Being the stupidest person among your peers is probably the best things you can do for yourself if you want to learn. Who better to learn from than a bunch of brilliant people!

Whenever I join a new company, I'm the dumbest person there at the beginning... Until the next recruit arrives :)

Putting yourself in the position of always being the dumbest person in the room is the smartest thing you can do.

You never want to be the smartest person in the room... EVER. Sure, it feels great, but you don't learn anything.

By always putting yourself in difficult situations, you become more adaptable and better rounded as an engineer.

The more advanced you get in your field, the more you understand how little you really know. I feel like this every day. It's easy to forget that to a ton of people you're still a guy/gal who works magical wonders with computers.

There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.

Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.

Another real issue in technology is that technologists have a real tendency to think the rest of the world is full of idiots because they can't code. That causes all sorts of sad and frustrating situations. We all have to realize that intelligence can't be judged by your ability to code or how many languages you can code in. I code across many systems, many languages and have done that for 30 years now and I have met many brilliant people who have a hard time using their iPhone. Often my partnerships and relationships with those people have proven to be some of the more rewarding relationships I've had in my life.

But seriously, everyone comes to tech forums with different levels of ability, experience, understanding, and skill in getting these things across. Geeks are especially prone to under-valuing their talents as most of us are introverts, and tend to self-judge quite harshly.

The best life lesson I've had on this problem (which I've definitely struggled with) was from a very intelligent guy, who came to work at the same company as me when we were both quite new. I was crossing over from my field to a new field which he was very experienced in, and he was doing the same (crossing over into my old field). We naturally connected, and he was completely unconcerned about asking me questions which a person in his new position should have had down in muscle memory by that stage. He didn't care though - he accepted that he didn't know them, and did his best to learn as quickly as possible.

The takeaway: don't tie your self-esteem to your level of knowledge in any particular area. It's definitely the easy path, but it's also a precarious ledge once you're 'there', especially in the tech field. Just accept that your value lies in being able to reason through things, and that you'll always be less knowledgeable about something than someone else (but also conversely, quite likely to be more knowledgeable about something, however esoteric or seemingly useless).

In short, have fun and don't sweat it. Most people are in the same boat. :)

As software engineers, we tend to be told especially when we are young that we are all “smart people” (tm). We start to internalize it (believe our own bullshit). But the longer your career is, you realize that the world is full of “smart people” and that your coworkers also came up thinking they were the smartest people in the room.

I do believe I made it clear I'm NOT referring to unintentional ignorance. I'm complaining about people who act like they know everything, not people who genuinely don't know some things and have the humility and common sense to not hide it.

I do have incredible contempt for people with this level of hubris and it hasn't been a problem for me so far and I don't intend to change. Since it has not been a problem in my career, I guess I come off pretty well in IRL social situations but we're just having a text-based misunderstanding or whatever.

I have absolutely no contempt for anyone who is willing to admit they don't know everything, and have spent plenty of time working on teams where everyone was great partly because they had that kind of humility.

FWIW, most people are decent like that. I'm just sick of even having to deal with that small egotistical minority. So is everyone else.

The specific thing I'm most sick of is people who think knowing how to program is some kind of genius level skill, so if you have it, you get to accordingly act like you are an expert at all manner of unrelated things too. News flash: programming is easy, it only seems hard for temporary social/historical reasons. Literacy also used to be a very, very special skill. Times change.

I figured out quickly that the technical guy was pretty bright, but I never got a hand on the other guy. He exhibited behaviors that I associate with idiocy or flat-out frat boy douchebaggery: making things up, pretending to understand things he didn't, ridiculing ideas that he didn't even pretend to understand (I'm not making that up), bragging about himself, continuing stories after his listener had pointed out that their premise was factually untrue, and so on. Yet occasionally he said something that made me think no, a stupid person could never have said that. Plus the technical guy, who apparently knew him well, was taking all of this douchebaggery in stride and was talking to him as if he were an intellectual equal, not holding back or simplifying at all. The technical guy had apparently known this guy long enough to realize that he was much smarter than he seemed.

Even the fact that the technical guy consistently, quietly corrected the other guy's facts -- and then sat patiently while the guy finished his story despite the fact that the correction removed both the point and the credibility of the story -- seemed to indicate that they had a considerable level of mutual comfort and respect. I mean, if the guy had really been a complete idiot, the technical guy would not have bothered correcting him so often. Not to mention that an arrogant idiot would not have been so tolerant of correction as this guy was.

Anyway, that whole story was just to illustrate that there is a huge cultural gap between technical people and nontechnical people. The way that guy acted, I would not have trusted him to feed my goldfish. Apparently, though, he was a bright guy who had learned a different set of social mores.

And I think I’ve identified the cause: lack of continual contact with reality. I’ve yelled on a conference call with a bunch of Honeywell engineers “STOP FUCKING HYPOTHESING AND CHECK THE LOGS!” Smart people are prone to forming their own little bubbles; groups of smart people even moreso. They suffer from a lack of continually having their bubbles popped by abrasive facts, or dumb people who point out the obvious.

I’m having work done on my house, and my contractor is an endless source of simple, “this is how it works” data. I conceive of interesting structures for my wife’s greenhouse, and then he explains why it won’t work in single syllable words.

This is the primary reason conversations on HN involving SBF, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Eliezer Yudkowsky etc can be so tedious

Exactly.

I think I've got suckered into a clickbait substack and a circular discussion on HN to cause various people to respond each in their own silos, asserting their own worth either as self-assigned intelligent or self-assigned stupid people.

I'm a stupid person (not least for falling for that) but I get paid to think uncommon things, which turns out to be not only marketable but productive. Some of what the substack invokes is perfectly true: I get by on determination and crunch, to the point that I have to watch it (right now I'm experiencing health issues which I think trace back to the amount of crunch I can't resist doing, out of fear.)

I daresay there's usefulness in reminding people not to just pursue the 'highest intelligence' path. From where I'm standing that's a ridiculous mistake. Higher intelligence can quite easily give rise to high rationalization and rigid thinking. This is probably why some tech folks go in for self-destructive behaviors like getting wacked out on ketamine in the belief that it will increase their brain plasticity. I don't get to do that stuff with drug abuse so I have to go about it in simpler, experiential ways.

It's a 'right tool for the right job' situation. It's not broadly useful to be hyper intelligent or hyper plastic. Willingness to try and ability to care about the situation go a long, long way, and that's very much the purview of this substack post. Not a bad summary, I'd say.

I do find the education focused ones interesting, in "oh boy" sort of way. We're just taking something as dogma (anti-college) and just running with it, where we're going I don't know. There's no "there" there. I feel like this view is so prevalent in our world of computing because there are really 1) many outliers that are great autodidacts and brilliant programmers (but not as many as is claimed) and 2) there are also many that believe they don't need any kind of education because they saw a YouTube on making RoR apps and follow JS blogs but I don't think the rest of the world is really like this.

I enjoy being the dumbest person in the room. Others find it threatening.

And for those who are so busy outside of work that they can't grow inside of work, I feel for them because that sounds like an exhausting life.