Some broad answers:
- Fee is higher than people are willing to pay
- People don’t trust the experts
- The experts don’t exist yet
- People have no idea how to find the experts
Adding on to this: people overestimate their own expertise.
Dunning-Kruger also has a corollary: the very intelligent under estimate their intelligence.
Ask a really smart person if they know a lot about a topic they know a lot about…
And they’ll tell you about all the things they don’t know about the subject.
Ask an idiot about a topic they know nothing about, and they’ll bullshit about how they know everything.
It’s why the smartest people at any company are rarely running shit. Overconfidence always sells better than being realistic about your ability.
In other words, people saying they know everything are selling something. In your example, themselves.
Yes. You have summarized the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Except it’s completely normalized to teach people to “sell themselves” to be able to get a job. It’s not necessarily that they think they know more than they do. They might be very aware of their limitations, but have no shame and are willing to bend the truth to “get ahead.”
If you go in trying to get an expert position and start talking about all the things you don’t know, you’re probably not getting the job, you know?
Outside of the context of job interviews, I find when talking informally with someone who truly knows a shitload, they tend to know enough to know how much more there is to know and may make mention of that along the way. And those that don’t know how much they don’t know of course can’t really mention that because they can’t even convince of all the stuff they don’t know.
I always pay attention to people who are like the former and who are comfortable with maintaining an appropriate level of uncertainty because it usually means they think more scientifically.
Or put another way, he who speaks loudest knows least.
I find when talking informally with someone who truly knows a shitload, they tend to know enough to know how much more there is to know and may make mention of that along the way.
Good answer!
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Very much 4
We wanted to get an engineer to audit something we set up, talking like 1 hour phone call, maybe 1 hour of work beyond that if something needed to be adjusted
We wasted like 4 hours on the line with different agencies (talking to sales people) who wanted to connect us with a DIFFERENT agency to do the actual work, who wanted us to sign a 3 year service contract.
Like no, “please just let us talk to one of your senior engineers and bill us $500/hr for his time”
While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.
Not true at all.
It’s just a bad idea. You need to have a minimum contracted price.
There’s plenty of “$0.10 for the screw $1m for knowing that’s the solution” stories.
In this case, by “audit” it was more of a metaphorical “here is our setup, do we plug this into slot A or B, we don’t want to read the 300 page manual”, so 1 hour was literally all it needed
Spoiler: I ended up reading the 300 page manual, it took a week. That was 3 years ago and we have never touched it since
#1.
Don’t you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like “Can’t we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?” FFS. I’ll be like “Sure, we can. What’s your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That’ll cost you.”
I’ll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap… I mean, sure, it’s less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.
People have no idea…
The experts don’t exist yet
This is something that people often don’t know about. For certain things there can actually be little to no experts. One example, ski lifts. There are only a handful of people in the entire world who know how to splice together ski lift cables.
A more concerning one is nuclear engineers. There’s been such a stigma against nuclear power that the amount of people who know how to build a nuclear reactor has fallen to incredibly low numbers. Also, the US had to reverse engineer some of their own nuclear weapons because the people who built them all died and the knowledge of how they were built died with them.
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What “people”, what “experts” and in what field? What industry? Can you provide any additional context for the question?
Is the premise that “people” never hire “experts” or are you wondering about those cases where they don’t? I find it hard to believe this former is universally true.
It’s false just in its premise. Experts typically become experts by developing expertise in their field, usually by working in that field.
Experts are expensive.
I’ll speak from my experience in engineering.
It is extremely difficult to find experts. There are just not that many people around who are both smart and knowledgeable enough to solve high end engineering problems. This is why the vast majority of complex problems are solved by very few people, with the rest existing to support them.
10x’ers are real. Except it’s worse than that. The tip top can solve problems the median person will never be able to.
Second, like everything, expertise exists on a continuum. Since the best of the best are radically more talented than the median (who you could still even call experts) or even the 90th percentile, you want the top ones.
It’s just very hard to tell them apart in an interview. You can try the standard interview questions, but that’s not very discriminatory.
Standard interview questions are terrible for that. It’s probably better to test how well they learn and how good their thinking is in certain areas.
I’d rather hire someone who hasn’t a clue but can come up to speed than someone with decades of experience that still hasn’t managed to learn much.
What on earth is your experience in engineering that you would have anything to do with 10x’ers, as you called them?
Also, I’m willing to bet the median expert will suffice for most problems.
Hah!
No. The median engineer cannot, say, design anything to do with a tokamak fusion reactor. Even the ones that work at places that build tokamaks. At least the hard stuff, that’s why they’re in supporting roles.
The people that do those types of things are very, very special.
As for 10x’ers. This is a standard term. It’s used everywhere.
Easy proof that they exist is that lots of people are taking on multiple “full time” jobs. Like 4-5.
Those are at least 4x’ers. They’re just pretending to be 1x’ers for the salary bump.
And of course, 10 x’ers don’t get 10 times the salary. Double would be pushing it.
This is 100% true.
I work as an electrical and hydraulic engineer and i consider myself above average.
The people with the knowledge base above me are ridiculously intelligent and in a different playing field.
I love calling NFPA and giving them a code reference and they know it off the top of their head.
The median engineer cannot, say, design anything to do with a tokamak fusion reactor.
But, of all engineering problems, how many of them are associated with a tokamak fusion reactor?
I’m not saying these people don’t exist or that they’re not highly valuable. I’m just saying their skills don’t need to be applied everywhere all the time, which leaves room for “regular” experts.
I’m deliberately avoiding identifying my industry, but this exists in every industry.
I can be flippant and say “we’re not making a web shopping cart here” to my people, but the top engineers making Amazon’s shopping cart must deal with a lot of complicated problems.
Do I even need to list things? Think of something that’s difficult. Nuclear bombs, medical devices, jet engines, skyscrapers, semiconductors, guided missiles. I could go on and on, but I’d still have to explain to you about the more mundane things like operations research.
In case it helps to illustrate the point, those aren’t the most complicated things; those are areas in which a few very complicated, difficult problems exist. For example, semiconductors is a very massive field.
Designing the next utilitarian op amp is not something everyone can do but it’s not that difficult of a problem, necessarily.
Designing the next cutting edge CPU (for Intel or AMD or Apple or whatever) on the other hand is (I imagine) a handful of very difficult problems (most of which I have only the vaguest idea of) like optimizing pipeline and predictive execution or how to get to the next level chip design & fabrication process (which itself has a bunch of different issues, from what I gather).
That’s where I would expect the 10x or whatever to work. At the cutting edge of engineering and science where the hardest problems are.
Plenty of room for regular experts.
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I’m sorry you haven’t met one (or recognised it when you did). They exist
My experience is between a typical engineer and a 10x’er is that a typical engineer can be trusted to do repeatable work, but they have major issues handling anything that isn’t exactly what they are used to.
The problem a lot of times is that a lot of issues that require an engineer are usually the more novel problems. You also have automation solving the routine. So you have a lower demand for routine practitioners while still maintaining demand for higher level work.
I am an “expert” in my field. But it’s not because I’m the best in the world at networking and servers. It’s because I am one of the few in the world who knows this highly specialized system setwork, how it integrates across VPN, and a bunch of other niche stuff. Sure, any donky with basic linux and TCP/IP skills could do my job, but it’d take years to train them on this particular setup. And that’s because experts are mostly this: highly specialized in what they do well.
We have multiple experts at my job, and we frequently have to call each other due to ineptitude in what is outside of what we normally do. Ask me how to right click on a mac and I’ll come up short. Ask me how to fix some broken O365 setup and I’ll have to guess based on 20 years outdated IMAP setups that I haven’t touched in one and a half decade.
It’s easy to find experts. But experts in the exact thing you need are rare.
It’s also a separate skill to actually listen to the expert once you’ve got their advice. Look at climate change, basically anything to do with politics, etc…
As the great theologian J. Biafra said, “give me convenience, or give me death”
I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert, but I have a niche skillset, coupled with knowledge in a specific key industry.
There are probably only a handful of people with this particular combination of skill and sector.
It doesn’t make me especially special, but it is niche enough to make non-compete clauses post-contract, unenforceable.
Other people think I’m an expert but I’ve seen enough to know I’m not.
We see this all the time as an integrator. The project I mostly work on is so off the wall that there are maybe four people who are experts on it. The fire and security system we were asked to build for a school system is so custom that nobody is an expert; I’m the only guy that knows how the backend works (because I wrote most of it from scratch in a mix a C, TSQL, and Wonderware QuckScript), but I’m clueless on the front end.
I walk into places running old end-of-life Modicons running LL984 ladder logic and don’t know a single person outside Schneider-Electric that understands that stuff besides me. I’m not an expert, but I’m all that’s available.
Our business development team is always asking us, “do we have people who know xxx?” and I have to tell them no, if you want to bid on that job you need to hire an xxx expert to do the design and lead the project. Occasionally we do.
Thats a heckuva false premise
Because experts usually know their worth and charge accordingly.
I’m an expert at fucking my life up. I have no idea why anyone won’t hire me.
Well, because they need experts at fucking up their lives, not yours
What do you do?
I can try to help. Interviewing was really hard until I gained confidence.
What makes you think they don’t???
I often don’t hire an expert to do certain tasks. Here are three common reasons:
- I don’t trust any expert that I can hire
- I can do the job adequately and I consider the expert too expensive relative to the value of having the job done very well
- I want to learn how to do it and so I want to practise
Money probably even if it means a lack of quality and/or done wrong. Might be more expensive in the long run so its kinda ironic
We’re pretty expensive. Honestly you have to be good at something to understand the real value an expert can bring.
I can figure it out.
Sort of broad, but you’ll find more experts working for Governments than at corporations. Corporations can’t or won’t pay top dollar to put experts on the payroll. They might hire one as a consultant if the price is right.
Most experts not involved in Government are self employed or do contract work.
I feel like this sentiment is exactly backwards in the USA. Corps want to be better than the govt, so they give them excessive $
I work with government people all the time, and I think it’s highly dependant on what the project is and what part of the government is running it.
We’ve worked with the Navy and, well, their “experts” for the work we do are a joke. My company designed the system they use and all the experts that work on it work for my company.
We’ve worked with the Army Corps of Engineers and it’s completely different. The people we worked with were knowledgeable and thorough in their work. They specify exactly what work is required and will make sure it’s done right.
State/local governments are also hit-or-miss. Often they don’t have experts at all and it’s up to us to work with them to determine what they need and how to implement it. But sometimes there’s the old graybeard who knows the system in and out and can fix anything. I like dealing with those guys. They’re usually full of character and you can learn useful things from them.
U.S. Corporations haven’t been innovative in a long time, because they don’t have to be. They wait for some small company to think of something good then they buy them out. They have so little competition that they hit the too big to fail level. The leadership of course get massive bonuses and their employees get nothing or worse, laid off.
The fact is that U.S. corporations don’t seek to be the best, they seek a means to fleece the public. There is no investment in the future, only profit.
- Sometimes “experts” suck. I’ve had 2 projects done to my house that need to be re-done, they were so bad. I would have been better off investing some time into learning to do it myself, which I now have to do anyway.
- Having experts do my camper van conversion would be ridiculously expensive. Same for buying pre-made things. There is a lot to learn about floor, insulation, wiring, charging, cabinetry, water, storage, etc. But learning that is one reason I’m doing it myself. Mistakes still don’t add up to even one piece that pre-fab or shop expert would charge. For example, a galley is about $1200 (sink, fridge cabinet). I built my own for ~$200 and got most of it done in one day.
- There are some experts I will trust. I trust one bike shop to do my shock service each year because frankly it’s a messy hassle for me to do it myself, and If I screw up, I buy a new $1000 fork. If they screw up, they buy it.
You didn’t have experts. You had people who convinced you that they were experts.
Same thing happened to me. Their (obvious when it was pointed out to me later) failure cost me a lot of money.
