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Comment by codeslush | Hacker News Reader

"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD!

FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.

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I found another formulation in reddit, a few days ago, that you might like also: "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room".

I prefer Norvig's advice:

"Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others."

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I have to agree with this. Leading a group of less experienced programmers can be a great experience. I guess it depends on what you're looking for.

I really enjoyed my last position. I was a team lead of a team of junior programmers, but the other teams had better programmers then me. I got the best of both worlds.

Helping someone learn new, cool shit is just exhilarating... Almost cooler then learning new stuff yourself.

When I was a TA in college I gave similar advice to my students: If you are the best person in your study group, you are in the wrong study group. Now, the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in. What that special something is, everybody has to figure that out for himself. I can't help you with that.

I am definitely seeing lots of parallels to work and other aspects of life here.

the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in.

"Do you like your espresso long or short" works for me.

I am NOT joking: Every project in the world has some mundane thing that has to be done but everybody is too busy to do it. Make coffee, write and maintain build scripts, write test cases, documentation, whatever. If everyone on the team is smarter than you, they all would rather be doing something else, and they will value a team member that gives them more time to do it.

ah the benefits of humility. Well said.

The process of learning a musical instrument isn't too different from learning how to program. As a long time musician, I heard the quote a long time ago and it comes to mind frequently.

Taking part in a programming community like those surrounding more academic languages such as Scala, Haskell or J is a challenge a lot like playing in a jazz band with music majors and 60 year old musicians with amazing grace. That's the wonderful thing about being online - you can interact with a nearly limitless variety of social circles. There's always someone with inspiring talent, skills, ideas or enthusiasm to inspire you.

That's one of the reasons HN is so good - this community challenges members to make contributions which are intellectually substantive, unlike Reddit, TechCrunch or other superficially similar sites.

It sounds great but most places seem to hire based on current abilities or previous accomplishments, not potential, so how does one go about implementing this advice for anything other than an entry level position?

Of all the places I've worked as an employee, I've always been around people smarter than me. I never found it difficult to find them. Maybe this is because I'm not very smart! :-) I like to think it's because I looked for them. Even if they weren't in my direct group of peers, they were somewhere in the company and easy to associate with. Without fail, if I became the top person in my group, it was time to move up or move out.

The only real time I've had a problem with this is when consulting. I usually WAS the expert, or at least perceived expert, and had difficulty finding people to work with that could elevate me to the next level. The easy solution to this is to go to local meetups with people who share your passion.

Work for companies that are weak in what you're strong in, but strong in lots of other areas.

When I joined Google Search, I was frequently the smartest guy in the room when it came to JavaScript quirks, or web development, or rich AJAX apps. I was usually the dumbest when it came to massively distributed systems, or information retrieval, or i18n and accessibility, or unstructured data mining.

Over time, I've transferred a bunch of my frontend knowledge to other engineers, and I've learned a whole lot about how massive software systems are architected. I'm a better developer, the people around me are better developers, the company is several hundred million dollars richer, and everybody wins.

Your experience sounds a lot like mine, except my team thought that expertise in Javascript was a sign that you had wasted your life.

I'm not bitter. At all.

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