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.
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 Ask me how to fix some broken O365 setup and I’ll have to guess based on 20 years outdated IMAP setups that I haven’t touched in one and a half decade.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”
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.
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.
I can figure it out.
What makes you think they don’t???
I’m an expert at fucking my life up. I have no idea why anyone won’t hire me.
What do you do?
I can try to help. Interviewing was really hard until I gained confidence.
Because they’re worried the experts might discover that they’ve been “winging it” all along!
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
Because, more often than not, we have a very hard time determining whether someone is truly an expert, or just good enough to do the job.
Even if you found them, more often than not their motivations aren’t to work for megacorp in a major city. They might be married, with kids, and enjoy where they’re currently at. They might be happy enough building shitty web apps over working at a FAANG company. They might have tried working at the top of their career, realised it was more trouble than it was worth, and decided “nah, I’m good”.
- 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.
Because they don’t know where to find the Experts Lounge, duh. /s
There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in America at least, and a lot of people don’t “trust” experts.
