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Comment by thesumofall | Hacker News Reader

But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed the better one? And yes, probably he didn’t care about the exact latencies in the system, but he would probably care about customer retention, system availability, etc.?

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I'm finding this entire line of discussion incredibly curious because not only does it confirm my original argument and the that of the article, but it hammers the point home.

Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master.

It's like making a straight-faced argument that setting the speed limit to 1 mph on a motorway might make perfect sense, and the traffic engineer is actually at fault for not making it clear that this is nonsense.

I get that you don't see the ridiculousness of 50 microseconds vs 5 milliseconds, but that's the point.

You don't see it, and you start making random arguments untethered from reality.

The fact that you are blind to it, unlike being blind to 1 mph vs 65 mph is the entire point.

You may have driven thousands of hours. You have don't have thousands of hours of network performance tuning expertise.

Both of us wouldn't be able to even begin to understand the complaints Ayrton Senna might make about how the steering is too "crunchy" at the extremes or that the brake strength imbalance is shifting the car about.

There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.

He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.

It's the job of an expert to communicate their understanding of the world in a way that motivates non experts to make the correct the decision. If an expert isn't successful in this, they need to improve their methods of communication. Everything else is an excuse.

This presumes that the expert shouldn’t be the one making the decision.

Law firms are run by lawyers. The chief of surgery is a surgeon. Architecture firms are run by architects at the top.

Why is it that in IT it is expected that all management of IT is “non technical” to the point of not understanding what they’re hearing from direct reports!?

Would it be normal in your mind for a chemical plant foreman in charge of the process to not know what atoms are!?

What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic

> I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way

Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen".

The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A.

Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.

Nuclear risk is about the reaction to somebody using a nuclear weapon, not the bomb itself being bad.

'Eschew' is probably the word you want instead of 'eskew'.

If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds. Understanding the magnitude might not be the problem for the CTO. But why should the CTO care? How does it translate to his business requirements? That's your job to explain, no?

> If I were to guess, I would say an average 4th grader knows the difference between nano, milli or micro seconds.

Have you ever spent any significant time in an environment where most people are not (children of) college graduates? Because this is absurd. The average person who has just finished a year of high school physics probably can’t tell you those.

If I were to guess, your child is attending Palo Alto High School when the next school year begins.

I am in Ethiopia. We use the metric system, maybe I am biased

The person who was talking about this optimization should know that they should provide context.

Do they work for a high frequency trading firm? Do they make a CRUD app which has few users and (as much as I hate that) "they can wait even 5 seconds".

If the person does not give context then they dont explain well..

On a side note: for me the problem seems to be not the speed, but the choke point - just 2 servers (with no redudancy?). What one or both go down?

> Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master

That is rather a condescending take: calling yourself a master and calling their words gibberish is hardly thoughtful dialogue. Other parts of your comment are equally bad “ untethered from reality” should not be written. Someone is trying to engage with you and you are dismissing them by using very charged words. Even worse you are demonstrating poor communications skills - that point being questioned elsewhere in the thread. I hope you can learn to listen to others politely even when you disagree, and please try to follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

  Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.

But again: is the CTO really not able to spot the expertise or is the expert so detached that he can’t translate between the worlds anymore? I find it much easier to believe that the CTO fully understands that he has an expert in front of him who knows what he is talking about but doesn’t see the relevance of the recommendation. My doctor might tell me that I should eat more vegetables and I’m fully convinced of the doctor’s expertise, but I might still not follow the advice

> There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

You've disproved this yourself earlier in this comment. You made an analogy to explain a concept to a non-expert.

It is entirely on you to make yourself understood to non-experts. It is both possible and extremely important.

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