Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

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There's a problem involved when you don't have a subject matter expert.

consider: here on HN commenters will often deride decisions made "anyone in the field with half a brain should know...".

But if you don't have that requisite someone in the field with half a brain, and when someone who literally makes money from convincing you they are experts tries to sell you...anything, how can you possibly evaluate the truth of their claims?

I saw this in state govt when they would try to hire someone - without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer? This goes beyond the normal problems of interviewee evaluations - you can get people that can't do fizzbuzz and you'd not be able to tell. Being able to tell the difference between "experienced expert" and "halfway competent but way over their head" isn't even an option.

It's a hard thing for an organization to overcome - as far as I can tell, absent some trusted 3rd party evaluation system (which runs into incentive problems), it requires iterations of staffing and trial by fire to build even this ability to evaluate in house.

> without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer?

I work in .gov and have heard many variations of that problem. A really common non-solution is to hire a second contractor to oversee the first. In theory that’s not a completely horrible idea but there are relatively few contractors who are certified to do business with the federal government and they usually aren’t trying to make waves, not to mention how job hopping makes for a lot of personal incentives which aren’t aligned with the clients’. Since getting and breaking contracts is so hard — and the big guys will definitely play hardball if you do – it has to be a pretty epic disaster to have real consequences, and that’ll arrive after years of billing very well.

The answer should be having more staff positions at competitive rates so agencies have qualified staff for oversight or simply doing the work but that has been politically untenable for decades.

And this is one of the reasons why you see the revolving door between regulators and private companies. They are both competing for experts.

One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.

For highly-technical regulators, this is definitely true — I’ve wondered what the threshold would be where it’d be cheaper to pay substantially more but with a non-compete banning work with anyone in a related field. There’s a plausible argument that the country would be better off with, say, a really motivated SEC even if you paid their retirees 50% to sit on the beach after they left government service.

Yeap. If you cede the doing to consultants, they will extract more money. Especially when you cede the management of the doing entirely.

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