this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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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 Ask me how to fix some broken O365 setup and I'll have to guess based on 20 years outdated IMAP setups that I haven't touched in one and a half decade.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.