I've definitely met these people and have learned to avoid them. But is this website (and avoidance in general) the right way to deal with this class of people?
We're smarter than them. We ought to be able to extract some use from them.
We're smarter than them. We ought to be able to extract some use from them.
I met a guy who I've now nicknamed as "Ideas and Problems guy" when I talk about him. (It's a little more polite-- so I'm not bad mouthing his name, since our community is not that big.) I think that just by talking to him I provided value to him--- I was a cynical sounding board for his ideas. I never wrote a line of code for him, but being a sounding board probably helped him. Oh well, TANSTAAFL reigns.
Who are the pretentious ones again?
That quote or attitude came from a mentor I had at an internship. He noticed that I was annoyed at people who I thought were stupider than me-- so he told me that:
"If you think you're the smarter one, then the onus is on you to have a smooth business relationship with them. You're the more capable one, so it's within your power to do business with these clients despite their shortcomings."
The great thing about this attitude is that it works even if you aren't smarter than them. If anything, this quote can encourage pretentiousness to turn on itself.