Tech people are pretty smart, on average. It's a somewhat demanding professional career. There's a hell of a lot of difference between "smart" and "infallible".
This is true for a lot of people in tech, in general. Part of it is because tech people are, on average, much smarter and much more curious than an average person. Now, you take a smart, curious person and you make them work at a computer connected to the internet -- the largest knowledge base ever created. That's like hiring an alcoholic to work at a liqueur store and expecting them not to drink during the work day.
everyone in this industry loves to think that they're surrounded by (and accordingly one of) the smartest people in the world. Sure, some people in tech are very very smart, but many, maybe most, of the smartest people in the world, don't work in tech at all (they work as researchers, in universities)
They can solve complex open-ended tasks, and formulate long term plans that take into account information from multiple sources.
I understand that this is not a very high bar to set in comparison to other working professionals, but nearly everyone in the tech industry, and most other people who have a desk in a company's head office, are working at a level above the average person. Many of the posters on HN are biased by their personal and professional contacts and have an incorrect impression of what an IQ of 100 looks like, or how smart the average person is.
Going back to what I said originally, being smart is not the same as being infallible. Smart people can get themselves into all sorts of trouble that everyone else would have the humility and common sense to avoid.
Oh hell yes, that is often infuriating and sometimes dangerous.
I figure a few factors must be:
Often being surrounded by people with simpler jobs than yours so you understand theirs but they can't understand yours. Even if the job requires more skill and is harder to do than the tech job, it seems easier in the same way that outsiders presume that the hard part of programming is learning those funny looking programming languages and cryptic terminal commands. You get used to explaining things to people who don't get it.
IQ is likely more useful in tech as well so the tech people tend to be smarter in that way than their other peers. They also value IQ more highly than other forms of intelligence because that's the one they probably have.
There are a lot of jobs in tech where social interaction isn't as important, so the field self selects for this. People who value and/or are skilled in these traits will leave or be tempted away at a higher rate than the replacement rate. These skills correlate with effective introspection and self evaluation.
Systems thinking is a learned skill, and it does actually make you better at understanding things in general. It's not evenly distributed and those without this skill can seem less intelligent than they are. This aspect is less hubris than actually having been trained in a useful general thinking tool by your job.
Western culture recently funnelled a lot of low status kids into tech. The narrative was that they were "the smart ones", they have carried over this "we're the smart ones, not like those stupid jocks and douchebags" framework into adulthood and are still trapped by it. Anti-intellectualism provided the seed for this narrative but it is way overblown.
The valley pushes this "you're the special best, you deserve to rule, save the world, fix everything the stupids ruined" narrative pretty hard because it works well.
This combines into: Privileged, sheltered humans with a chip on their shoulder, local evidence of superiority in an area they both value and a lowered ability to understand or even recognize other areas. That strikes me as a recipe for this, physicists do it too as do economists and trust fund kids with an MBA. Doctors are famous for similar personality defects.
No, this isn't sarcasm or a joke. I do wonder if there's some sort of inverse correlation between intelligence and ability to thrive under corporate bureaucracy.
I think that might be colored by the "culture" of tech workers where you happen to be, that has certainly not been my experience. The smart folks I've met in tech, including the outright geniuses, have been almost universally well-rounded with a strong set of "soft skills" and typically a widely varied set of interests outside of their work specialty. Indeed, I'd describe them as "fully fleshed out human beings", perhaps more so than the average human being in fact. The number of "smart tech workers" I've come across who I would describe as "high-functioning autistic savants" I could count on the fingers of one hand, and even then that description would be a decidedly uncharitable characterization for them.
I find that in tech you run across more people than usual where because they are very intelligent and successful within various tech domains they think this also sets them up to uniquely be an expert at other domains. Politics, law, public health, economics, etc. This is not true.
I know a few who probably doesn’t realize how smart they actually are.
Smartest one I known so far works at a corp and is often moved between teams for new projects. Second smartest person I know works at a tiny startup and enjoys life and as chill as Buddha. The third smartest person I know doesn’t do tech anymore, was promoted to higher level management and left tech because he made immense f*ku money and is mostly travelling these days.
For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience at all, with the possible exception of the As. I suppose tech is in some ways an unusually functional industry overall, but all the leaders I've seen who weren't particularly smart but had people skills have failed pretty miserably. The successful ones have been almost universally the ones who are very smart (categorically as smart or usually smarter than their underlings) _and_ had excellent people skills.
As I said, it's entirely possible that tech (or at least the quality of company I've worked at) is something of an anomaly, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as unrepresentative: it's not controversial at all that the importance of intelligence is rising fairly rapidly in the modern economy and tech may be more representative of the present and future than you'd think at first glance.
A significant problem with intelligent people is that they're repeatedly told they're good at everything throughout their early life, but being clever doesn't automatically make you good at everything. Some things take experience and knowledge that takes years to attain. Tech is full of people who did well at school, went to a good university and did great, and then went to work at a tech company. They have no experience of the world outside of their very limited experiences. But they don't realise that. So they fuck products up a lot because outside of tech people couldn't give a damn about the same things clever nerds give a damn about.
The reason I know this is because I was the same. I did well at school, did well at university, got good jobs in tech, and then tried to do a startup and failed hard because I wasn't nearly as clever as I thought I was, and I had completely misunderstood the product I tried to make. It was quite the lesson.
That's not the sad part, the sad part is how many people who aren't that smart are convinced they really are very smart because they happen to work with computers.
Tech workers (with their inflated view of their own intelligence) are almost always hilarious. It's half the reason I keep coming back to HN.
If they spent the same amount of time doing research as they do on concocting inane conspiracies and brainless explanations, they may actually be as smart as they think themselves to be.
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