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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

In my experience in tech (only a few years, I came from finance, and before that construction, weirdly) people are super cynical and often believe that they know more about _any_ business because they can write some code or something similar. I have never been around more people who consistently think they know better than everyone else. This was a surprising thing for me because I assumed engineers would be more curious and thusly more humble. It's actually a really unappealing part of my experience in the industry that often makes me wonder how long I'll last in it.

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No - it is just about age. HN readers are younger thus they think they know more. Old people will just say: "I don't know about that" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

I would've thought it's more that HN'ers tend to have first or second hand experience tech boom/busts, and each subsequent sky-high validation brings back memories and feelings that are hard to ignore

HN commenters, the more visible ones, are not that young (by young I presume you mean anywhere in the 20s).

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

I think the median age in the top 10, for example, is around 40.

I work with quite a few "old people" who will happily explain everything to you in the most definitive manner possible.

This reminded me of a chunk from an [interview with Linus Torvalds](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/linux-at-25-qa-w...)

Stephen Cass: You’re a much more experienced programmer now versus 25 years ago. What’s one thing you know now that you wish your younger self knew?

Linus Torvalds: Actually, I credit the fact that I didn’t know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. If I had known what I know today when I started, I would never have had the chutzpah to start writing my own operating system: You need a certain amount of naïveté to think that you can do it. I really think that was needed for the project to get started and to succeed. The lack of understanding about the eventual scope of the project helped, but so did getting into it without a lot of preconceived notions of where it should go.

This is true of many groups: bankers, consultants, doctors, PhDs, and journalists.

Or maybe, it is true of people who choose to comment.

People who believe they don't know much about a subject may choose to remain silent on the matter.

Yeah I agree. There's also a general proclivity to discount boring, but effective solutions to problems.

I'm writing a hotel property management system right now for a hotel chain. In its first year, it will move more money than most startups will make in their lifetimes. Somehow, that isn't "cool", though.

See: craigslist

You know, a bishop is stronger than a pawn, but a bishop never can became a queen, while a pawn has a slim but real chance.

Hence be the boring bishops and exciting pawns paradox.

Seasoned programmers who have worked on software across several industries are probably pretty good at understanding and translating day to day business tasks into automated code. To do that you almost have to understand a business inside and out. That's their job. If more people were humble, less would get done

That make's plenty of sense but I have a hard time believing that so many of the commenters here have the experience you just described. I know it is certainly not true of the people I interact with offline on a regular basis.

Also, I'm not sure I really buy the argument that because you can automate some "day to day business tasks" means you know better about how a business should be run. Automating a process that already exists is not the same as deciding which processes need to exist and which don't. Certainly, there are people who can both but I'd be lying if I said any significant number of engineers I know could really do both.

Humble is opposite to arrogant, not to decisive or knowledgeable.