Comment by habinero

If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential.

Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying.

I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol)

Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned.