What “people”, what “experts” and in what field? What industry? Can you provide any additional context for the question?
Is the premise that “people” never hire “experts” or are you wondering about those cases where they don’t? I find it hard to believe this former is universally true.
It’s false just in its premise. Experts typically become experts by developing expertise in their field, usually by working in that field.
Some broad answers:
- Fee is higher than people are willing to pay
- People don’t trust the experts
- The experts don’t exist yet
- People have no idea how to find the experts
Adding on to this: people overestimate their own expertise.
Very much 4
We wanted to get an engineer to audit something we set up, talking like 1 hour phone call, maybe 1 hour of work beyond that if something needed to be adjusted
We wasted like 4 hours on the line with different agencies (talking to sales people) who wanted to connect us with a DIFFERENT agency to do the actual work, who wanted us to sign a 3 year service contract.
Like no, “please just let us talk to one of your senior engineers and bill us $500/hr for his time”
While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.
In this case, by “audit” it was more of a metaphorical “here is our setup, do we plug this into slot A or B, we don’t want to read the 300 page manual”, so 1 hour was literally all it needed
Spoiler: I ended up reading the 300 page manual, it took a week. That was 3 years ago and we have never touched it since
#1.
Don’t you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like “Can’t we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?” FFS. I’ll be like “Sure, we can. What’s your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That’ll cost you.”
I’ll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap… I mean, sure, it’s less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.
People have no idea…
The experts don’t exist yet
This is something that people often don’t know about. For certain things there can actually be little to no experts. One example, ski lifts. There are only a handful of people in the entire world who know how to splice together ski lift cables.
A more concerning one is nuclear engineers. There’s been such a stigma against nuclear power that the amount of people who know how to build a nuclear reactor has fallen to incredibly low numbers. Also, the US had to reverse engineer some of their own nuclear weapons because the people who built them all died and the knowledge of how they were built died with them.
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Experts are expensive.
Thats a heckuva false premise
I am an “expert” in my field. But it’s not because I’m the best in the world at networking and servers. It’s because I am one of the few in the world who knows this highly specialized system setwork, how it integrates across VPN, and a bunch of other niche stuff. Sure, any donky with basic linux and TCP/IP skills could do my job, but it’d take years to train them on this particular setup. And that’s because experts are mostly this: highly specialized in what they do well.
We have multiple experts at my job, and we frequently have to call each other due to ineptitude in what is outside of what we normally do. Ask me how to right click on a mac and I’ll come up short. Ask me how to fix some broken O365 setup and I’ll have to guess based on 20 years outdated IMAP setups that I haven’t touched in one and a half decade.
It’s easy to find experts. But experts in the exact thing you need are rare.
I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert, but I have a niche skillset, coupled with knowledge in a specific key industry.
There are probably only a handful of people with this particular combination of skill and sector.
It doesn’t make me especially special, but it is niche enough to make non-compete clauses post-contract, unenforceable.
Other people think I’m an expert but I’ve seen enough to know I’m not.
It’s also a separate skill to actually listen to the expert once you’ve got their advice. Look at climate change, basically anything to do with politics, etc…
As the great theologian J. Biafra said, “give me convenience, or give me death”
We see this all the time as an integrator. The project I mostly work on is so off the wall that there are maybe four people who are experts on it. The fire and security system we were asked to build for a school system is so custom that nobody is an expert; I’m the only guy that knows how the backend works (because I wrote most of it from scratch in a mix a C, TSQL, and Wonderware QuckScript), but I’m clueless on the front end.
I walk into places running old end-of-life Modicons running LL984 ladder logic and don’t know a single person outside Schneider-Electric that understands that stuff besides me. I’m not an expert, but I’m all that’s available.
Our business development team is always asking us, “do we have people who know xxx?” and I have to tell them no, if you want to bid on that job you need to hire an xxx expert to do the design and lead the project. Occasionally we do.
I’m an expert at fucking my life up. I have no idea why anyone won’t hire me.
Well, because they need experts at fucking up their lives, not yours
What do you do?
I can try to help. Interviewing was really hard until I gained confidence.
I often don’t hire an expert to do certain tasks. Here are three common reasons:
- I don’t trust any expert that I can hire
- I can do the job adequately and I consider the expert too expensive relative to the value of having the job done very well
- I want to learn how to do it and so I want to practise
We’re pretty expensive. Honestly you have to be good at something to understand the real value an expert can bring.
I can figure it out.
What makes you think they don’t???
Because experts usually know their worth and charge accordingly.
Because, more often than not, we have a very hard time determining whether someone is truly an expert, or just good enough to do the job.
Even if you found them, more often than not their motivations aren’t to work for megacorp in a major city. They might be married, with kids, and enjoy where they’re currently at. They might be happy enough building shitty web apps over working at a FAANG company. They might have tried working at the top of their career, realised it was more trouble than it was worth, and decided “nah, I’m good”.
Money probably even if it means a lack of quality and/or done wrong. Might be more expensive in the long run so its kinda ironic
- Sometimes “experts” suck. I’ve had 2 projects done to my house that need to be re-done, they were so bad. I would have been better off investing some time into learning to do it myself, which I now have to do anyway.
- Having experts do my camper van conversion would be ridiculously expensive. Same for buying pre-made things. There is a lot to learn about floor, insulation, wiring, charging, cabinetry, water, storage, etc. But learning that is one reason I’m doing it myself. Mistakes still don’t add up to even one piece that pre-fab or shop expert would charge. For example, a galley is about $1200 (sink, fridge cabinet). I built my own for ~$200 and got most of it done in one day.
- There are some experts I will trust. I trust one bike shop to do my shock service each year because frankly it’s a messy hassle for me to do it myself, and If I screw up, I buy a new $1000 fork. If they screw up, they buy it.
You didn’t have experts. You had people who convinced you that they were experts.
Same thing happened to me. Their (obvious when it was pointed out to me later) failure cost me a lot of money.
Because they don’t know where to find the Experts Lounge, duh. /s
There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in America at least, and a lot of people don’t “trust” experts.
