6 ms·

Dunning-Kruger

79 points by tylermenezes 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
codex 14y ago
I'd like to coin a new effect, "Pop Psych Geek Blogger Effect", which describes the tendency of bloggers to write about pop psychology, which is catnip to geeks, and the tendency of these posts to be upvoted.
paranoiacblack 14y ago
Maybe the reason why the community clings to imposter syndrome is so they can focus on getting interesting work done instead of writing self-important blog posts.
jere 14y ago
I think you may be missing the point here. I'm sure you are a great engineer. And Impostor Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger are definitely phenomena you need to know. But the vicious response probably comes from a concern that is completely orthogonal to how good you are: Humility. People expect you to be humble. Even if you were the cleverest hacker on Earth, readers are not going to take kindly to you giving yourself kudos, even if it is something as small as being a "great engineer." I know hubris is one of great virtues of programmers, but I would contend that humility is a great virtue of writers. It's why self deprecation is so common in writing and comedy. You poke fun at yourself to make the audience feel more comfortable. Do the opposite (call yourself great) and you may be triggering impostor syndrome for your readers. Secondly, saying that Facebook is in the wrong because you are awesome.... well, that reminds me of another social norm: "The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault" I won't elaborate any further. I think Atwood has this one covered: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/the-first-rule-of-programming-its-always-your-fault.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/the-first-rule-of-p... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/why-im-the-best-programmer-in-the-world.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/why-im-the-best-pro... By the way, I want to say that Zuckerberg's claim in the code.org video that Facebook's strategy is to literally hire as many talented engineers as possible is bullshit. Obviously, that's not their strategy.
- xmlblog 14y ago
  I agree with your point, though I'd phrase it more along the lines of humility being an endearing quality (less emphasis on people's expectations). The word "great" was likely what turned most people off. A whole slew of other adjectives would have been a lot less grating: competent, good, capable, or even accomplished to name a few. Even better would have been to write the post about somebody else. I also don't doubt that Godwin's Law kicked in after too long in the responses he might have gotten. And while I'm glad he seems to have overcome his self-esteem issue and doesn't let the negativity of others get him down, I can't help but observe that Internet can be a rough place if you're looking for catharsis.
- readme 14y ago
  Why would someone want to be humble? Lets look at the definition: hum·ble /ˈhəmbəl/ Adjective Having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance. When you're telling someone to be humble, what you're really doing is saying "You're not important, and I want you to know that." To even say that requires some pretension on your own behalf. People should not have a "low estimate" of their own importance. They should have an accurate one, and it's their business to come up with it. Not anyone else's.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    That is one definition of 'humble'. Another is > not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful. And another is > courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong. Both of which seem, IMHO, to be more relevant to the thread than the definition you provide.
    - readme 14y ago
      You are correct to list those other definitions. I still think people who tell someone to be humble are pretentious.
    - josephlord 14y ago
      > courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong. Maybe it is because I'm English but does anyone say that when they are really being humble? I would assume sugar coating at best and dripping sarcasm at worst. Admittedly it isn't as bad as "with all due respect" followed by something indicating how little respect is considered due.
cpt1138 14y ago
https://twitter.com/mariofusco/status/47988950903693312 https://twitter.com/mariofusco/status/47988950903693312
nasalgoat 14y ago
Get over yourself.
gopalv 14y ago
Humility only works internally. Believing you can do anything often leads you find out it's only partly true. But believing you can't do anything is often true all the time. I blame my parents for misleading me there, but they meant well & it only took a decade to for me to find out. http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/arrogance-of-essence http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/arrogance-of-essence
danso 14y ago
I missed the HN discussion that inspired the OP to write this. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278389 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278389 > I’m not really surprised at the extent of that response, either, but it is disappointing. I avoided the comments on Hacker News, which tend to attack the simplest parts of an article, to avoid getting into stupid arguments. Hmm...I guess if he did read that HN thread, he would've seen that most of the comments sympathized with him about puzzles. But I guess a great engineer can just instinctively pre-judge things and be right without double checking.
- alexanderh 14y ago
  Yea I was surprised to see this response. I totally sympathized with him. I totally glossed over the part where he was boastful. I think the response he got, and responded too, had more to do with the article being more popular than he's ever delt with before, then it did with anything he specifically said. Its the internet, when you reach a wide audience, haters are indeed going to hate. You just have to ignore it.
groby_b 14y ago
Arrogance doesn't make you a bad programmer. It, in general, makes you a person that others don't like to be around. And if you want to get hired by a large company, likability is part of the package. Not because it's a popularity contest, but because those other people there will need to spend 8 hours every week day with you. I know your story - I've not been exactly popular in HS either. I did not excel at quite a few thing. Like you, for a while I thought I could gain more confidence by loudly proclaiming my superiority when I actually was better at things than my peers. All that creates is resentment. The best piece of advice I ever got - and it might well be meaningless to you, but let me share anyways - was that "Actions speak louder than words". Go forth, do great stuff. Help other people achieve greatness. Be judicious when you do and don't mention your achievements. (I'm not saying to never toot your horn, but do it by choice, to make a salient point). And never, ever, call yourself "great". There are few truly greats in any profession. Aspire to be one. You'll know you're there once others refer to you by that label.
- j_baker 14y ago
  I personally say that if someone wants to refer to themselves as a great programmer, and they have at least some reason to believe that, they should find people to work with who are willing to put up with their arrogance. Everyone has a vice. Is a bit of arrogance really that big a deal?
  - groby_b 14y ago
    Yes. Because soliciting constructive criticism is a rather important part of being a good engineer, and arrogance will get in the way of that. And of course, working with somebody who rejects constructive criticism but loves doling it out (a characteristic quite commonly associated with arrogance) is plain annoying. So nobody wants to.
    - j_baker 14y ago
      Nobody wants to? I don't believe that. I would believe that you don't want to, which is fine. But why must you state that in such moralistic and absolute terms?
DanBC 14y ago
He makes a reasonable point about undue hostility in online communities. That other thread? The article did come across as a little bit arrogant. Not the fun charismatic arrogant either, just arrogant. Still, this article puts that in context. And threads about puzzle questions are always weird. You get one camp saying it's not about the answers, it's about the process of answering. When you see a sequence of numbers it's not about whether you happened to see that sequence on Wikipedia last month (and still remember it), but whether you can describe your process of trying to see how it's made. You then get another camp who just can't seem to understand that the answers don't matter; who say that puzzles test for people who are lucky enough to have seen the puzzle before and don't test for good programmers. (Puzzles probably don't test for good programming, but they're not meant to.)
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Dunning & Kruger (1999) [1] studies individuals' perceived and actual performances in humour, grammar, and logic. It observed that the gap between expectation and reality was inversely predicted by competence. The authors conclude that "people tend to hold overly favourable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains". C'est tout. The implied mis-interpretation of Dunning & Kruger, that inability and confidence are correlated, is as commonplace as it is untrue. The Dunning & Kruger cohort which estimated its humour at the top quartile did perform in the top-quartile. And the cohort which estimated its humour in the bottom quartile did, too, perform the worst. It's just that the top quartile estimated itself at 75 when it came out at 90 while the bottom estimated itself at 60 when it performed at 10. We are good at relative evaluation. What we suck at is pinning that to an absolute scale. "Several of my teachers [said] I’d gotten far too arrogant...this caused me to once again return to my previous mode of thinking. I wasn't actually a good programmer." One can be a good programmer and arrogant. The former refers to technical competence. The latter to social competence. [1] http://www.psoriasissociety.ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20Effect.pdf http://www.psoriasissociety.ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20E...
- neeson 14y ago
  Thank you. The unintentional irony of people who've completely misinterpreted a very short, accessible paper and then try to use it to make fun of other people's intelligence...
  - haberman 14y ago
    If only I had a quarter for every time I've seen the "Dunning-Krueger effect" Wikipedia page linked in an embarrassingly self-serving and condescending way. It makes me cringe every time. If you feel like cringing a lot, check out: https://www.google.com/search?q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDunning%25E2%2580%2593Kruger_effect https://www.google.com/search?q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikiped...
SethMurphy 14y ago
Proclaiming a judgment of yourself is always tricky. It's like coming up with your own "good" nickname because you don't want a bad one. If you are great fine, but remember there are always greater, and always make sure to continue to strive to be better. Don't worry about self proclamation it just gets in your way, let others proclaim it for you.
lrivers 14y ago
I think most hiring practices are seriously broken. I love the approach Heineken took in this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ftu3NbivE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ftu3NbivE
georgemcbay 14y ago
I missed the original "Facebook Lost a Great Engineer" post until now. I agree with a lot of what was said in both posts, I think puzzles are generally a bad way to hire and they get especially dangerous the more senior an engineer is (the longer they are out of school or out of the initial learning phase if they are self-taught, the more such questions are detached from day to day development and thus you're only testing if the developer has been practicing to interview lately, not whether he or she will be an effective developer). However, this statement from the "Great Engineer" post struck me the wrong way: "I would fire any developer who chose to re-implement standard library functions." That's a terribly absolute stance to take -- consider, for example the widely-discussed fast inverse square root: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root That was a re-implementation of a standard function (rsqrt), but for a very good reason (speed was more important than accuracy for the use case). While that specific trick is mostly obsolete in development today, if you're pushing the envelope even a little bit with your code, it isn't that rare to run into a situation in which it makes sense to side step the standard library implementation of something. tl; dr - Developers (at least non-Sith ones) should never deal in absolutes.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Is there a Sith developer blog? It would fit with Fred Brook's pilot-copilot/operating room organization.
calhoun137 14y ago
Confidence is a funny thing: you can't succeed if you don't have it, and you can't have it if you don't succeed. In poker, a game which I am not unfamiliar with, it's well understood that having confidence, even apparent arrogance, is a significant strategic factor which can dramatically improve a players results. The example of poker is relevant as an analogy both for getting through an interview, and getting money from an investor; both activities involve a similar degree of imperfect information. Having confidence helps prevent you from making bad decisions or constantly second guessing yourself when you experience significant variance, it intimidates your opponents and causes them to make mistakes which work to your advantage, and it can drive you to push yourself harder to learn and improve than you would if you didn't think it was possible to succeed.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  Staying calm and rational is an important psychological factor on poker. Confidwnce is not very relevant.
  - calhoun137 14y ago
    http://www.pokerlistings.com/poker-strategy/the-pros-of-confidence http://www.pokerlistings.com/poker-strategy/the-pros-of-conf... http://www.learn2holdem.com/poker-strategy/confidence-in-online-poker.htm http://www.learn2holdem.com/poker-strategy/confidence-in-onl... http://www.poker1.com/archives/14247/mike-caro-poker-word-is-confidence http://www.poker1.com/archives/14247/mike-caro-poker-word-is...
rbkillea 14y ago
I have to stop reading these medium.com articles. They are making me deeply saddened, are sapping away my time and energy in minute quantities, and are probably decreasing my peak intelligence/output.
smoyer 14y ago
I hope I wasn't one of those your felt put you down ... and I think if we were sitting across the table, we'd probably reach an agreement on what we thought about your skills. I think today's article is an argument for being honest with yourself about your skill level. I'm never going break a 3 hour marathon, but that's not why I run. On the other hand, the paragraph "When I graduated high school, I was an okay programmer. Last year, I was a good programmer. After a lot of work, I’m a great programmer, or at least pretty close to it. I don’t think I’ll ever become an amazing programmer or any other superlative; I’m not that talented." came so close. What I'm interested in hearing from any candidate is what follows that thought ... "Tomorrow I'll be better than today".
OGC 14y ago
So this guy basically told me he's great anyway. Despite external feedback telling him to turn down his arrogance. And ending with "haters gonna hate" (+ oscar wilde pic). Jerk moar HN.
ricardobeat 14y ago
TL;DR yes, I reaffirm I am a great programmer, everyone else has imposter syndrome, but I don't. haters gonna hate. "Great" programmer or not, both posts are pointless and this attitude will not do him any favors. Overcoming the underdog mentality is good, but being so self-centered is at the other end of the spectrum. ar.ro.gan.ce offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride; proud contempt of others
amadeus 14y ago
Why is this petty shit on the front page? Who gives a fuck?

79 points by tylermenezes 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

codex 14y ago

I'd like to coin a new effect, "Pop Psych Geek Blogger Effect", which describes the tendency of bloggers to write about pop psychology, which is catnip to geeks, and the tendency of these posts to be upvoted.

paranoiacblack 14y ago

Maybe the reason why the community clings to imposter syndrome is so they can focus on getting interesting work done instead of writing self-important blog posts.

jere 14y ago

I think you may be missing the point here. I'm sure you are a great engineer. And Impostor Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger are definitely phenomena you need to know. But the vicious response probably comes from a concern that is completely orthogonal to how good you are: Humility. People expect you to be humble. Even if you were the cleverest hacker on Earth, readers are not going to take kindly to you giving yourself kudos, even if it is something as small as being a "great engineer." I know hubris is one of great virtues of programmers, but I would contend that humility is a great virtue of writers. It's why self deprecation is so common in writing and comedy. You poke fun at yourself to make the audience feel more comfortable. Do the opposite (call yourself great) and you may be triggering impostor syndrome for your readers. Secondly, saying that Facebook is in the wrong because you are awesome.... well, that reminds me of another social norm: "The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault" I won't elaborate any further. I think Atwood has this one covered: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/the-first-rule-of-programming-its-always-your-fault.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/the-first-rule-of-p... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/why-im-the-best-programmer-in-the-world.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/why-im-the-best-pro... By the way, I want to say that Zuckerberg's claim in the code.org video that Facebook's strategy is to literally hire as many talented engineers as possible is bullshit. Obviously, that's not their strategy.

xmlblog 14y ago
I agree with your point, though I'd phrase it more along the lines of humility being an endearing quality (less emphasis on people's expectations). The word "great" was likely what turned most people off. A whole slew of other adjectives would have been a lot less grating: competent, good, capable, or even accomplished to name a few. Even better would have been to write the post about somebody else. I also don't doubt that Godwin's Law kicked in after too long in the responses he might have gotten. And while I'm glad he seems to have overcome his self-esteem issue and doesn't let the negativity of others get him down, I can't help but observe that Internet can be a rough place if you're looking for catharsis.
readme 14y ago
Why would someone want to be humble? Lets look at the definition: hum·ble /ˈhəmbəl/ Adjective Having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance. When you're telling someone to be humble, what you're really doing is saying "You're not important, and I want you to know that." To even say that requires some pretension on your own behalf. People should not have a "low estimate" of their own importance. They should have an accurate one, and it's their business to come up with it. Not anyone else's.
- DanBC 14y ago
  That is one definition of 'humble'. Another is > not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful. And another is > courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong. Both of which seem, IMHO, to be more relevant to the thread than the definition you provide.
  - readme 14y ago
    You are correct to list those other definitions. I still think people who tell someone to be humble are pretentious.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    > courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong. Maybe it is because I'm English but does anyone say that when they are really being humble? I would assume sugar coating at best and dripping sarcasm at worst. Admittedly it isn't as bad as "with all due respect" followed by something indicating how little respect is considered due.

cpt1138 14y ago

https://twitter.com/mariofusco/status/47988950903693312 https://twitter.com/mariofusco/status/47988950903693312

nasalgoat 14y ago

Get over yourself.

gopalv 14y ago

Humility only works internally. Believing you can do anything often leads you find out it's only partly true. But believing you can't do anything is often true all the time. I blame my parents for misleading me there, but they meant well & it only took a decade to for me to find out. http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/arrogance-of-essence http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/arrogance-of-essence

danso 14y ago

I missed the HN discussion that inspired the OP to write this. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278389 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278389 > I’m not really surprised at the extent of that response, either, but it is disappointing. I avoided the comments on Hacker News, which tend to attack the simplest parts of an article, to avoid getting into stupid arguments. Hmm...I guess if he did read that HN thread, he would've seen that most of the comments sympathized with him about puzzles. But I guess a great engineer can just instinctively pre-judge things and be right without double checking.

alexanderh 14y ago
Yea I was surprised to see this response. I totally sympathized with him. I totally glossed over the part where he was boastful. I think the response he got, and responded too, had more to do with the article being more popular than he's ever delt with before, then it did with anything he specifically said. Its the internet, when you reach a wide audience, haters are indeed going to hate. You just have to ignore it.

groby_b 14y ago

Arrogance doesn't make you a bad programmer. It, in general, makes you a person that others don't like to be around. And if you want to get hired by a large company, likability is part of the package. Not because it's a popularity contest, but because those other people there will need to spend 8 hours every week day with you. I know your story - I've not been exactly popular in HS either. I did not excel at quite a few thing. Like you, for a while I thought I could gain more confidence by loudly proclaiming my superiority when I actually was better at things than my peers. All that creates is resentment. The best piece of advice I ever got - and it might well be meaningless to you, but let me share anyways - was that "Actions speak louder than words". Go forth, do great stuff. Help other people achieve greatness. Be judicious when you do and don't mention your achievements. (I'm not saying to never toot your horn, but do it by choice, to make a salient point). And never, ever, call yourself "great". There are few truly greats in any profession. Aspire to be one. You'll know you're there once others refer to you by that label.

j_baker 14y ago
I personally say that if someone wants to refer to themselves as a great programmer, and they have at least some reason to believe that, they should find people to work with who are willing to put up with their arrogance. Everyone has a vice. Is a bit of arrogance really that big a deal?
- groby_b 14y ago
  Yes. Because soliciting constructive criticism is a rather important part of being a good engineer, and arrogance will get in the way of that. And of course, working with somebody who rejects constructive criticism but loves doling it out (a characteristic quite commonly associated with arrogance) is plain annoying. So nobody wants to.
  - j_baker 14y ago
    Nobody wants to? I don't believe that. I would believe that you don't want to, which is fine. But why must you state that in such moralistic and absolute terms?

DanBC 14y ago

He makes a reasonable point about undue hostility in online communities. That other thread? The article did come across as a little bit arrogant. Not the fun charismatic arrogant either, just arrogant. Still, this article puts that in context. And threads about puzzle questions are always weird. You get one camp saying it's not about the answers, it's about the process of answering. When you see a sequence of numbers it's not about whether you happened to see that sequence on Wikipedia last month (and still remember it), but whether you can describe your process of trying to see how it's made. You then get another camp who just can't seem to understand that the answers don't matter; who say that puzzles test for people who are lucky enough to have seen the puzzle before and don't test for good programmers. (Puzzles probably don't test for good programming, but they're not meant to.)

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Dunning & Kruger (1999) [1] studies individuals' perceived and actual performances in humour, grammar, and logic. It observed that the gap between expectation and reality was inversely predicted by competence. The authors conclude that "people tend to hold overly favourable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains". C'est tout. The implied mis-interpretation of Dunning & Kruger, that inability and confidence are correlated, is as commonplace as it is untrue. The Dunning & Kruger cohort which estimated its humour at the top quartile did perform in the top-quartile. And the cohort which estimated its humour in the bottom quartile did, too, perform the worst. It's just that the top quartile estimated itself at 75 when it came out at 90 while the bottom estimated itself at 60 when it performed at 10. We are good at relative evaluation. What we suck at is pinning that to an absolute scale. "Several of my teachers [said] I’d gotten far too arrogant...this caused me to once again return to my previous mode of thinking. I wasn't actually a good programmer." One can be a good programmer and arrogant. The former refers to technical competence. The latter to social competence. [1] http://www.psoriasissociety.ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20Effect.pdf http://www.psoriasissociety.ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20E...

neeson 14y ago
Thank you. The unintentional irony of people who've completely misinterpreted a very short, accessible paper and then try to use it to make fun of other people's intelligence...
- haberman 14y ago
  If only I had a quarter for every time I've seen the "Dunning-Krueger effect" Wikipedia page linked in an embarrassingly self-serving and condescending way. It makes me cringe every time. If you feel like cringing a lot, check out: https://www.google.com/search?q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDunning%25E2%2580%2593Kruger_effect https://www.google.com/search?q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikiped...

SethMurphy 14y ago

Proclaiming a judgment of yourself is always tricky. It's like coming up with your own "good" nickname because you don't want a bad one. If you are great fine, but remember there are always greater, and always make sure to continue to strive to be better. Don't worry about self proclamation it just gets in your way, let others proclaim it for you.

lrivers 14y ago

I think most hiring practices are seriously broken. I love the approach Heineken took in this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ftu3NbivE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ftu3NbivE

georgemcbay 14y ago

I missed the original "Facebook Lost a Great Engineer" post until now. I agree with a lot of what was said in both posts, I think puzzles are generally a bad way to hire and they get especially dangerous the more senior an engineer is (the longer they are out of school or out of the initial learning phase if they are self-taught, the more such questions are detached from day to day development and thus you're only testing if the developer has been practicing to interview lately, not whether he or she will be an effective developer). However, this statement from the "Great Engineer" post struck me the wrong way: "I would fire any developer who chose to re-implement standard library functions." That's a terribly absolute stance to take -- consider, for example the widely-discussed fast inverse square root: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root That was a re-implementation of a standard function (rsqrt), but for a very good reason (speed was more important than accuracy for the use case). While that specific trick is mostly obsolete in development today, if you're pushing the envelope even a little bit with your code, it isn't that rare to run into a situation in which it makes sense to side step the standard library implementation of something. tl; dr - Developers (at least non-Sith ones) should never deal in absolutes.

stcredzero 14y ago
Is there a Sith developer blog? It would fit with Fred Brook's pilot-copilot/operating room organization.

calhoun137 14y ago

Confidence is a funny thing: you can't succeed if you don't have it, and you can't have it if you don't succeed. In poker, a game which I am not unfamiliar with, it's well understood that having confidence, even apparent arrogance, is a significant strategic factor which can dramatically improve a players results. The example of poker is relevant as an analogy both for getting through an interview, and getting money from an investor; both activities involve a similar degree of imperfect information. Having confidence helps prevent you from making bad decisions or constantly second guessing yourself when you experience significant variance, it intimidates your opponents and causes them to make mistakes which work to your advantage, and it can drive you to push yourself harder to learn and improve than you would if you didn't think it was possible to succeed.

RivieraKid 14y ago
Staying calm and rational is an important psychological factor on poker. Confidwnce is not very relevant.
- calhoun137 14y ago
  http://www.pokerlistings.com/poker-strategy/the-pros-of-confidence http://www.pokerlistings.com/poker-strategy/the-pros-of-conf... http://www.learn2holdem.com/poker-strategy/confidence-in-online-poker.htm http://www.learn2holdem.com/poker-strategy/confidence-in-onl... http://www.poker1.com/archives/14247/mike-caro-poker-word-is-confidence http://www.poker1.com/archives/14247/mike-caro-poker-word-is...

rbkillea 14y ago

I have to stop reading these medium.com articles. They are making me deeply saddened, are sapping away my time and energy in minute quantities, and are probably decreasing my peak intelligence/output.

smoyer 14y ago

I hope I wasn't one of those your felt put you down ... and I think if we were sitting across the table, we'd probably reach an agreement on what we thought about your skills. I think today's article is an argument for being honest with yourself about your skill level. I'm never going break a 3 hour marathon, but that's not why I run. On the other hand, the paragraph "When I graduated high school, I was an okay programmer. Last year, I was a good programmer. After a lot of work, I’m a great programmer, or at least pretty close to it. I don’t think I’ll ever become an amazing programmer or any other superlative; I’m not that talented." came so close. What I'm interested in hearing from any candidate is what follows that thought ... "Tomorrow I'll be better than today".

OGC 14y ago

So this guy basically told me he's great anyway. Despite external feedback telling him to turn down his arrogance. And ending with "haters gonna hate" (+ oscar wilde pic). Jerk moar HN.

ricardobeat 14y ago

TL;DR yes, I reaffirm I am a great programmer, everyone else has imposter syndrome, but I don't. haters gonna hate. "Great" programmer or not, both posts are pointless and this attitude will not do him any favors. Overcoming the underdog mentality is good, but being so self-centered is at the other end of the spectrum. ar.ro.gan.ce offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride; proud contempt of others

amadeus 14y ago

Why is this petty shit on the front page? Who gives a fuck?