Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The expertise of the expert judgers is never in question. That is because they are usually wrong. Nevertheless, they never stop judging.

Microsoft recently announced that they are ending support for the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. The what? Does anyone remember that? Does any one have one of those phones that still works? I guess there are a few out there.

Back in 2007, the senior executives where I worked constantly told us engineers, who weren’t executives even though many of us were “senior,” that we needed to learn everything there was to know about the Microsoft Windows phone thing. Microsoft was never wrong. Microsoft’s phones would be a major player in everything, and we needed to be with it. That, what was it called, oh, yes, “Android” thing was yet another Google experiment to be ignored as it would quickly pass away.

Well, ahem, history shows that the senior executives were wrong. And, oh, by the way, those same senior executives judged the judgment and expertise of us engineers.

Hmm, not a good track record of judgment. Hmm, still judging everyone else. The results were predictable and predicted.

Fast forward to 2019, we have this company called Neo (neo.com). That bunch of expert judgers is going to look at high school students—yes 13 to 18 years of age—and decide who among them will be expert engineers. Neo will then connect those young-but-one-day experts to current experts for grooming or something.

Of course some of these identified-at-13 folks will become successful engineers. Why not? They will be groomed by current experts who will open doors, impart wisdom, and do all sorts of things that help a youngster grow.

Yet still, who makes Neo a good judge of young talent? Machine learning?

No, the expert judgment of expert judgers is never questioned. The expert judgment of expert judgers will continue to fail the vast majority of the time in spectacular fashion.

Those youngsters—especially the ones like me who went to the wrong high school in the wrong place at the wrong time—will move through life on the more difficult path. Some will persevere and become “good engineers” whose abilities are judged by the expert judgers who will tell them that Company X is never wrong and Company Y is just fiddling around and…