> But I don’t think we should be calling these people “domain experts”. I think we should reserve that name for the other group, for the people who truly and deeply understand the domain, the whys and whats and why nots.
replyI've spent a lot of time in my career extracting info from the business and I think most do understand the whys/why nots but aren't practiced at organizing all of those decades of experience into a higher level abstract model that can easily be communicated.
It's typically layers and layers of information with dependencies in many directions littered with exceptions. Just like our software design+dev experience, it takes a lot of practice to try to organize all of that info into a coherent presentable model.
That ship has sailed. Anyone who works in a field is now considered a domain expert (or "SME") even if they're nothing of the sort. There should ideally be another term that's a superset, but I doubt it would ever catch on.
replyYou're doing a bit of a "true Scotsman fallacy" here.
replyIt feels like without a bit of true Scotsmanship, the term “domain expert” doesn’t really mean anything.
replySure it does, it’s just a highly contested meaning that depends on a proper contemporary interpretation if to be received as intended in this context. Context that varies domain to domain. For the domain name buyer it’s quite different than the metacognitive scholar.
replyThen there are almost no domain experts.
replyAgree. If you can't explain it to someone else, you don't really understand it yourself. These people are practitioners not experts.
replyPeople you say are not experts are fully capable to explain whys and whats and why nots. In more details that you can absorb.
replyThey will do that on examples tho. They will recognize and explain every single exception they see - but they are not able to list all exceptions up front. Because, that is highly unusual task