Not sure I agree. I've worked with a few "smartasses" in my time, and it can be a real pain. Some people are absolute masters of the technical details of a subj

Not sure I agree. I've worked with a few "smartasses" in my time, and it can be a real pain. Some people are absolute masters of the technical details of a subject, but fail to see the wider context. For example, you get developers optimising the hell out of a block of code - making it unmaintainable in the process - when the real bottleneck is developer time, not processor time. Or someone builds a giant vector autoregression model powered by MCMC when a rolling mean would have been adequate for the task. Build the simplest tool that will solve the task at hand is not a mantra that comes easily to some people.