

Ask HN: Great Non-Hackers? - apu

Many people have said that it's impossible to tell a great hacker from a bad one unless you're a hacker yourself (e.g., in PG's "Great Hackers").<p>As a hacker, however, I feel that this is equally true about non-hackers -- I can't tell the difference between great marketers/salesmen/"business people"/etc. and bad ones. And because some of these people are polished and smooth, I always feel really nervous that I'm going to be smooth-talked into working with someone who's not great.<p>Is there a way to figure this out?
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tokenadult
_Is there a way to figure this out?_

Empirically, most forms of human greatness ("expertise") are defined as
RELIABLY superior performance in the defined domain. See

<http://mit.edu/6.969/www/readings/expertise.pdf>

for a discussion of this by scientists who literally wrote the book on the
subject of expert performance. Bear in mind that some domains, notably
choosing common stocks in which to invest, have no experts, that is no one who
is reliably superior in performance over time.

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jacquesm
Tricky... what I've gotten weary of over the years is people that approach too
aggressively, that's a big red flag for me.

Another one is people that do their best to worm their way into your private
live even though your relationship is purely business. That doesn't mean that
it isn't possible to know people both privately and professionally but if
they're actively trying to gain a foothold in your private affairs that would
make me think twice.

Good salespeople are always in 'sales' mode, they can't really help it,
whether they're talking about their holidays or the next deal, it is always
the biggest thing since sliced bread to them. And in their world that's a good
thing.

I've been had once really bad by some guy that approached me online and took
more than a year to gain my confidence against strong skepticism but bit by
bit he wore it away and then he used one of my associates to get what he
wanted. We managed to reverse the whole thing but it cost us dearly and it
definitely made me much more careful when strangers approach me out of the
blue. Not paranoid, just more careful.

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iterationx
If you know psychological manipulation then you can detect if people are doing
it to you, [http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-NLP-Psychological-
Understa...](http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-NLP-Psychological-
Understanding-Influencing/dp/1855383446)

that should handle the smooth-talking part, but it seems like you'll still
need some domain knowledge to figure out if someone is good at their job.

