Or maybe they’re just not that smart or have mental bandwidth? I’m surprised more people don’t acknowledge that a lot of engineers in a lot of companies probably have at best average IQ if not lower.
If so, I would be careful about coming to work thinking that many of my colleagues shouldn't have been hired. If that's actually the case, you're just in the wrong company and you should bail. Caveat: maybe you'll find your new colleagues lacking too, if you think that's widespread.
And if that's not the case, then you have to work with the colleagues that you have, regardless of how smart you think they are. And it's frustrating sometimes but only because you're thinking about the imaginary colleagues that you think you should have.
I can’t speak to what my IQ is, or whether I learn faster than others, but I can, at the very least, say that I’ve put effort into everything I know.
So when something needs to be built as a Vue.js component, or we need new build scripts in our local environment, or a SQL query is slow, I learn what I need to and I do it.
Everyone else just throws up their hands and says “welp, I don’t know JavaScript” or “I don’t understand this old SQL”, as though they were born with the knowledge they have and will never gain any more than that.
It is so great to finally have found other like minded people that you can just have an awesome discussion with on an equal enough level. Of course people still have differing opinions or knowledge about specific topics. We can have a heated discussion on what the best structure or naming is for something but you don't have to fight over whether naming is important in the first place and you don't constantly feel like you have to explain the basics on everything over and over, never getting anywhere.
The book The Unicorn Project shows how it is dysfunctional. Leaders tend to thrive doing nothing of value in such environments.
It's not uncommon to have utterly dysfunctional workplaces where the people are all very high in IQ (1), have premium academic credentials and stellar career trajectories. What matters, far more than raw intelligence, is people not behaving like assholes.
If people aren't reading and sharing beautifully prepared internal documentation, it's more likely to be about their perception of status about the author or lack of openness to new experience. A lot people are just incurious or are obsessed with their status. They tend to "punch downwards" and don't handle change well (or at all). This has little to do with IQ.
(1) We don't really know IQ do we? Unless it's measured we can only guess. When someone says that somebody has a high IQ, usually, it just means they perceive the person to be erudite or learned, acheivements, clothes, speech, vocabulary, appearance, credentials, titles-- all these things feed into that perception, but usually NEVER the score of a f-ing standard IQ test.
>have at best average IQ if not lower.
my reading of a lot is always more than 50%, which implies to me that more than half of the engineers at half of the companies have average IQ or lower - which seems unlikely.
on edit: unless of course we assume that development / engineering type careers attracted more people of average IQ or lower - but I think that will be a hard sell on HN.
So if I said there were a lot of homicides in NYC last year, you would think that over 4 million people were killed?
That depends. It's unlikely that they have at most the average IQ of the general population.
But if we assume that engineers as a group are smarter than the general population, it follows immediately that over half of them are below average among engineers. If you mostly work with engineers, that will probably look like "below average".
Well, depends a bit on the shape of the distribution, because of mean vs median. But you are right enough for most reasonable distributions.
That's what the word "most" is for. A lot only means something like "large amount", with no hint at how large. It could be more than half, it could also be 1% because that's still a lot of people.
So if you don't really have an easy to understand context I don't know if 1% would be considered a lot.
Let's imagine the HN conversation:
a lot of people love the fruitcake they receive for Christmas!
I checked Santa's bureau of statistics - only 1% love fruitcake - is that what you call a lot?!?
So I guess I agree a lot doesn't have to be more than half, but when I don't have an easy to identify context I read a lot as being most. Surely my mistake, but one I feel is hard to guard against.
So you say, why not plan for more time to do the task? Then the people who had 20% capacity for documentation etc. now have 40% capacity for that plus other things, and the same annoyance happens for the other things (e.g. unit testing, automation, etc.).
A good solution requires the company and the team to do the difficult thing and recognize and allow for the fact that different people spend different amounts of time on the same work.
Documentation is the required thing.
Developers should slow down. Knocking out features is not the be all and end all.