> It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert".
Not entirely on topic, but this makes 'experts' who have a large social media presence talking about the subject you are interested in far more likely to be invited while they might (and very often don't) know almost nothing about the subject, have no degrees (but often lie that they have) and made up their title(s). This trend is growing in the professional world. The amount of secops 'experts' I meet at companies who know nothing at all about this field besides the very basics they saw in a youtube video is incredible. I recognise them immediately as they talk too much and what they say sounds like hallucinating chatgpt (and I am not a security expert, but it intersects with what we do and need often). When I ask someone in the company (I get into companies via my own company to troubleshoot things, I don't work there, but I see a lot of them) they usually have something like 'but he is THE expert in the field on LinkedIn/Twitter (meaning, many followers and a lot of edgy shouting about the subject) so how can it be bad?'.
Anyway, you only have to watch some Joe Rogan lately to see where that is going quite rapidly. Grifter 'experts' supporting crazy grifters (yes, Terrence for instance) to make them more credible to both sell more grifter crap.
I find it very dangerous and i'm not the only one; non critical people may actually believe what these people peddle; a secops or devops that basically googles/chatgpts everything and comes with a plan cannot be good for the world now can it? If we (my company) need an expert on something, we call the university (of Delft or Amsterdam in our case as they are our alma maters) and ask which industry person with an actual degree and 10+ years industry experience we should ask for advice on xyz. Never failed us in the past 25 years; never had a twitter celeb over I am happy to say.
Not entirely on topic, but this makes 'experts' who have a large social media presence talking about the subject you are interested in far more likely to be invited while they might (and very often don't) know almost nothing about the subject, have no degrees (but often lie that they have) and made up their title(s). This trend is growing in the professional world. The amount of secops 'experts' I meet at companies who know nothing at all about this field besides the very basics they saw in a youtube video is incredible. I recognise them immediately as they talk too much and what they say sounds like hallucinating chatgpt (and I am not a security expert, but it intersects with what we do and need often). When I ask someone in the company (I get into companies via my own company to troubleshoot things, I don't work there, but I see a lot of them) they usually have something like 'but he is THE expert in the field on LinkedIn/Twitter (meaning, many followers and a lot of edgy shouting about the subject) so how can it be bad?'.
Anyway, you only have to watch some Joe Rogan lately to see where that is going quite rapidly. Grifter 'experts' supporting crazy grifters (yes, Terrence for instance) to make them more credible to both sell more grifter crap.
I find it very dangerous and i'm not the only one; non critical people may actually believe what these people peddle; a secops or devops that basically googles/chatgpts everything and comes with a plan cannot be good for the world now can it? If we (my company) need an expert on something, we call the university (of Delft or Amsterdam in our case as they are our alma maters) and ask which industry person with an actual degree and 10+ years industry experience we should ask for advice on xyz. Never failed us in the past 25 years; never had a twitter celeb over I am happy to say.