

The Fine Line Between Understanding and Expertise - brownie
http://blog.wk.com/2011/10/21/why-we-are-not-hiring-creative-technologists/

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erikb
Where is the discussion "between understanding and expertise"? I scrolled over
the way too long text reading some chunks here and there but nothing sticked
according to the title here. Is it even the right post?

~~~
invisiblefunnel
This is what I took away:

> Agencies don’t hire writers just because they know the rules of grammar. We
> hire them because they’re eloquent, lucid, imaginative wordsmiths. We hire
> them because of their practised ability to lovingly craft words into things
> that work. Things that make people feel.

EDIT: removed snark

~~~
erikb
Yes, I read that passage too and was actually quite disappointed about it,
because it doesn't help you to become an expert. If you think, you learned
something out of that phrase, that means you actually "understood" something,
but you are still not an "expert" writer.

The thing is, that knowing and understanding the features that discriminate
experts from nonexperts doesn't help you much in your desire to become an
expert. If you understand these features you can tell more accurately, if you
are an expert yourself or not. At best this helps indirectly with telling you
how much your learning task is achieved. At worst it just destroys your
motivation. The question of how to become an expert is still open, though.

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hammock
Does no one on HN do dev work for an ad agency? I see articles about agencies
pop up on here every now and then, and I am always amazed at how little most
of the commenters seem to know about what goes on at an agency or how it
works.

Which is surprising to me, because I happen to know that there is a huge
demand and opportunity for great web development expertise, hustle and knowhow
at agencies, which are often full of subpar, outdated dev teams being asked to
do elite-level projects by non-tech ad folks who see the startup community
doing cool things and want to do it themselves.

This article is a plea to the talented coders out there (not the wannabes), to
let them know that there is an agency that understands you, knows that
"UX/social media gurus" and their ilk are frauds, and wants you to be able to
work for them with the same satisfaction you would have at Google or some
crazy startup.

(By now it probably sounds like I work for W+K, but I don't, just know the ad
industry quite a bit)

~~~
nikatwork
My experience developing at digital agencies in the early 2000s agrees with
the article. Terrible pay, insane hours and no recognition, even when you
pulled off the impossible.

Never again.

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HnNoPassMailer
Ugly monospace font in 2011 for a blog? Halfgrey on white background? I now
have trouble taking anything you say serious.

~~~
erikb
There are people who like old school and people who don't. Where's the point
in discussing about taste?

~~~
billswift
It isn't taste. That font is barely readable. Worse, their encoding wasn't
UTF-8, so a lot of their punctuation showed up as black rectangles, darker and
solider than the text. I had to fight to keep my eyes from skipping from black
block to black block without reading the spindly gray text in between.

