Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)
This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers.<p>It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I <i>can't</i> convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the difference.<p>> <i>I’ve noticed that in nearly every skill tree I’ve climbed, there comes a point where you begin to notice certain nuances of skill that novices not only don’t notice, but that you cannot articulate using the commonly accepted vocabulary of the skill.</i><p>This happened to me just over the last month or so. I was trying to explain to a CTO how horrifically wrong it is to plumb their entire cloud network through just a pair of virtual machines for "security". I just could not make him understand that 5 milliseconds of additional latency in the era where <i>microseconds are an eternity</i> is a disaster for a veritable smorgasbord of upcoming projects. It just. Would. Not. Sink. In.<p>To some people, "micro" and "milli" sound the same. Latency just doesn't compute as a <i>thing</i> to be concerned about.<p>I've spent my career performance tuning, but then how do I explain this to people who think a 60-second timeout is a performance problem best solved by buying another million dollars worth of kit?<p>The article jumps between martial arts and the world of finance, so I'll jump to another example: AI playing games.<p>When I watched AlphaZero play chess, I was just a tiny bit impressed. I watched it beat the Go grandmaster and I was not very impressed. Then I watched it play Dota 2 -- in which I've sunk several thousand hours -- and holy crap. Wow! It was suddenly <i>terrifying</i> how good it was, because I could judge the nuance of what it was doing.