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Comment by halpert | Hacker News Reader

That’s the opposite of advice I’d give to someone. If you’re the smartest in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.

In understand you point, but what's your entry ticket to that room? Why would people who are so much more knowledgeable than you want to have you around?

If you read closely, the two statements doesn't even contradict. S(he) said that it's good that you are the best AT SOMETHING. You said, it's not good to be THE BEST.

Another piece of advice I’d give to a young person is that older people want protégés. Your ticket into the room is simply being smart, young, and impressionable.

> Why would people who are so much more knowledgeable than you want to have you around?

Because they have more work than they can handle and want you to fill in their shoes at some point in time. That is the basis of hiring junior developers.

Depends on what you want. If you are designing the next James Webb telescope, you are in the right place if you are the smartest in the room regarding one subject, like aligning mirrors, or testing the folding mechanism. It gives enormous responsibility, which you can and should share with others, but I don't see the downside here.

If you're starting with a new career, learning on the job, it's not good if you're the smartest in the room. Then you need to find a place where other people can teach you.

It can also be read as a ego-booster. If you know the most of all people about basketball at a birthday party, it's a cool thing to talk about.

I think the target audience of this type of advice should be young people beginning their careers. True domain experts likely don’t need advice like this. There does come a time when you reach your limit in terms of what you can learn. But young people hopefully haven’t reached that at the start of their careers.

That's a completely different idea from having a specialization where you are the go-to answer man.

I think the idea is to improve your learning speed by having experienced peers around you. If you only help less experienced people all day, i.e. 'you are the go-to answer man', before you are a true domain expert, that can hinder your career.

I don’t wanna be harsh but sounds like a shallow line of thinking. Can you expand?

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’ve likely surrounded yourself with people “worse” than you in some way. How can you grow in such an environment? You want to surround yourself with people smarter than you so that you can learn from them and grow. So if you’re the smartest person in the room, then you should go find a new room with smarter people. Unless you’re the smartest person on earth of course ;)

Because those people are probably much much better than you in other ways and maybe you want to improve yourself in those ways.

It's not as black/white as you're making it out to be. Reality is far more nuanced.

Do you spend all of your time in one room? Sorry, but I think you might be missing the spirit of the phrase above. Maybe one needs to have heard it "in context" the way I originally heard it to get the intended spirit of it? Dunno.

The idea isn't about surrounding yourself with people who are worse than you, just so you can say you are "the smartest person in the room". The idea is to focus on something and become so good at thing that you are -usually- the "smartest person in the room" on that particular topic. Which means this whole idea is only relevant to contexts that your thing is relevant. And to reiterate, this is more of an aspiration than something that's literally achievable. In reality, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, there will always be at least one person who knows more than you about thing. And that's OK. The point is about focus and the importance of putting in the work vis-a-vis your thing.

Usually you are in a room with different expertise and culture. How can you definitely say if you are the smartest or not?

What happens with classroom professors or surgeons in surgery rooms? Should they leave the room as well?

If you’re starting out your career as a surgeon, you really better hope you’re not the best surgeon in the room. People will die. Obviously there comes a point when you can’t grow any more and then it’s ok to be the smartest, but that’s hopefully after a long career filled with growth.

This advice is about having one specific thing for which you can say you're "the smartest person in the room". It's not about being the "smartest person in the room" in any general sense. So imagine aspiring to have something about which you are better informed / knowledgeable, even if you're in the same room with Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Nikola Tesla, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, Yann LeCun, and Grigori Perelman. Are you likely to be smarter than all (or any) of those people in general? Maybe not. Is there some specific niche which is "your niche" where you are more informed than all of them? Very possibly so.

What if my room is planet earth?

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