The knowledge needed to advocate

Geertjan Wielenga: Although you can't know everything, is there a cut-off point for how much you should know to do this job?

Reza Rahman: You should know more than 80% of your audience. As long as you know substantially more than most of your audience, you're okay. It depends on your audience too. It's one thing to go and talk about computer science to somebody at school, but if you're talking to some Ph.D. students about a big data topic, you have reason to be concerned about how much you know. It's all relative.

Geertjan Wielenga: Doesn't it also depend on what kind of topic you're presenting? If you're presenting your journey into the cloud, for example, that's going to be a very personal story.

Reza Rahman: That's also true. You can present a different perspective on just about any topic. It depends on what the value would be to the audience. Nobody wants to hear about the last time you...