culturally speaking, are you primarily a business person or primarily an Engineer? In Engineering that sort of self-deprecation is considered polite. False hu

culturally speaking, are you primarily a business person or primarily an Engineer? In Engineering that sort of self-deprecation is considered polite. False humility is /essential/ for Engineering types to get along without our massive egos causing unproductive fights. You quite often see "But I might be wrong" at the end or "Perhaps" at the beginning of very detailed, very correct mailing lists... it's just there to soften the "You are wrong" blow. Of course, this is quite different from the business world, where people seem to select for massive egos. It's interesting, really, how my world has changed as I've learned to fake confidence as well as I can fake humility. (of course, in both cases, I think everyone knows you are faking it, and nobody cares. It's sort of like wearing culturally appropriate clothing. investment bankers don't show up in T shirts, and coders don't show up in suits.) Really, this is one of the things I find most interesting about the hacker news crowd... so many are halfway between the worlds of Engineering and Business that you see these two diametrically opposed cultures mixing, sometimes producing something that is more useful than either one by itself.