Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

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> Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much.

I never had a formal computer science education and I also tend to do that.I took enough Math, CS and Electrical Engineering courses to be utterly frightened by what I don't know. This means that I also over-estimate what other people know. Oh, Sally has a pure math degree from Harvard, let me be very careful talking about kernels around her. James studied Distributed Systems at MIT, I better over think my system design before I talk to him.

What I have realized is that, this anti-pattern comes in conflict with the opposite anti-pattern. The one that comes from people who hide their insecurities by being over-confident. The one that comes from people whose deepest fear is saying "I don't know". To them, a person who says that is a person who can't code. If you want to progress in your career, you will have to deal/learn to deal with such people. Being nice doesn't really help when the other person is a "Oh, you don't know X" dick. Especially if you are working in something that is a specialized domain where the other person doesn't have the expertise to evaluate you.

Oh, god I do these exact same things. Also don't have a formal computer science education (went with journalism). While I'm confident in my abilities and knowledge, I always hedge because I'm 99% sure that I can't be 100% sure on anything.

Trying to figure out the right balance between deference and confidence is hard

That is a very interesting anti-pattern, and I see it a lot in non engineering/tech companies (because I think people are insecure about the rapid technical changes they see about them). It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect [1].

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” - Bertrand Russel [1]

[1]http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-dunning-kruger-effect-w...

I don't want to get into the pattern of assuming that all people who are certain are stupid. :) Especially since my career involves working with enough people who are non tech but bring so much value to the table that I would be foolish to assume that.

However, another interesting side effect of Engineers who are so damn certain about The Right Way is Product Owners or higher ups who have been trained by such engineers are absolutely confused by a person who expresses uncertainty.

I have started learning the art of keeping the uncertainty to myself or a trusted set of people who are OK with uncertainty and project a calm, clear vision to those who don't.

I've noticed in management positions particularly since they're usually the ones that need to make sure the job is done but don't have the time to sit down with the engineers and figure out how/why it takes so long to work. Then there is the ego that everyone has to maintain some non-existent dominance amongst others..

There's a love hate relationship to this imo - it works if everyone has that same level of ego so it becomes a health level of competition, but this is rarely the case.

When I face an overconfident developer my learned response is to ask questions. If he has reason to be confident, I learn new things, if he doesn't he's outed. I win anyway.

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