
Ask HN: Trapped by knowledge - boulders
I&#x27;m a tech lead for a small group of developers and sysadmins.  I often find that even though they are experts in their own domain, I am able to help them to resolve problems in specific areas for which I have little or no knowledge.  I find it surprising that they have not arrived upon the solution themselves.<p>I describe it as being trapped by knowledge.  Those that I am helping appear to have passed some magical threshold of knowledge, beyond which they stop asking &quot;stupid&quot; questions, and instead rely only upon what they know.  That&#x27;s where I step in.  I ask those stupid questions, or I do a quick Google search, and more often than not I find a solution very quickly.  Maybe my team experience the same thing with me, and I just don&#x27;t recognise it.  Or maybe I&#x27;m just the sort of person who doesn&#x27;t mind asking those stupid questions.<p>Is this a known phenomenon?  Has any research been done in this area?  I&#x27;d be interested to know if anyone else experiences the same thing.
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emmelaich
I've had the same thing happen. We had a guy write some JNI code (C shim for
Java). It was woeful; didn't even check the return value of getenv(). I don't
find out until this thing crashes first deployment in production.

Another example: our Java and QA guys wondered why they couldn't get Jmeter to
do Kerberos authentication. I quickly Googled and found that their Jmeter used
a version pf Apache's HTTP library which couldn't do Kerberos. They just
needed to update.

I'm constantly asked 'quick' questions (unfortunately quick questions tend to
have the longer answers).

I ask them dumb questions and ask them to ask dumb questions (why, where,
what) but it's taken to be insincere. Perhaps it's just straight fatigue that
I find difficult to hide.

I realise I need a new job, even if its giant drop in salary.

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partisan
I don't think you should be so quick to classify your team members in any way.
It's hard to see the answer when you are heads down in something. You lose
orientation and a fresh pair of eyes is helpful in those cases.

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itamarst
The issue isn't that they know too much. The more likely difference is that
you are an expert at relevant kinds of problem solving and they are not (they
might be pretty good, but that's not the same thing). Expertise is _not_ about
knowing lots of facts or APIs or whatever.

Chances are you don't even realize you have the relevant skill (there's a
thing called "expert blind spot") so you also have hard time articulating what
exactly you're doing.

There is in fact quite a lot of research on the subject. Might want to start
with "Sources of Power" by Gary Klein, and "The Cambridge Handbook of
Expertise and Expert Performance" (which I haven't read yet but gets cited a
lot).

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scawf
I once worked with a guy that was supposedly a C expert.

One day he was asked to estimate the memory consumption of a new project. He
did it by writing a simulator that would fill a data structure with random
data. Each data size had a specific probability to be generated. Then he would
measure memory used.

Why didn't he simply compute the total size ? That's basic math/CS.

There are stupid people and smart people. Being expert doesn't mean they are
smart.

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partisan
Did you ask him why he took the approach he took?

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emmelaich
Yes, and why random data? Possibly he needed 'real' data because the store
used compression/RLE.

But certainly they should have got an estimate first - given a probability and
size.

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scawf
He was not using real data because we anticipated that with this new feature,
the usage would change. (Making our existing data meaningless).

And there was no compression or anything fancy.

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rcavezza
There's something to be said about people who ask "dumb questions". There are
some really great lines about it in the Tim Ferriss/Malcolm Gladwell podcast
when Gladwell is talking about how his dad is one of those people that are
really great at asking dumb questions.

I think it has something to do with confidence. Confident people don't care
too much about being wrong - they are confident in what they know and aren't
concerned about being labeled "an idiot."

