Red Flags When Talking to Subject Experts

I recently helped screen people for a big switching project that I’m working on. While I can fight my way out of a paper bag when it comes to simple things like VLANs and layer 3 switches, I hardly consider myself an expert. One soi-disant “expert” I interviewed kept throwing buzzwords and hardware at me, and I couldn’t help but think that he was trying a bit too hard to convince me he was O. G., particularly when he’d drop phrases like “back in the day” and then allude to technologies like 10base5, 10base2, and hubs.

To see what he was made of, I simply asked him if he ever had to observe the 5-4-3 rule. He had never heard of it. And when I told him what it was, he then told me that was no longer needed. And when I told him that to my limited understanding it was needed “back in the day”, he changed the subject to vampire taps! Hmmm…go figure. (So maybe it wasn’t just me when we seemed to have a little disconnect between the difference between a broadcasting and a collision domain.)

Hands down, my favorite posers thus far are the “forensic experts” I’ve screened. I don’t know beans about forensics, but I have a clue when it comes to certain key concepts, and if pushed, I could fight my way out of a paper bag on any of those topics, as well. One “expert” said that he had all of these forensic skills, and when I finally asked about how exactly he acquired the data before he analyzed it (one of the few forensic topics on which I’m somewhat knowledgeable), I got an answer on how he didn’t do it. When I pushed him on the nitty gritty on how he “forensically searched” the contents of people’s copmuters, I found that he had done little more than install EnCase on his computer and conducted extremely rudimentary searches on some EnCase images.

Being a sort of technology generalist, I can certainly understand that no one person can understand everything about a given subject. It’s often easy to get caught not knowing very basic things about something you’re supposedly an “expert” in. But when it’s obvious that you’re batting WAY out of your league, c’mon…