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Comment by simmanian | Hacker News Reader

I can anecdotally confirm the American side. My manager values confidence to the point where he sees it as the number one signal for actual competence. I started acting more confident and aggressive to appease him, and realized that everyone else has already been doing it all along.

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How is that sustainable? Does the scheme lack a feedback loop of sorts or why doesn't he (or the stereotypical American people of similar attitude) realise that the overconfident-looking people aren't necessarily that competent? I mean, competence is a hard quality: you immediately know who's lacking it when you see someone who really, truly has competence. You can only fake it till so far.

unless you collect data points over a relatively long period of time, it's hard to assess the competence of a developer. you might have one person on a team who works on bugs in ascending order of difficulty and closes many tickets every day. you might have another who works on high-priority difficult bugs, but takes several days on each one.

either person could be a valuable member of the team, but how do you say which one is more competent in a quick glance?

Honestly, most managers are not constantly evaluating their team. They have other work to do. I think employees tend to believe that the only thing on their managers mind is them when in reality it's the furthest thing from their mind.

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