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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> Engineers are the worst at this part of the game. They'll sign anything you put in front of them.

The smart ones absolutely will not. Smart people absolutely will not do this, regardless of their profession.

But that's the ultimate cop-out. By sheer definition smart people will not do anything stupid. They are utterly incapable of doing stupid things, because then they wouldn't be smart. This is a wonderful tautology and a beautiful way of saying absolutely nothing.

Once you internalize tautologies you see them eeeeeverywhere. sadly.

It's just a way of saying "doing X is stupid" without being blunt.

That's a dangerous and reductive line of thinking. There are plenty of factors that can lead people to believe (correctly or no) that they don't have leverage in an employment negotiation. First job out of school, first job in the tech industry, family causing them to want to stay in an area without many other prospects, etc; NDAs are an employers way of leaning hard on the fact you need them a lot more than they need you.

I don't agree. I've worked with some very smart engineers and scientists who simply do not inform themselves about things that are outside their domain.

> who simply do not inform themselves about things that are outside their domain.

And hopefully have the self-awareness not to have strongly held opinions in these areas (at least without sufficient evidence). However, I find that all too often, this is not the case.

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