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The "good engineers are right a lot" is true, but it feels bad to say. Why does it feel bad? Everyone wants to be right more often. All else equal, we'd like t
by habitue 2y ago
The "good engineers are right a lot" is true, but it feels bad to say.
Why does it feel bad? Everyone wants to be right more often. All else equal, we'd like the people we work with to be right more often than wrong.
Here are some statements that don't feel as bad to say for some reason (not endorsing these per se, just they dont feel bad to say):
- good engineers are pleasant to work with
- good engineers are practical
- good engineers know a lot about engineering
Here are some statements that start to feel weirder to me:
- good engineers have high IQs
- good engineers are uncompromising
- good engineers know that lisp is the best language
- good engineers are right a lot
Maybe it has something to do with the ratio of how easy it is to verify the property, with how hard it is to embody the property once you hear about it.
Having a high IQ is kinda hard to verify directly. If that was a widely known phrase, everyone would just claim they had the high IQ. Same with being right: you can just claim you're right a lot. Being uncompromising is easy, just don't compromise.
Being practical is hard to do, but maybe is easy to claim? Maybe it's easier to verify if someone is practical than if someone is smart. Not sure. Being pleasant tonwork woth is hard work maybe? Maybe there's just a social confluence bias.
- daymanstep 2y ago> Having a high IQ is kinda hard to verify directly. No it isn't. You literally just give them an IQ test. That costs at most 2 hours and maybe $150 at most. Ironically, having a high IQ is a much more easily verifiable claim than any of the other claims on your list ("pleasant to work with", "practical" etc)
- DanielHB 2y agoI worked in two companies who did IQ tests for hiring, the people in those companies were very knowledgeable engineers. Not necessarily good engineers, but they knew their shit. Being cracked at something doesn't make you a good engineer by itself, but it did skew the average up.
- JackSlateur 2y agoThe older you are, the more useless are IQ tests Because the whole thing of those tests is to test intelligence, not knowledge. And the older you are, the more knowledge you got. When I was like 7, I passed an IQ test. I did it again, for fun, at 30yo. I then noticed things that I now know: for instance, XOR (as in the boolean operation). When I did it at 7yo, I had to understand XOR. When I was 30yo, I had time to learn XOR. Doing IQ tests for adult is how you have people with 165 IQ everywhere. What a joke.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- golly_ned 2y agoThat is -- it's hard for one to directly verify the IQ of a peer besides submitting them to an IQ test, since we're trying to assess whether an engineering peer is good by means of some proxy.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoAll my IQ tests show results between a chair and a fly. The testers were horrified, and so I was. I am still wondering over all these years if this is the test or if this is me :)
- amai 2y ago> good engineers know that lisp is the best language Good engineers know that readability counts.
- antipaul 2y agoDon’t forget: Good design comes from good designers (Fred Brooks)