The Fine Line Between Understanding and Expertise

http://blog.wk.com/2011/10/21/why-we-are-not-hiring-creative-technologists/

by brownie • 15 years ago

35 12 15 years ago

blog.wk.com

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

WA• 15 years ago

I wish I could say something else, but I have to agree. I did think the exact same thing.

nzonbi• 15 years ago

That can be fixed with this:

  body {
    font: normal 14px/18px verdana;
    color: #333;
  }

From my quick read, the article talks about the proliferation of "creative technologist" who lack deep technical skills, and the problems brought when these people is put in charge of conceive, and lead the implementation of creative technology projects. I agree with their point.

erikb3• 15 years ago

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

HnNoPassMailer2• 15 years ago

It's not about taste, but about readability, a part of usability. Why act like a technologist while flushing about 50 years of usability knowledge (Helvetica is from late 50s) down the drain? Heterospaced fonts with significant contrast are used widely for good reasons. Ignoring these harms credibility of the writer severely, at least for me personally.

billswift• 15 years ago

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.

erikb3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

erikb3• 15 years ago

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.

espeed• 15 years ago

That was my thought too. I was hoping for some Feynman-esque discussion on what it means to truly understand something:

"It’s not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find. In other words, he wanted to connect a new idea to what he already understood and thereby extend his understanding" (http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/08/how-richard-feynman-t...).

hammock• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

The Fine Line Between Understanding and Expertise

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