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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

> below-average IQ people.

> Any advice is appreciated.

Not shitting on your colleagues with this generation's phrenology would be a great start.

More generally, it sounds like you are starting with the idea that you're better and smarter than everyone you work with and only you can see the problems, as opposed to everyone you work with being (by and large) decent and hard working people who are making the best of a complicated situation. Learning about that situation, chesterton's fence etc, will be more productive that presuming everyone you work with is an idiot.

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This.

Wonder what this person's teammates might have to say about them?

"They just started and think they have all the answers without even considering there might be complex and higher-level reasons why a decision was made."

"This supposedly smart person joined our team and does not respect the strengths our diverse experiences and skills bring to make the sum of the team greater than it's parts."

"This person is a condescending jerk who treats everyone who disagrees with anything they say as inferior to them."

"This guy just joined and has no clue about what problems we deal with and the importance of write simple and maintainable code, and instead insists in throwing in half the GoF book in what should be a simple six-liner code change."

"To make matters worse he handles code reviews very poorly, complains about his abstractions being flagged as unacceptable while systematically failig to understand they are not needed and just worsen code quality and maintainability while really adding nothing in return."

"Ultimately he just shows he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of software engineering, specially the importance of making things as simple and as maintainable as possible, displays an unwillingness to learn and adapt, and when faced with any sort of criticism he shows poor attitude and professionalism such as accusing everyone around him of being dumb."

I don't necessarily agree with your point of view, but these two concepts were new and interesting to me. Posting their meanings for others that haven't heard of them either:

> Phrenology

Pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.

The study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character.

> Chesterton's fence

Principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

>> Phrenology

> Pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.

Funny story (for us who live a century later):

I heard Norwegian phrenologists traveled around Norway to measure Norwegian skulls and how it related to personal traits and their conclusions were that there were broadly two kinds of Norwegians:

- "long-skulls" in the eastern part: these were friendly, generous, open-minded and intelligent.

- "short-skulls" on the western coast: these were dumb, stingy and distrustful

Wonder were those researchers came from ;-)

This. I mean you tell me that you just only joined a FAANG...I don't know how you've come to the conclusion that "your team has below-average".

Everyone needs to be mindful of Chesterstons fence when marching in with a strong sense of confidence with little knowledge of history.

I didn't know it, so here goes:

"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

Very reasonable.

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