The HiEx Principle: Get High-Expertise Information

Getting Accurate Information from Experts

Relevant expertise can help you get accurate information:

THE HIEX PRINCIPLE: Get high-expertise (HiEx) information, which comes both from people with a lot of knowledge and/or experience in a specific area, and from people with knowledge and experience in many areas.

When someone close to the problem isn’t available to you, look for people who recently solved a similar problem. The word “recent” is an important nuance here. When you want specific advice from an expert, look for someone who recently solved the problem you’re trying to solve. Asking someone who solved your problem twenty years ago how they did it is not likely to offer specific and effective insights. You want a current expert—and no, I don’t mean the talking heads on TV. They’re rarely actual experts.

Experts can increase the accuracy of your information and decrease the time it takes to get it. Getting even one expert’s advice can cut through a lot of confusion and help you quickly formulate and/or eliminate options.

I learned the value of expert advice firsthand when I began coding at an intelligence agency. It was a very different experience from coding as I’d learned it. In school, it was possible to basically just Google things and piece them together. People had solved these problems long ago and the solutions hadn’t changed much. My job at the intelligence agency was much harder. Not only were we prohibited from Googling anything we were coding for security reasons, but even if we’d been allowed to, it wouldn’t have helped: we were trying to do things no one had ever done before.

A few months in, I got stuck on a problem. Really stuck! As a kid I’d always taken in a lot of different perspectives on a problem, but in the end, I always thought if I just put my head down and worked harder, I’d figure it out eventually. Days went by. Then weeks. I couldn’t understand what was happening. Finally, with my head down, I approached someone who had worked on a similar problem before and explained what I was stuck on.

“Let me look at your code,” he said. In less than twenty minutes he diagnosed what was wrong: there was a subtle difference between what the documentation said would happen and what would actually happen in certain edge cases. Since most people wouldn’t run into those edge cases, the problem wasn’t documented anywhere. This person had faced and overcome the same problem, though, and it had taken him a long time to solve. He was happy to share his hard-earned knowledge. While I was a bit frustrated that I’d wasted weeks out of stubbornness, this exchange kick-started our relationship, and I learned a lot from him over the years.

Even one expert’s opinion can be more helpful than the thoughts and guesses of dozens or hundreds of amateurs. Look for experience that matches the problem and its current conditions.