Reflections on (Humans) Trusting (Humans') Trust

One thing I've learned from consulting is that you should trust a competent person's feels about a technology, even if they can't immediately come up with arguments to support them. Seemingly vague statements like "Oh, I hate the Foo webserver, it's so flaky" or "Bar is a really annoying language to work in" or "the Baz API just doesn't feel very user-friendly" are actually the distilled product of many hard-won experiences that the speaker may not be able to call to mind individually. I observed this last night at Larry Wall's Perl 6 talk, specifically the Q&A: most of the time he came up with great examples, but sometimes he just had to talk about his own language in broad, esthetic terms. And I'm no Larry Wall, but today I found myself in a similar position when advising a client about which of two virtualization platforms to use. Of course, this applies to people speaking from experience and not from prejudice; you have to know how good someone's judgment is in order to transitively-trust them to have good opinions. That's one soft skill that gives you a major edge in technology. But, contrary to stereotype, most technical people are good at making these kinds of meta-judgments.