On this question I flagged the following flag for being an Answer in comments:
Actually, I don´t agree with most of the answers. This is the basic principle of a handgrenade. Most SAM´s are working on the same principle. I don´t see why a space-anti-ship-missile should not do this in an up sc...
@Shalvenay Ni hao! How's life? Nothing much going on here. Currently nice and warm, but expecting a thunderstorm this evening. The fact that that's the most interesting thing I could think of at the minute shows just how little is actually going on today :P
@Green Nice! I know that I've got Aunts/Uncles/cousins or something in a house that's been in the family for over a century, but I don't know exactly how long. Sadly, there's not really enough money for the upkeep (it's a big 3-story farmhouse), so it's not in great shape though :/
@Mithrandir24601 Yeah, I know how that goes. There is a farmhouse on the property that was lived in till the 1960's. My parents have been cleaning it up for the last couple of years. Thousands of pounds of porcupine poop have been removed from the premises.
@Mithrandir24601 Not as bad as you'd expect but not nice either. The poop is just dried wood in big pellets. It's dusty as hell but not smelly like you'd expect with poop.
@Green In undergrad, I was chapel clerk of the college chapel, which was over 650 years old :) I miss those days, even if they were super-stressful. It's an utterly beautiful place, so separate and peaceful and apart from everything
@Green Yeah, it's always quite funny mentioning the age of some of the buildings - it sheds a different light on things for a lot of people. The building I had my rooms in for 2nd and 3rd year was built in 1908 and is considered the new part of the college, for reference :)
@Mithrandir24601 I remember reading in some kids books about houses that weren't considered worth living in until they were at least 200 years old. Preferably 300 years.
I see a bunch of older houses (100 years or so) near my job. They leave the shell and just enough internal structure to prevent collapse then completely redo the insides. New electrical, heating, plumbing, insulation....everything is new but the shell is old.
@Green I'd get along fine with a competent house inspector
unfortunately, in the USA, anyone can be a building inspector, and there are quite a few that aren't really up on what they're doing, even if they mean well
aye. a well schooled DIYer can do as good as or better work than an professional trying to bang out the job as fast as they possibly can so they can move onto the next one
@Shalvenay helpful, but uggghhh, opportunists setting up certification bodies, taking a fee then handing out a piece of paper. It helps. I wish there were better ways to signal competency.
@Shalvenay I'm reading this book called Antifragile. One of my biggest take-aways has been the idea "It ain't the same thing!". Certificates don't mean competency. Wars don't mean increases in the price of oil.
So I look at huge companies who want my GPA from 15 years ago (as if it mattered now) and say "Nah, you're looking for the wrong things. I'm gonna get a job somewhere else."
Compound that with the very real problem that only an expert in an area can verify another expert.
The people doing the hiring are not domain experts themselves, usually, so they have to use a proxy for gauging ability.
If you sit two domain experts down with each other and get the talking...it's a completely different language. No one who isn't an expert in that arena can tell what they're talking about.
@Green Not necessarily - If you want to know how good someone is at, say programming, you get them to write some code to do something. A pretty good heuristic for an expert is someone who's code is easy to understand, so you get someone inexperienced at programming to verify an expert by getting the newcomer to explain what the expert's code does. Maybe not perfect, but a good start, I think
@Bellerophon Then maybe I run a consultancy for that area/industry so I own all the working time of the expert so I can allocate it as I see fit. Maybe 30 hours a week doing real work and 10 hours a week doing interviews.
@Mithrandir24601 I don't think that holds. What about when the code is embedded and exceptionally compact? By its nature that kind of code isn't easy to understand. If you're a non-expert looking at that code, it will just look like garbage.
@Bellerophon I would weight education to mean exactly zero to counteract that tendency. (or even apply negative weights in some cases. A degree for Harvard means you're super good at getting good grades. It doesn't mean you can reason your way out of a wet paper bag.)
@Green You ask them to create to code for a specific problem as part of the interview process - there are assumptions about what type of programmer you want, sure, but if you ask a programmer to come up with a solution to a specific problem, in a specific context that a different expert programmer has already done (and can make neat/easy to read etc.), if they come up with something that's not easy to read, they haven't done as good a job. It's probably still not a great example,
but simply saying that you need an expert to verify an expert is perhaps jumping to conclusions too quickly. As another heuristic example, in academia, you simply compare things like number of citations with average number of citations in that field (it's more complicated than that, sure, but that's the gist)
@Green Sure, but my point is that if I am a genuine expert in a reasonably large area I will already have a full time job in my field. You're going to have to offer pretty high pay to get me to massively reduce my work as an expert in my field and come to work for you where I have to do some interviews for some of my time.
I mean, you have to make it worth me losing valuable time networking and building a reputation for myself.
@Mithrandir24601 Solving a (hard) toy problem in an interview still isn't the same thing as developing code day-in, day-out. There's only so much information that can be passed between two parties in an interview (however long that may be). Having experts on both sides allows for extremely high compression rates since they'll only need a few symbols to convey lots of meaning.
@Bellerophon I think then that'd I'd target older, high experience people. They already have lots of domain knowledge. They already have extensive professional networks.
I'd hire the people who are already ready for consultancy work (and people are ready to pay them consultancy rates).
This whole idea doesn't work if it's not lucrative.
I just can't see people being willing to essentially leave their field and take up a post in an interviewing consultancy. Maybe semi-retired people who want a well payed part time job.
@Green Time's always going to be an issue, of course - to be honest, interviews aren't always great because of this either :P Getting an expert on the interview panel will definitely help, sure, but I'm trying to say that it's not impossible to tell if someone's an expert, without being an expert
@Bellerophon I'm not asking them to leave their field. I'd get them consulting work in their field. In addition to that, I'd offer interview consulting too. Perhaps all my consultants don't want to do interviews. Fine, they don't have to. Maybe I get a consultant working for me who just loves interviews and is really good at drawing out what an interviewee knows.
@Mithrandir24601 Agreed. You make a good point. The way I've been writing this, I have been saying that only an expert can verify another expert. As you point out, it is possible to verify an expert by a non-expert.
I'm going to make my assertion that while possible to verify by a non-expert, the best and most reliable verification will be by another domain expert.
@Mithrandir24601 But this raises another problem. What's the root of trust for this? Is it me? Can I verify that someone I hire is a domain expert? I guess I'll have to :)
@Green I can only guess through years of them outputting solid, high quality work in time and being able to help more junior members in a quick and useful (and ideally pleasant!) way
@Mithrandir24601 Mentoring is a nice add-on for me, on top of knowing the domain. I wouldn't discount someone's skill just because they can't convey what they know. That's a different skillset.
Just like I wouldn't discount a good programmer just because they don't run a blog about what they know. Perhaps they aren't a writer of english with the same skill that they are a writer of code.
Granted, for CTOs at lots of startups, the ability to write and present is really important (or seems to be) but let's not be biased just by what we see. How many CTOs are there that don't write and don't present at conventions but still do phenomenal work?
@Green Yeah, of course, it's just that I'm so used to being taught by experts (in some sense or another) - I suppose that to mentor someone into an expert requires an expert who is also good at mentoring, but that's not the same as saying 'all experts are good at mentoring'. It is, however, virtually a requirement in academia (which is what I have a limited amount of experience in)
@Mithrandir24601 In academia, the correlation between domain-expert and mentor is stronger than in industry since teaching is supposed to be what academia is about....could be wrong though.
Let us consider the following. Domain experts who are equally skilled in their domain (not sure this is possible but let's just say it is by fiat). One expert has zero mentoring ability; a nice person to work with but can't teach at all. The other expert is a gifted teacher. You're paying by value delivered. Which is the more valuable expert?
@Mithrandir24601 Also considering that actual teaching is left to TAs or adjunct faculty, I'm not sure that being a professor is really about teaching all that much.
@Mithrandir24601 I was going to say that the mentoring expert was more valuable because they can help create more experts over the long term. However, the first expert with no mentoring ability can spend all their time making things and so offers greater immediate value.
@Green Well, I guess they don't make you a professor unless you do some teaching. Once you are a professor you can then stop teaching and you don't lose it
@dot_Sp0T It's possible, even likely, but so long as they're not using one account to affect the other, it's fine. It's quite possible they're doing that though :/ I can't check - you'd need one of the WB mods
@Shalvenay Ni hao! How's life? Nothing much going on here. Currently nice and warm, but expecting a thunderstorm this evening. The fact that that's the most interesting thing I could think of at the minute shows just how little is actually going on today :P
@Shalvenay Raspberry Pi has a few audio out boards. BeagleBone has an obsolete recording shield but I couldn't find that for sale anywhere. Arduino has low fidelity sound in and out.
On this question I flagged the following flag for being an Answer in comments:
Actually, I don´t agree with most of the answers. This is the basic principle of a handgrenade. Most SAM´s are working on the same principle. I don´t see why a space-anti-ship-missile should not do this in an up sc...
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