It seems of late there is a campaign in the software development community, especially in the agile community where ignorance is a virtue.
Ignorance of the microeconomics of decision making.
The ignorance that all project work contains uncertainty, that uncertainty is of two kinds - reducible and irreducible, and that uncertainty is the source of risk.
The ignorance that in order to manage the expenditure of other people's money in the presence of uncertainty requires making estimates of the impact of the decisions made in the presence of that uncertainty.
The book The Death of Expertise is a continuation of a paper by the author in the Federalist.
From that paper, I'd say I'm also an expert. Not an expert in everything of course, but an expert is a narrowly focused domain of Program Planning and Controls (PP&C). This domain includes the management of Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance Management of projects in the domain of Software Intensive System of Systems. This domain also includes Risk Management, Requirements Management, Agile development, Root Cause Analysis, Monte Carlo Simulation and the tools used to manage the outcomes of these engineering efforts.
When I say something on these and related topics my expectation is those statements carry weight from both the knowledge point of view and a practice point of view. Both Knowing and Doing.
This book explains how the death of expertise has now crept into most corners of must domains. This is a Google-Fueled, Wikipedia, unsubstantiated opinion based approach to most everything in our software development management world these days. I read it on the Internet is not just the source of alt-news, it's the source of alt-knowledge of how the business of software development works, how decision support systems work, how the basic financial processes of writing software for money work.
Read this book, see how the self-proclaimed experts in our field have captured the mind share of the unsuspecting who are seeking easy answers to hard problems, and we get this result.
