A surprisingly large part of having expertise in a topic is not so much knowing everything about it but learning the language and sources well enough to be extremely efficient in google searches.
— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) December 8, 2018
Absolutely. I don’t know nearly everything about virtualization and networking. But I know a lot, and more importantly I know how to find — with celerity and accuracy — what I don’t know, and put it to use just as rapidly.
The other day, I was working on a problem for a company for which my company is a vendor. It was an infrastructure problem and unrelated to our product, but as I’ve noted before I end up doing a lot of free infrastructure consulting for various reasons (mainly that many companies have shockingly bad infrastructure teams). This problem 3-4 people had spent nearly a week working on.
I solved it in 10 minutes through knowing how to find what I needed and how to put that knowledge to use. I know I get paid a lot. But I often solve things in 10-15 minutes that teams of people spend weeks looking at. And that’s because I know how to find what I need and know that I know it’s right very damn quickly.