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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

If people at google are so smart why can't google.com get a 100% lighthouse score?

I have met a lot of people at Google, they have some really good engineers and mediocre ones. But mostl importantly they are just normal engineers dealing normal office politics.

I don't like how the grand parent mystifies this. This problem is just normal engineering. Any good engineer could learn how to do it.

Because most smart people are not generalists. My first boss was really smart and managed to found a university institute in computer science. The 3 other professors he hired were, ahem, strange choices. We 28 year old assistents could only shake our heads. After fighting a couple of years with his own hires the founder left in frustration to found another institution.

One of my colleagues was only 25, really smart in his field and became a professor less than 10 years later. But he was incredibly naive in everyday chores. Buying groceries or filing taxes resulted in major screw-ups regularly

I have met those supersmart specialists but in my experience there are also a lot of smart people who are more generalists.

The real answer is likely internal company politics and priorities. Google certainly has people with the technical skills to solve it but do they care and if they care can they allocate those skilled people to the task?

My observation is that in general smart generalists are smarter than smart specialists. I work at Google, and it’s just that these generalists folks are extremely fast learners. They can cover breadth and depth of an arbitrary topic in a matter of 15 minutes, just enough to solve a problem at hand.

It’s quite intimidating how fast they can break down difficult concepts into first principles. I’ve witnessed this first hand and it’s beyond intimidating. Makes you wondering what you’re doing at this company… That being said, the caliber of folks I’m talking about is quite rare, like top 10% of top 1% teams at Google.

That is my experience too. It sometimes seem the supersmart generalists are people whose strongest skill is learning.

Pro-tip they're just not. A lot of tech nerds really like to think they're a genius with all the answers ("why don't they just do XX"), but some eventually learn that the world is not so black and white.

The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to smart people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self estimates.

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