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Comment by arkanciscan | Hacker News Reader

I've always readily admitted when I don't know something. Might be that I was raised in Arkansas, where ignorance is a little more acceptable.

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.

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> Engineers don't take you seriously, if you act as though you have any doubt in yourself

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.

I'm not talking about management, I'm talking about leadership. Do you have a tech lead on your team? If not how do technical decisions get made? Is it democratic (everyone votes) or more meritocratic (everyone argues their opinion and the strongest one wins). In my experience it's typically the later, and it's in that case that demonstrating a lack of confidence is likely to defeat your chances of leading the team in the direction you think it should go.

It is meritocratic, we don't technically have tech lead, but we do have seniority. However, the most senior engineer doesn't pretend/try to give the impression that he knows everything. Usually each person will have a portion of the project that he knows best and his opinions are the primary driver in that portion. Others give recommendations based on those opinion and not overriding them (normally).

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.

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