We're not talking about some ordinary rank-and-file engineer here. The situation Rachel is talking about where the person is usually well-known among a significant fraction of their industry for their expertise in X. That level of seniority (principal level or beyond) is supposed to imply that they also know when -not- to use X and the responsibility to speak up, but sometimes either their belief in X is too strong ("When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.") or, in some cases I suspect, the monetary and career-enhancing incentives are high enough to overcome any unease they may have misapplying X. Then you get this situation where a mandate comes down for X is used where X is not really the appropriate thing to do.

> The situation Rachel is talking about where the person is well-known among a significant fraction of their industry for their expertise in X.

I don't know the specifics of Rachel's parable, if any. But by and large, the people who are most well known in industry for 'expertise in X' are the devrel / tech evangelists whose job it is to go on stage and be an expert, for one hour at a time (and perhaps a few extra hours on the show floor surrounding the conference). Well, the on-stage demos they execute only have to live as long as the lecture, and you don't have to fix bugs so much as rework the preso to avoid them. It's a long march from a proof of concept to production readiness, and I've seen one or two stories on HN about people who got burned hiring high profile devrels to lead an infra buildout.

> sometimes either their belief in X is too strong ... or, ... the monetary and career-enhancing incentives are high enough to overcome any unease they may have

One scenario I've seen play out: you hire a core maintainer for a product you depend on, but should probably be transitioning away from. The maintainer you typically don't have comparable expertise in anything else, so they might as well apply for unemployment before telling your boss you recommend against it. Which I suppose is covered in 'monetary incentives' but with tinge of regret about the whole thing, especially if hired away from some a more stable role.

You also have those whose consulting career is fully based on being 'experts in X', being on stage doing talks on X, is the mean to sell themselves as 'experts in X', alongside writting books about how cool X happens to be no matter what.

> But by and large, the people who are most well known in industry for 'expertise in X' are the devrel / tech evangelists whose job it is to go on stage and be an expert, for one hour at a time (and perhaps a few extra hours on the show floor surrounding the conference).

When I think of "experts in X" I usually think of the people who created or maintain the thing, or who're active in the Github issues. I guess some of those people might be considered tech evangelists, but I don't think I could name a single devrel person.

One probably spent too much time debugging someone's shit mountain code base, the original author got to enjoy bog bonuses and bragging about X in conferences and getting hired by similar companies to build another X.

It doesn't have to be a malicious charlatan to pounce on value that has already been built, without them having actual consideration for future value that should be more rewarding and more sensibly worth working toward instead.

The corporate-climber-who-can't-build can often do this and nothing else, and they can sometimes even subconsciously exhibit some of the behaviors that end up with the same outcome, and it often can actually be unintentional.

> I will now point out that whether X makes it to production can become disconnected from the notion of whether X actually belongs in production. In one outcome, it's brilliantly executed and things grow. But, this is about the downsides, and in that scenario, it's a stinking pile of garbage and needs to be thrown out, but it gets forced in, anyway. [emphasis added]

She's left the positive case out for the charlatan comment, they wouldn't be charlatans (in this instance at least).

The guy building X isn't a charlatan in any case. The charlatan is the guy selling X, which is presumably the guy who hired the guy who builds it.

If you tell me to build you a system you don't need, and I do, and you insist on using it against everyone else's better judgment, how did I become a charlatan?

Because if you're the expert on X, you can either stand up and agree with everyone that building X is not the right decision, or you can smile and nod and say yea, we should totally build our own X, it's a great idea. If you say no, it won't happen.

On one side I would say that this the most authentic course of action.

But that doesn't suddenly shift all the responsibility to the expert. The power relation and degree of freedom between those who hire and those who get hired is often asymmetric. The ones who hire usually are the ones who make the decisions, so they should be held accountable for those.

Now of course if the expert does have a sufficient degree of freedom then they become complicit.

and they loose the job they were just hired for.

because the more likely situation is that the newly hired expert on X is the only one realizing that X is wrong for this case.

If you know you were being hired for one specific task shouldn’t you have talked about the fit before you start? I would say that is reasonable.

It's not always reasonable, because in the general case you don't know until later right? You discover the issues at some point when already working. Also you're implying that there is no economic dependence which is not always the case.

The ones who lie to keep their job are the ones who get called 'charlatan'. Seems fair.

except they are most likely only being asked if they can build X (which they can) and not if X is appropriate here. so at the most they are lying by omission, but more realistically they are opting not to become a whistleblower.