The power of admitting ignorance
bastian.rieck.me
bastian.rieck.me
They are not a “warm and fuzzy” bunch.
But they respect apologies. If I screwed up, I quickly learned to cop to it. The absolute worst thing I could do was cover it up.
Their attitude was not a punishing one, but we were expected to fix our mistakes, and ensure they did not happen again.
If we said we did not know something, it was assumed we would learn, or find someone who did.
Lot of “personal responsibility” stuff.
Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.
I am constantly encountering people that Absolutely. Will. Not. Admit. Ignorance. Or. Fault. Even when it’s quite clear.
It’s crazy.
But these are grown up people though, using those arguments, not high schoolers.
IMO this is one of the fringe benefits of a good math education. Almost everybody who does math for long enough, especially if you work in small groups with your peers, will have a moment of "oh, I see, I am totally wrong and you are totally right" and find out that being wrong does not make someone a bad person. And you will see your peers do the same.
It's one underrated side effect of clear and unambiguous reasoning. Yes, many things are grey areas, but there's value in a place where you can't throw up a muddle of goalpost-shifting and rhetorical tricks to run away from your own errors.
After thinking a few times "it must be the compilers fault", you get more humble and figure out that you're too stupid to find your own fault ;).
That's a big reason I don't like to use prerelease compilers and toolsets.
So I still feel the more experienced you get, the more you have to aknowledge your own shortcomings.
It was my fault.
I love that!
I find that in engineering, too. I write about that here:
https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...
When I was younger and my dream was to become a programmer, I imagined (probably rightfully so) my default state in life would be feeling very secure in the fact that I am an expert in my job and know advanced stuff and so on. Now that I became a mathematician instead, I miss that sort of self-assurance.
It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general.
My first job out of college was at a dysfunctional company with a lot of internal competition. Making a mistake or taking responsibility for a failure was something that would be remembered for years and brought up at every opportunity. I remember my manager coaching me through covering up a simple mistake because he knew another team was eagerly waiting for me to slip up so they could attempt to take over our almost-finished project.
My second job was the polar opposite. When someone made a mistake, other teams jumped in to help fix the problem and kindly educate the person about how to avoid the problem in the future. Mistakes were a learning opportunity, admitting fault was a show of leadership, and the only real way to fail was to be chronically careless or to lie.
The biggest difference between the two companies was that the first company felt like a zero-sum game. We always felt like we were competing against other teams for bigger slices of the company budget, limited attention from executives, or just to keep our jobs through the next round of layoffs. It was every team for themselves, and other teams' mistakes were an opportunity to take them down a notch.
Meanwhile, the better company operated like everyone was on the same team. We all succeeded or failed together. Mutual respect an taking responsibility for your actions were not only encouraged by management, it was a requirement if you wanted to work there. I've tried to model my management style after this.
I mean as someone who's worked in a corp that has one foot in the US and one foot in Japan, I see where OP is coming from.
Japan's business culture is no-frills "get it done" which rewards performance + optimization all the way down to the factory worker/janitors. In the US we have a culture of middle-management bloat where performance is usually transitive up the chain in some weird hierarchy; ie: my accomplishments are actually my manager's. This is all done with the "teamwork" mechanic - I didn't accomplish something... the team did.
What this leaves is a whole buncha people who know their failures will blow back on them 10X vs. any successes, giving the company an excuse to withhold incentives (raises, bonuses, etc). You're incentivized to cover stuff up because you know it's going to come up in your reviews, and with your accomplishments being diluted into the "team" it ends up being a major point of contention.
This is all anecdata but... I really understand/see where OP is coming from with his comparison as someone with a similar situation!!
It's not foreign in American culture, either. My understanding is in the us Navy for junior officers and enlisteds anyways covering up is the worst thing you can do; you can cause catastrophic accidents that if they don't kill anyone will result in no punishment besides a "what did we learn here?" lecture.
Not as true in the upper, more political ranks so I understand.
“Were you told to not do that? Yes.”
“Did it work? Also, yes.”
“Now clean up this goddamn mess.”
Uhhhhh what? Japanese IT companies run decades old practices, are hugely inefficient and if anyone suggests they change its the famous "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Also they are not known for rewarding performance what-so-ever, they're known for rewarding seniority and butt-in-seat time. They're famous for both of those.
Things moved fast and people were pushed to innovate/iterate within their roles. The Japanese mothership was quick to get things done without much BS and always seemed interested in optimization/solving problems efficiently (on time, on budget).
I think some cultures have an ingrained mistrust of the idea that some people are so far above others. Perhaps that attitude forces a false humility onto geniuses, but it works as a cultural inoculation against blowhards and pretend superheros. In the U.S., I think we have a complicated melange of different influences ranging from the New England protestant stereotype who would never tolerate such people to the South which I think cultivates an unfortunate craving for Great Man saviors (which can manifest on the small scale, like one engineer gathering a cabal of awed worshipers in an engineering organization, or on the national scale with politicians.) These are broad stereotypes, and I think cultural and geographic mixing in the U.S. makes accurate generalization impossible, but different people have different gut reactions to people who make implicit or explicit claims to greatness, and I think these gut reactions are culturally ingrained in childhood. Companies can cultivate a culture, but I don't think that will override whether a person responds to grandiose self-presentation with aversion or craving.
The last couple of years, I’ve been “refactoring” myself, to pivot from being a manager (I ran a C++ image processing shop for a long time), to being an engineer (specializing in native Apple device programming in Swift).
For years, I never needed to self-promote. The people that mattered knew all about me; warts and all. It wasn’t important for anyone else to be impressed.
I am now working towards hanging a shingle as a contract engineer, and I need to let folks know why they should pay me for my work and experience.
It’s really difficult to talk about myself and what I can do, without it sounding like boasting; yet that’s what I’m expected to do.
I am really, really honest, which is, apparently, absolutely worthless in today’s business environment. The Japanese really liked it, but no one else seems to find it at all appealing. I’m not one of those “brutally honest” people that ends up making a pariah of themselves, but I have a very stringent code of personal ethics that I follow.
All that is to say that I’m not good at the “humblebrag.” If I’m good at something, I simply say that I’m good at it. I don’t claim expertise at anything I don’t know, and I don’t make promises I don’t plan to keep.
You don’t last long at a Japanese company, if you are full of hot air.
I’m way past the Dunning-Kruger Peak, and the Jon Snow Trough.
If I say I can do something, I mean it. I won’t say I can do something that I can’t do.
It’s that simple.
When we discussed this behavior afterwards, my boss's response was, "Don't worry about it. He's been working as a consultant for the last couple of years, and consultants have to act like that. It's a survival thing."
So... yeah. I think you are going to have to think very hard about what you CAN say that will produce the same effect as the things you won't say. I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't literally true or false that you could say to communicate to people that they will be in good hands with you.
If you decide to give it up in the end, I think people will be very sympathetic to you applying for a permanent position as a developer and saying that you tried contracting and decided you weren't cut out for it. I think most people working permanent jobs in software engineering can't imagine themselves succeeding as contractors and will admire that you even tried it.
No one wants to hire anyone over 40 as an engineer. After a series of insults and attempts at humiliation, I realized the deal. It’s a very different world from the one I left, when I joined that Japanese company.
I won’t lie, and I won’t compromise my personal integrity. If that means that no one will want to hire me to develop their critical must-not-fail products, then so be it. It's surprising to learn that people actively seek out folks with compromised ethics for these types of gigs, but it's a funny old world.
I’ve already reconciled myself to the fact that this means that I may never work for anyone other than myself; which is acceptable, but not ideal.
I just find it rather personally offensive to encounter this kind of willful self-destructiveness.
I have the skills and experience to make a lot of money for people. I’m quite willing to take risks with startups, and have a truly vast array of experience in many, many disciplines (which is usually fairly valuable for things like startups). I have tremendous self-discipline and integrity (You get that, when your boss is 7,000 miles away, and doesn't speak English), clean up pretty well, and am used to selling complex ideas to powerful, skeptical, conservative managers. I'm a top-shelf writer, having been writing since I was a child. I'm a very good architect, having developed infrastructure-level systems that have lasted decades (If you order the current SDK for DSLRs from my alma mater, you will find a module in there that I designed in 1994, and I've also developed a really big open-source infrastructure for NPOs, that is becoming the worldwide standard after more than ten years). My GitHub ID Activity Log is solid green.
My entire career has been delivering software (as opposed to just “writing” software), I don’t have a need for ego-gratification, I’m fine with a very reasonable compensation, and am mostly doing this because I simply love software development.
If I say all that in an interview, though, it's assumed that I'm lying, even though I have a vast open-source portfolio of hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted, ultra-high-quality, single-origin, small-batch (and also really big-batch), artisanal code, over a decade of commit history, in dozens of repos and gists, hundreds of pages of documentation, reams of articles, blog posts, and other examples of top-quality writing that describe, in detail, how I work, think, design, assess risk, test and deliver.
It's all up-to-date, too. My last checkins will probably happen later today. I'm working on delivering a new Bluetooth explorer app to the App Store. It looks like today is Submit Day.
It's my experience that no one will even glance at that. I think it's kind of crazy. I would have killed for that kind of data on prospective hires.
I’m actually perfectly fine, doing my own thing, but I find that I miss being on a team.
Maybe you're shooting too low. People hire a lot of engineers over forty, but mostly into high-level positions where they are expected to mentor junior developers, guide decisions about technology, work closely with people outside of engineering, and otherwise help set standards and direction for the team. It's still technically an individual contributor role, but you're judged by your influence on the performance of everyone around you. The emphasis you place on your individual technical achievements indicates that you aren't aware of that aspect of the role that companies expect someone with your level of experience to fill.
On one hand, I think it's unfortunate, because if you want to concentrate on producing excellent individual work, there should be the same place for you at 40 or 50 as there is for somebody doing that at 30. On the other hand, they're demanding more of you because they expect that somebody with your level of experience should be able to deliver it, and they're probably right. You probably are capable of doing that stuff if you are aware of the expectations and aware of your influence on the organization around you.
And it can be kind of demoralizing for a team when leadership is required (as it always is) and someone with your chops and experience fails to step up and provide it because they're focused on the amazing quality of their individual work.
Again, I think you can probably do everything these higher positions require, but you'll have to rebalance the way you pitch yourself (add some stuff about your ability to mentor, guide technology decisions, etc.) to show that you accept those expectations and will do your best to live up to them.
Well...it will all come out in the wash or the rinse. I'll be giving online courses in Swift and Bluetooth soon. I have to set up the presentations and curricula for them. I've been mentoring and training for decades; almost entirely for the open-source work I've done. I suspect that it may be a direction worth exploring.
I have been absolutely stunned at the virulence of the ageism. I guess that it's maybe a by-product of all the polarization that's going on.
Oh yeah, this has changed 180º in the last ten years. My experience in startups since, say, 2013, is that development teams are expected to be 90% self-managing. Managers spend their time doing recruiting and high-level meetings and spend maybe an hour or two a day trying to stay in touch with what their team is doing.
Confusion with the product team? Quality issue with a junior developer? Something gets postponed and you need to decide what to do next? Developers are expected to take care of this stuff amongst themselves. Managers get informed and maybe consulted, and of course have authority to intervene, but the traditional day-to-day responsibilities of management now belong to the senior members of the team. My recent managers have attended planning meetings with devs so they have an idea what their team is doing and are available to answer questions about priorities and help with tough calls, but they're happiest if the team handles everything without them so they can concentrate on big-picture work.
For someone like me who entered the industry twenty years ago, it feels like we're doing our manager's job for them, but it's the new normal.
Fast forward 2 years. Everybody now respects him. He's the most generally knowledgeable guy in the company, the CEO consults him. Moved to manage the new products. He's on the road to Director now. Still the same helpful guy with the reassuring voice and the insistence everybody in the room understand before moving on.
Ain't that the truth. Get us going and you'll have to beg us to stop.
I find people are much more immediately capable if I can get a 1-2 hour "nuts-to-bolts" meeting to cover the bases. Also gets the mojo going for good questions as well.
Because even if you know all the tech stacks we're using inside and out, which I don't believe, you still won't know our own local quirks. Everyone knows you don't know; don't be the last to that party.
On the other hand, this post comes off as almost a parody of self-improvement advice.
One day he blew up at me and said I had a TTL data book on the shelf and to quit wasting his time because I was lazy.
He was absolutely right! It's good to ask questions, but not before RTFM.
Yes, you want people to learn and become more self-sufficient over time, but not at the cost of finishing projects in double the time.
However, if they are a true manager, then they work on “interrupt,” anyway, and their quick answers may improve the performance of the team, which is really Job One for any manager.
I say this, having been a manager for many years.
It sucked. I hated it, which is why I am pivoting back into engineering.
I was a damn good manager, though. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see lots of testimonials from former employees.
One reason I was good, was because I kept myself out of the critical path.
They have a manual of corporate philosophy.
In there they explicitly advise, "never admit fault".
Which makes sense from a business, legalistic warfare perspective. $>truth after all.
Maybe our corporate philosophy is leaking into our common philosophy.
> In there they explicitly advise, "never admit fault".
It's interesting to compare that advice with the advice to healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations in the UK. Telling the truth when things go wrong, even if that means admitting fault, is the law. They must do it. They have to say what went wrong, how it went wrong, what they're going to do to fix it for you, and how they're going to prevent it happening to other people in future.
Here's some information from the CQC (the regulator of organisations) about Duty of Candour: https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Duty-of-Candour-2...
The GMC (doctors), NMC (nurses and midwives), and HCPC (allied health professionals) have similar advice aimed at healthcare staff.
This came about after the Mid Staffordshire scandal.
I put together a short list last year: https://medium.com/@dan.bealecocks/advice-to-doctors-about-s...
They have to look like they know everything otherwise they'll lose the respect of their colleagues and even their patients. Even something simple like a procedure checklist improves patient safety but people are resistant because it could be viewed as a sign of weakness. I know one professor who was openly mocked by patients in front of her staff because she brought reference books with her to the hospital. Since they usually make a lot of money, they are attractive targets for litigation. If they make a mistake, they could be personally sued for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Is it any wonder concepts like defensive medicine exist?
Don't know if there's any truth to it, but it sounds plausible.
So true. And people wonder why others don't apologize - we teach them to not apologize, because an apology is an admission of guilt and then we destroy them.
Shoutout to all the foreigners working in the US that don't say that know everything, are quiet in meetings when everyone is yelling out stupid ideas, regularly give up their design when a competing one gets promoted loudly, then never get promoted. Eventually you'll learn never to admit failure or ignorance and eventually start demanding who made the error.
Conversely my worst work has been done when i have bullshitted and now need to keep up the lie. Pro-tip - don't do this
Pro-tip-2 - confidence that you can do something you have not done before, when having a history of success in the field is not the same as bullshitting
Anyway it's hard to measure objectively- but you tend to reward the right people when you do.
And no, markets don't do that nearly as well as you might think
Markets depend on Good information To function well. Market participants can distort the information in the market for profit. In so far as this profiteering can be maintained, markets won’t function so well.
Some conjecture that might not be too far off the mark.
The term in organisational behaviour is "psychological safety" and it comes up probably in the first couple hours of your manager training at any competently run company in 2020. Hell, it's in Steven Covey's 7 Habits.
As you're saying, it's the bedrock of promoting actionable feedback and exceeding zero-sum behaviors.
Anyway, yes it's basic, it's taught - and it is almost non-existent especially when excrement hits the fan.
https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...
"psychological safety" is nr 1.
I immediately understood that this was a pointless exercise for me. I knew That I don't consider myself an expert. I haven't studied any topic long enough to call myself an expert. On the other hand, I like to believe that I don't fall in the "clueless" part either. I have worked in the computer industry form many years now and have overall pretty good problem-solving skills and am able to produce work that generates value for my employers.
Still, I learn every day and improve on my skill, but it will require a lot before I dare to call myself an expert. Others call me an expert, a wizard, and other nice things, but this is never anything I would use to describe myself.
I never got the job offer. Good riddance! I doubt I would have accepted the job anyway.
I used to ask candidates to rate themselves from 1-10, e.g., in database performance analysis, and often would get people rating themselves a 9 or a 10 without being able to articulate anything about the topic. It just seems very meaningless, since we were going to have a discussion anyway -- and the conversational part of the interview is more revealing, in any case.
And can be helpful when preparing for an interview (for the interviewer).
I find it surprising this didn't occur to the other commenters
There is a name for this, it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
-- Confucius
-On the wall of a classroom in my past -can’t remember where.
One reason is that I am not afraid to ask questions about why something is. I need to learn my subject "to the bone."
At the start of class, I'd always be asking questions that would have facepalms and guffaws around the room.
By the end of class, I'm helping everyone to figure the material out.
The best teachers I ever had were trained teachers; not subject matter experts.
The absolute worst teachers I ever had were subject experts. They would routinely skip important fundamentals, and shame you for not knowing them. I guess that they assumed we would be able to figure it out on our own; which isn't a bad idea.
Except when they don't give us the time or access to resources required to learn.
Mostly, first group were people who did not paid attention or were not used to think for themselves. Plenty of times it takes like 15 seconds to find the answer if you think about it. People who don't bother to think rarely start to be able to figure out on more difficult concepts by the end of the class. The dichotomy between people who ask simple questions and the ones who don't care is false one. There is massive group of people who think for themselves at least a bit when they come across issue.
"Senpai notice me" people tended to be orthogonal to quality of knowledge or willingness/ability to explain. Full disclosure, I asked these questions when the "participation" was necessary to get points. It is a bit stupid when you know answer, but still needs that participation point ...
None of that has anything to do with quality of lecturer.
I'm not very competitive. In American culture, that makes me a "reject," but I have always felt that I need to get by on my own merit; whether or not that compares favorably to anyone else.
People who know more than I do are not "competitors." They are resources.
The biggest issue that I have with people (and I am guilty of this, myself), is the tendency to ascribe motive to behavior.
In my case, I'm dead wrong -a lot- (See "on the spectrum," above). I've just learned that my projections of motive are usually wrong, so I have come to ignore them, and concentrate on the facts that are on the table (as opposed to in my head).
If I want to impress the teacher, I do good work. If I want to learn the topic, I ask questions to resolve gaps.
It really is that simple.
A class is just a transitory experience. If I fail to learn the subject matter because I'm afraid of what these people that I'll probably never see again think about me, I have no one to blame but myself.
2. Also, when someone asks if anyone has questions, and nobody has any questions, it can feel demoralizing and like nobody cared or understood what you were saying. Filling that space with an obvious question can be a small kindness. If you had a better question, maybe you should have asked it.
Disclaimer: I felt the exact same way as you when I attended university and have gained some perspective since.
"Kindness" seems to be in short supply, these days.
It really is depressing to see how many people take kindness for weakness. I'm seeing that demonstrated in this very article's comments.
One thing that I did learn in that corporation, was how to be an effective member of an effective team.
There is no culture on earth that comes close to the Japanese for effective teams. There's a ton of downsides to their culture (but I won't get into that); but their teams are incredibly tight and effective.
Being an effective member of a team requires far more than "hard" skills. It requires a lot of "soft" skills, and, in my experience, those lessons seem harder to learn.
One of the lessons that I learned, very early on, is that the person I denigrate now, may the one that I depend on to pull my ass from a fire, down the road.
At that time, they will remember whether I helped them, or tripped them up. To their credit, most of the Japanese that I know won't actually take that into account. If helping you helps the team, they will do it; regardless of how they feel about you.
That's actually kind of amazing, and rather humbling.
Why would you denigrate someone in the first place? Imo, the kind thing is not to denigrate anyone, including people that can not possibly be useful.
Exactly.
In fact, I have always found it advantageous to treat people "far down the ladder" with respect and kindness.
This has always worked out well for me. These people know everything.
In such case, nuance would be visible from answer.
I am not saying that every question is bad. But had experience of few individuals flooding lectures with too many such questions and it was not good experience. (They did it systematically, but lecturers eventually figured out to how to limit them - but it took multiple stalled lectures for that to happen. )
The (2) case is sort of nuanced, sure. I think there were sort of two cases of "dumb" question here: (2a) the person really just hasn't been paying attention and asked a question covered earlier in the same lecture, potentially even quite recently; if they didn't understand it, they should have asked when it was introduced, and if they weren't paying attention, they should've been. And (2b), remedial-type questions, which would be good in a class prior to the current one, but just demonstrate that the asker isn't ready for the course they're in.
These are bad questions for everyone else in lecture, who get to be distracted and sidelined from learning.
I didn't get the impression that anyone was throwing freebie questions to the professor to invite more questions from the tentative, but that's just my anecdotal experience.
What makes for good questions? I think good questions are timely and on-topic — relevant to recently discussed material. Save the questions about homework for after (or before) class, or office hours.
Yes, I know you don't know that, and yes, you're going to be confused if you don't remember how to diagonalize, but this is your 4th linalg question today, can you please review your linalg notes before next class? It's not just you but a whole class that's held up here.
"I know it's a much better decision to shut yo' mouth When you don't know what you talkin' 'bout Than to validate what everybody already thinks of you" -Hip hop
I'm there to learn.
If I don't understand a subject "to the bone," I am quite tenacious about finding out what makes it tick; even if that means bothering a content expert teacher with questions about fundamentals.
The results speak for themselves.
I also don't shame or humiliate others; even if they seem to be "intellectually lazy," or willfully ignorant. I get absolutely no benefit from that attitude.
None whatsoever. In fact, learning to shame and humiliate others makes me a pretty shoddy team member. No one wants to work with someone that will jump on their weak points and won't help them to fulfill their potential.
That remark shows a complete lack of understanding of your situation, your best interests, and social awareness.
In the very least, your role is to ensure your peers don't become a roadblock on your path to progress. The least you should aim for is to leverage your classmates as facilitators by helping you lower the difficulty curve.
By completely disregarding your classmates you are effectively doing the stupidest thing you could do, other than antagonizing both the student body and teachers: make your life harder just because you are totally oblivious to the importance of living in society
Plus, if you're wondering it, so is half the class. There was only a couple of occasions where it turned out I was on a very idiosyncratic path and decided to just let it go. Most of the time the class is nodding along at the question.
* mental laziness (didn't want to spend a few seconds thinking and just wanted to be handed the answer -- very commonly disguised as curiosity)
* bad faith (trolling, attempts at eliciting humor, "not really a question but a comment", agenda pushing)
It's very tiring to respond to stupid questions of this ilk -- it shifts the burden from the questioner to the respondent. It's not neutral, and having an environment of "no question is stupid" is draining -- psychologically, empathy is a finite resource like it or not. That's why there are so many guides on how to ask questions. (asking questions that elicit useful answers is actually a life skill!)
That said, I think the spirit of "no-stupid questions" is really about being open to (1) really out-of-left-field questions that challenge our thinking; (2) sincere questions that arise from curiosity; (3) clarification so that one doesn't persist in the wrong direction. I think this framing should be encouraged and environments/cultures should be cultivated to enable this.
But in my opinion "no stupid questions" as a catch-all is not practically tenable. The costs seem too one-sided.
I captured this concept in my first book with a phrase I call "profound ignorance". It's not just admitting you're ignorant, it's admitting you're probably ignorant about everything. And that's fine. Ignorant people don't know yet, and if they're curious, they go try to find out. Even when they do find out, they're still quite open to being wrong. They are, in fact, ignorant.
I found this had a profound impact in my programming and consulting career. Frankly, it's bad for your career and good for your life. People want to hire people that know a bunch of stuff, and to be open, honest, and curious about being profoundly ignorant is not reassuring. Other programmers many times want to play posturing games. It is, after all, part of our social programming. Ignorant people usually don't do so well in these games. But on a personal level? It was liberating. I could find whatever I wanted to and deep dive in it. Since I didn't know much of anything, I was able to talk about topics I have a ton of experience in without feeling like I had to attack or defend any pre-held opinions. It was, in fact, what I consider "growing up", both as a human and as a professional.
When we think of how much programming is skewed towards youth, we should keep in mind that most really young people have not had this growing up experience. We should wish them well and cut them a bit of slack if they're acting like we did when we were their age. After all, it's human.
Anyway, if you want to work in a genius-level field, you have to be motivated enough to find it on your own.
However if your friend didn't study, say, sth like the general theory of relativity then what I wrote might mean not much to him/her
My take was that you can be confident about the skills that you _do_ have, and honest about the skills you _don't_ have.
If you are already viewed as an alpha intellect in the group (or say you are viewed as one of the best software engineers in your company), then you have the luxury of being able to be modest and in fact expressing such modesty will even enhance your reputation among your peers.
If you are somewhat insecure about your abilities or if your reputation is unestablished or you are not particularly recognised, then admitting ignorance in front of your peers is unlikely to enhance your reputation or feeling of self-worth.
When I hear those at the top-of-the-hierarchy - whether in a management structure or in "technical ability" structure - being modest about their abilities or admitting ignorance, it often comes across as insincere to me.
My personal anecdote contrary to your point is my first programming interview. My answer to pretty much every question was "I don't know, but I'm excited to learn". I thought the interview went horribly, but I was offered the job. The owner who hired me (who ended up becoming a friend and we worked together at multiple companies), told me later that my confidence to say I didn't know something is what put me ahead of other candidates. Without knowing me well yet, he felt he would be able to trust me.
Then we would schedule their termination.
But there's something to the status thing, and I think he illustrates it: if you have any status or credibility at all, you also have the ability to set the tone.
And you probably should. The few managers and executives I've met with who can't take "I don't know" and "this was a mistake" in stride without losing their cool immediately start getting lied to and shielded from bad news.
For me - I had the exact same experience with topology as the author. I was taking a normal math class and in the middle of the normal class the professor started talking about topology. He got the whole class excited about topology to the point that we all enrolled in topology the next quarter.
Imagine our disappointment when we discovered our new topology professor did not love topology. He taught the class by rote. Topology is not a subject I could learn on my own. I dropped the class and sadly still wonder what I missed.
The lesson for me is that it is not enough to admit ignorance. You also need an enlightened guide and mentor.
It's usually a great benefit for me, for the same reasons the article describes. However the problem I've found is that--as an engineer--if you don't profess complete knowledge, there's a limit to how effective you can be in leadership. Engineers don't take you seriously, if you act as though you have any doubt in yourself. It's a wall I keep hitting and I've about decided I need to start feigning full-bore 10x brogrammer ego just to herd some cats.
As an engineer, me and my firsthand experience do not agree with this.
On the other hand, where I worked the entire team is involved and onboard with setting goals and prioritizing things that need to be done. We absolutely don't expect our manager to understand more than we do on our service.
There are larger issues in direction but for those I think all of our opinions are fairly similar - being engineers, we dislike complexity and like things maintainable and extendable.
We have a tendency to view people who change their views as "wishy-washy" and "flip-floppers", instead of respecting them for informing themselves and reevaluating their positions.
Edit: now the link works.
"in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few" - Shunryu Suzuki
But it only works because I consider my colleagues. If a random person does not undestand, I will react differently.
It is so hard for these people to just admit they don't know and have to ask someone or escalate the case.