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Comment by luckydata | Hacker News Reader

Some of the smartest people I've met work in sales. You don't have to be an engineer to be smart.

Agreed. It's easy for engineers to assume because they have a deep understanding of a complex topic, that it is a good proxy for assessing general intelligence.

Such assessment is a good proxy for a certain kind of intelligence only, because intelligence itself exists on a fairly wide spectrum, it is not a binary trait.

The problem is that the average salesperson is pretty ignorant, even about the probuct he's supposed to sell and the target audience to sell to. Encountering a great salesperson is a rare occurrence in life, encountering a more or less average one is very common.

Same with programmers or anything else.

The problem is the baseline STEM disciple looks on the baseline biz/marketing graduate with disdain like they took an easy route out.

'proper' Engineering (MECH/AERO/CIVIL/EEE) is full of memes about this mindset.

CS is just as bad.

Most decent engineers loose this mindset after freshman year but many go on to see them selves as the MVP department of whatever business.

In some ways I think Startup culture fights against this because it's really obvious at small team scale how different skill sets are needed.

The absolute best in any field including fast food cook is probably as intelegent as any other field. However the average really can be meaningfully different based on self selection. HR for example really does not attract the best and brightest.

Sales is an outlier because compensation for the best can be really good. So, it's got a large group of very talented people and many far less so.

There's always the difficulty of being able to recognise that as a lamen. Mediocre sales people are often transparent to anybody who listens to them and is able to ask questions. A mediocre engineer "blinds with science" and is very hard to identify without some amount of specialist knowledge.

Of course, never said it's not. Are people reflecting from themselves, or what is this about?

Classic programmer narcissism

Possibly just ignorant. Most people have never/will never be in charge of large budgets.

A normal consumer with a normal job is only really going to encounter the lower end of the field.

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