> significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being. ? You'll probably take offence to this, and I'm sure this will contradict your general ex

> significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being. ? You'll probably take offence to this, and I'm sure this will contradict your general experience, and will probably even set off some folks' pet pride narratives about themselves working in software...but I think that's bullshit. I don't think software people are smarter than any other profession on average, and I think almost anyone can learn to program and be employed in a software job. As someone who worked all of hospitality, hard science and software, I can say that all these folks that seem really smart, basically just seem that way because they use highly specialized technical knowledge. You can have pretty dull people who nevertheless are really smart at chemistry, or customer service or software, because they possess the specialized technical knowledge. I don't even think the average case is software people are smarter...but it definitely (again this will probably sound like I'm denigrating software people) seems like they think they are. Yet that attitude is not unique to software folks, I've known people who worked other things and: lawyers think they're smarter, accountants think they're smarter, business majors think they're smarter, hard science folks think they're smarter, etc... This probably will sound like I"m trying to denigrate software people, what I'm actually aiming to do is just to discredit the what I assume to be bullshit stereotype that (to seemingly overstate it): software is some sort of rarified intellectual pursuit confined only to some elite intelligentsia. In that sense, I think HN probably gives software a "bad name" in that sense by associating it with intellectualists, but even then truth belies that, as HN is diverse, it's not just software people. I hope people stop with the belief that people employed in software professions are a hyper-intelligent rare species, and are actually just regular folks possessed of essentially fairly narrow specialized technical knowledge. To finish on what will probably be the harshest statement you read today: I get if people like that mystique, but I think it's unnecessary, often compensatory, and just plain false. Happy to be wrong; guess it depends on how you define smart; lies, damned lies and statistics, etc; but that's what my gut says.