I’m slowly making my way through The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as my first book of the year. I’m enjoying learning how a skeptical empiricist looks at the world. One of the things that NNT hints towards is that in many Extermistan disciplines, experts know less than they are letting on, and in fact, experts might not be experts at all.

I’m quite convinced that Software Engineering is one such discipline. The “experts” here don’t really have anything insightful to share, beyond what any well tenured Software Engineer would’ve learnt. Every industry conference includes the same rotation of speakers, often from consulting companies, which depend on such public figures to get a steady stream of work. Even with his thin facade, most of the industry professionals just take whatever is evangelised by these experts as the word of gospen – often for the experts to recommend something completely different a few years later, again with the same amount of confidence.

Anyone who has worked on a real-world industry software engineering project, shares a 90% insight overlap with the “expert” and this overlaps increases exponentially the more work you do – different stakeholders, domains, tech stacks, etc. After this threshold, the “experts” are regarded so because they’re spending more of their career on being recognised as the expert, rather than, you know, actually writing software.