Help, I'm Too Smart For My Job | Hacker News Reader

Help, I'm Too Smart For My Job

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65 pointskenshiro_o29 comments

Not sure who said this first, but the classic quote is "If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room."

If you're the big fish in a small pond you're not only missing out on learning from others, and creating impressive things, but ingrained cynicism and having an over-inflated sense of worth are also risks.

Fortunately having an unchallenging job can provide lots of time and energy for research and side projects that can lead to jumping into more interesting work.

I couldn't agree with you more. I actually said this at my last job interview when asked why I was leaving. I've learned more in the last 6 months being surrounded by much smarter people than the 6 years of being "the smart one".

I won't lie though, the ego-hit of being "the dumb one" when surrounded by truly brilliant people is hard - 100% worth it - but hard.

That's why I believe one should always try to minimize his ego and embrace the kind of humility a curious kid has.

I know that I am good at what I do but I keep being curious and waiting to be told "You're wrong. this is the better way of doing it". That's definitely worth multiple cuts to your ego.

"If you're the big fish in a small pond you're not only missing out on learning from others, and creating impressive things, but ingrained cynicism and having an over-inflated sense of worth are also risks."

Absolutely true.

"Fortunately having an unchallenging job can provide lots of time and energy for research and side projects that can lead to jumping into more interesting work."

You know, in theory this is true. In practice, I've been in this situation a couple of times in my career. And it sucked. Hard. It was soul crushing. It was depressing. I found myself emotionally drained at the end of every day. I would complete my work in a short timespan every morning, then somehow end up mindlessly cruising Facebook (or whatever passed for Facebook back then) throughout the day. My latent productivity plummeted in direct correlation to my plummeting mental engagement.

Maybe I'm an unusual case. But oddly enough, I find a boring, trivial, meaningless job almost more draining than a challenging and extremely fast-paced one. In the latter, at least I am revved up, and thus I have energy for side projects on the weekends.

The other side of the coin is even worse actually, I have been in plenty of positions where you are the only human who can do most of the work, and the others just form a queue in front of your desk.

That is a sign that either your employer needs more qualified people or you need another job.

It is a sign that you are a knowledge hoarder, happy that others are dependant on you. There is a lot of job security in that I guess. If you want to do yourself and others a favour, instead of giving your fellow co-workers fish, teach them to fish. Maybe you could learn something satisfying from them.

I knew I would get a response like this as soon as I posted my comment. And to clarify, I dont mean to have me explain things, but to have me do things that they themselves could "never do!".

I completely get where you are coming from though, hah!

I think the dread of going in to yet another mind crushingly boring day of work also contributes to that. Just the thought that tomorrow is going to be exactly the same hanging over you all the time can be draining.

> "Fortunately having an unchallenging job can provide lots of time and energy for research and side projects that can lead to jumping into more interesting work."

That's not always true.

It only works if the job is both easy and coming at a low enough pace that you can do it in a couple of hours and forget about it.

However, when the amount of work itself is overwhelming and the job is unchallenging, it works out the other way: it sweeps all your energy and leaves you burnt out at the end of the day. You get home and all you want to do is drink a couple of beers and watch a TV series until you're sleepy enough that you can go to bed and fall asleep, getting just enough sleep to be ready for more bullshit the next day.

> However, when the amount of work itself is overwhelming and the job is unchallenging, it works out the other way: it sweeps all your energy and leaves you burnt out at the end of the day. You get home and all you want to do is drink a couple of beers and watch a TV series until you're sleepy enough that you can go to bed and fall asleep, getting just enough sleep to be ready for more bullshit the next day."

I'm on some twisted variant of that where I'm stuck trying to sift through a backlog of tutorials or Algorithm review so I can still be considered remotely competent enough to apply elsewhere, finding myself staying up 'til 1, sometimes 2AM, only to wake up the next day to repeat the cycle. Only reason I haven't 'rocked the boat' yet with my supervisor is because it's a fairly high-profile project, but definitely starting to apply elsewhere if they ignore my request to switch from backend to front-end after this. Glad to know I'm not the only one.

>You know, in theory this is true. In practice, I've been in this situation a couple of times in my career. And it sucked. Hard. It was soul crushing. It was depressing.

I'm in a similar boat. Not as bad as your experience sounds, but I would definitely consider it an unchallenging job that leaves me feeling more stressed than anything. I have lots of ideas I want to pursue in my free time, but I know that if I get involved in a project it will make time go by quicker and I'll just have to be back at work sooner. Everything I do in my off time is designed to make it feel as long as possible. I haven't read a book in months. Sometimes I don't even want to watch TV because it's too entertaining.

God damn that's depressing to write down.

You should read that book. Seriously. If you don't have fun at your job, and you're not having fun away from your job something needs to change. It's easier to have fun in the latter situation versus changing your job. Good luck my friend.

Which book?

I don't know, I saw that you said you haven't read a book in months - I thought maybe you had one in mind.

If not, I recommend "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. It's not a taxing or immensely intellectual read, but it's a great adventure story with very interesting and suspenseful parts. It's a lot of fun to read and definitely won't feel like work - it'll feel like play.

> "If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room."

Corollary: every non-empty room has at least one person that is wrongly there.

That's only a corollary if there is a clear ordering in the room. For many rooms I would imagine the ordering is fuzzy and you don't know for sure if you are the smartest person there. This would happen if everyone is roughly the same caliber, in which case the room is fine and nobody should leave!

I took a job after the dot com bust where I knew at the interview they were not a high-quality team, but I felt like I had no choice. I took the job and was told after a year there and at age 25 that my tech skills were "the finished product" which was high praise, but just made me sad. I was by far their best programmer but only because the rest of the team were nearly worthless.

An HR article with broad emotional appeal! It's like opening a fortune cookie and reading, "You are destined for great things."

Of course we're all too smart for our jobs!

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I can't tell whether or not this is an advertisement.

The sentence: "You can start getting your Human-Voiced Resume™ together now and be in a new job by Halloween" sounds like an advertisement.

It also bothers me that the title is 'HELP! Im too smart for my job', when it isn't actually someone asking for help.

Maybe the story inside is true, and Drew is real. It's well written. But I don't know what to make of a story like this if I can't tell whether its true or not.

I stopped reading when I realised it was an ad for snake oil, but lots of people feel like Drew at work. And they are all justified, even when working together. Drew IS the smartest guy at his job, when it comes to the things he cares about. The trick is, most of his co-workers are also smarter than everyone else, when it comes to the things they care about and specialise in.

People come to me at work all the time frustrated about something. "Sometimes I am the only one who has any idea about X and is actively trying to push it at this company". And they are right. When it comes to X, they are far too clever for the company. But when it comes to Y and Z they are just like everyone else, except for the guy that really gives a shit about Y and knows its the most important thing the company should be concentrating on, and the guy that really gives a shit about Z and knows that its the most important thing the company should be focussing on.

We are all in our own little bubbles and have trouble considering that fact that maybe we aren't so smart after all. We just need to start seeing things from other peoples perspectives. Maybe X, Y AND Z are important so why not recognise how clever other people actually are work together. Those people that can manage to realise that they aren't in fact the only one who cares, and get past their egos and manage to work with others and connect all those important things are the true people who are clever enough to work anywhere.

Edit: So yeah, this smart clever things isn't really such a black and white dichotomy. Pretty much all of us are clever at some thing, yet utterly stupid at most things, that is just how things are. That is why we need to work together to get anything done.

> There's almost no focus on anything that could have impact outside a tiny circle of bureaucrats. It's a shame, not to mention frustrating."

> "Well, I get to be the rabble-rouser, which is frustrating at times but satisfying at others," said Drew.

I worked in government/academia (big public U) for a long time. This is pretty much why I left. I agree to an extent that there's some value in the "If you're not the smartest person in the room..." quote, but there's something to be said for it. At least every person on my team at the BigU had the ability to drive change.

In a more startup-like culture with obvious rockstars, it feels like only the rockstars get to drive the change and the rest are supposed to follow along even when they don't agree. It's something that managers should sit on, but they often don't, and it leads to monocultures of thought that aren't necessarily the best for the business.

I'm not even sure this is "too smart" for your job, this feels a lot more like "too driven" or maybe more accurately a willingness to stay complacent. If you give any value to the personality tests that exist something like 60%+ of all Americans have a stable personality, one that is happy with what is happening now and doesn't want to rock the boat. This is normal, and to me what this article is really calling out is that if you're not one of those people, don't become one just because it's what you think is stable.

Disregarding the marketing bits, a good story.

But there are a lot of actually good reasons to stay in an easy (ie. stupid) job if it's a temporary situation with an exit in sight. Specifically, when bootstrapping/moonlighting a startup you have no energy left for an overly intense day job. So stick with the crappy job until it's time to take your passion full time.

So I'd suggest a modification to the old maxim: If you're the smartest person in the room, either leave the room or start to build a new one.

Ideally any group will have good intellectual variety (not an attempt to be PC. I mean that the group is composed of uniquely smart individuals in their field in a complementary way). My question is what is the role of the "smartest" person in the room? Obviously a group won't survive if the smartest person is always moving on. Assuming there is always 1 "smartest" person, this is an inherently unstable system. Eventually all groups will be composed of one individual who is both the smartest and dumbest member of the group.

The way I see it, the smart people can both:

- Satisfy their intellectual curiosity individually through their work or in personal extracurricular activities

- Establish a mentoring relationship with the rest of the group

Regarding the second option, I believe this is a healthy group dynamic. It raises the groups average IQ or expertise, and training / mentoring others helps to solidify your own understanding of a subject. Perhaps in time the mentee will get to the point where they can challenge and expand the mentor's own understanding.

I'm not sure there has to be just one "smartest person in the room"; people have different fields of expertise, so it's almost always possible to learn something from someone. You can be a mentor in one thing and a student in another if the room has a sufficiently diverse group of people.

The immediate and poisonous issue is not being recognized or rewarded. Typically you're better off by moving on sooner rather than later, becuase it's unlikely you're going to stanch the organizational entropy, no matter that you're carrying the rest of the department to verifiably higher levels of success.

OR, maybe you're not as smart and valuable as you believe, and you're better off if you STFU and produce.

Prove it, build a startup.

Not everyone is well suited to building a start up.

Indeed - nor is every startup worth building. I know here the cult of the startup is well celebrated but it's a bit of an echo chamber just like out there.

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