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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

"Your average colleague is an idiot" is never an unpopular opinion among tech workers. "You are average," now that is unpopular opinion.

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> "Your average colleague is an idiot" is never an unpopular opinion among tech workers.

I actually don't hold that opinion because I think a lot of these people are actually pretty smart!

They just aren't oriented to be tech experts. They are really talented at some other thing in life, but ended up in tech chasing the salaries.

Yeah, that's something I've noticed. I've worked with a few people who were brilliant and really good at something, but that something wasn't writing software. Even the people who are frustratingly bad at their jobs have rarely made me think they're idiots. They're just not very good at the specific thing they're being paid to do.

My average colleague is smart. I work with a lot of very talented people.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

― George Carlin

That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho

Median is one type of average.

what do you mean?

In maths, averaging has multiple forms.

Mean (what most people call "averaging"), median, mode.

yes yes, suppose you have summed it up

Well, no variance in opinions it seems.

Wait just a moment here.

In a normal distribution, like lets say a large population, the mean, median, and mode are all equal. I don't see a problem with the quote.

The set of people who pass the hiring bar at companies like Google are not modelled as the normal distribution of the average person you come across in the grocery store.

Companies like Google are not known for hiring morons.

It is a self-aggrandizing dumb comparison, and should be dismissed as such. It reads as a desperate attempt to rationalize away these layoffs as something that only applies to others.

The quote from George Carlin, a comedian, is about the general population. The quote itself is from "Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" a special in 1990 and predates Google.

It is on you to prove that human intelligence does not follow a normal distribution, if you find that funny and incorrect.

I always point that out too. And someone always points out that with distributions average and median are the same. That still doesn't make it right. What's worse is it's a quote about intelligence, so you would think it would use the correct word. Maybe that's the joke, it's summer dumbed down and smug in the knowledge that everyone that hears it thinks "thank god I'm above average!"

You can absolutely use the word average to refer to the median when you are speaking in a non-academic context.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

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