6 ms·
Smart and stupid are not opposites. In fact, they happily co-exist in the same brain. Thinking that you can avoid stupid people by only hiring smart people is
by beat 11y ago
Smart and stupid are not opposites. In fact, they happily co-exist in the same brain.
Thinking that you can avoid stupid people by only hiring smart people is naive, and misses this basic truth.
- jheriko 11y agothis is a beautiful observation, and very true imo.
- damoncali 11y agoThink about the thing you like most about someone. Think about the things you dislike the most about that same person. 9 out of 10 times, it's the same thing. Same goes for strengths and weaknesses.
- beat 11y agoNot necessarily the same thing, but often interdependent. Like "great sense of humor" and "unable to take anything seriously"... not really the same thing, but often interdependent.
- e12e 11y agoMaybe your idea of "great sense of humour" is off, if you can't see how "great sense of humour" is connected to being able to take everything seriously.
- damoncali 11y agoDon't take it so literally. The point is that the personality traits that give us our strengths and good characteristics are very often the source of our weaknesses and bad characteristics. Take a look around at the people you know well - I bet it's almost always the case.
- ionforce 11y agoTo further emphasize your point, there are skill lines. Someone could be smart at X but stupid at Y. So unless you're trying to hire someone that's A-level at everything...
- elihu 11y agoIt is also to some extent the product of the environment, not just an intrinsic property of the employee. I think in the long run, creating an environment that encourages dumb programmers to become smart programmers is as important as hiring the right people to begin with.
- thirdtruck 11y agoIt's absolutely essential. Every new programmer's going to start off as "stupid" in the context of a company's unique selling proposition.
- Xcelerate 11y agoYeah, but there's also correlations. If someone is "stupid" in one area, they are much more likely to be "stupid" in another area as well. It's not a guarantee, but it's highly probable. Success in one area typically correlates with success in many other areas as well. Otherwise we wouldn't have polymaths. There are people who are among the best in the world in fields that are completely independent.
- _delirium 11y agoPolymaths exist, but are not the norm. I've more often run across the opposite, where people who are good in one area are not good at all in another. For example many people who are very good programmers are very poor salespeople, and vice-versa, which is one reason you don't have your sales team and your programming team be the same. Good programmers and good documentation writers are often not the same people either. At least among my colleagues, I definitely have a sense that I should ask A for some things, and B for others.
- beat 11y agoSuccess breeds success, yes. And some people are truly more talented than others, yes. But it still leaves tremendous gaps for the stupid to occur. Consider the recent story about how Elon Musk (arguably the most brilliant polymath of our era) chewed out an employee for missing a work function attend the birth of his child. That's appallingly stupid. That's pure blindness to instinct, cultural values, and compassion. There you go. Elon Musk, fscking idiot. More generally, a lot of people with brilliant technical skills have lousy social skills - social failings that can drag a team's effectiveness down as much as a technical idiot can.
- jfarmer 11y agoAnd more than that, I'd say. People who are truly brilliant in one area can often get away with being absolutely, irredeemably stupid in another because nothing in their environment ever forces them to deal with their stupidity. A brilliant engineer can have an amazing, world-changing technical career without ever realizing that he'd be 10x more effective with better social and leadership skills. Whether one sees that truth about themselves has much more to do with their personality and temperament than it does with their intelligence or expertise (IMO).
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIntelligence is like four wheel drive. It just gets you stuck in deeper mud.
- CodeMage 11y agoWhy are we so keen on redefining words? I'm genuinely curious about this. Is it political correctness? If not, what is it? "Stupid" is pretty much defined as the opposite of "smart". You might be thinking of "unwise" or "ignorant" or "inexperienced". Or maybe you're thinking of "untalented" or "incompetent". None of those are "stupid" and their opposites aren't "smart". For example, I'm good at programming, I have a good ear for music and I absolutely suck at drawing. None of that necessarily makes me smart or stupid. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure people wouldn't call me "stupid at drawing". "Smart" and "stupid" are measures of a characteristic, just like "tall" and "short".
- sliverstorm 11y agoYou've never met someone with a stunningly sharp technical mind, but the social intelligence of a gnat?
- CodeMage 11y agoPlenty of times. Heck, I used to be a lot closer to that end of the spectrum than I am now. That's how I know that there are plenty of words to describe that, because I've been called a number of them ;)
- Cookingboy 11y agoI have, and I'd call that person smart. He could be unobservant, insensitive, socially awkward and all nine yards but he's still smart.
- sliverstorm 11y agoColloquially that person would probably be called smart, but their (social) actions might be described as stupid. A smart person can be prone to doing stupid things.
- irishcoffee 11y agoA smart person can do stupid things, and a stupid person can do smart things. This does not disprove GP's point. Rather, you seem to agree.
- woah 11y agoYou could be stupid because you spent months developing an in house framework instead of shipping, and smart because you developed a framework.
- beat 11y agoThe coolest, most technically challenging code I ever worked on was sheer idiocy that added immense risk to the business. It was back in the dotcom days. If one of my own employees proposed the same kind of thing today, I'd threaten semi-seriously to fire them on the spot, and I'd flatly prohibit them from wasting man-months of effort on something we could buy off the shelf. Then again, management paying no attention to what the engineers were doing was pretty stupid, too.
- kabdib 11y ago> Smart and stupid are not opposites. In fact, they happily co-exist in the same brain. Definitely. I've worked with people I refer to as "blithering geniuses". Like the guy who could write memory managers for OSes and so forth, but who would not only miss his own exit on the freeway, but suggest that we do crazy shit like switch C++ compilers two weeks before shipping (there was some feature he wanted out of another vendor's toolchain . . . hoo boy). It's worthwhile knowing what your blind spots are, and where you are stupid.
- Retra 11y agoI don't know why you think missing exits is in any way indicative of someone's intelligence. I've missed plenty of exits, and let me inform you of something: it's not a big deal. Like, at all. You know what stupid is? It's focusing on things that are not a big deal.
- npizzolato 11y agoIt's indicative of not paying attention to your surroundings, which, when you're piloting a 4000 lb hunk of metal, could be considered a stupid thing to do.
- hyperpape 11y agoYou're rationalizing. My wife misses exits constantly, but she does it safely--she's paying attention to the cars around her, but following a habitual route to some other place.
- beat 11y agoMany of the smartest people I know are constantly focusing on things that are not a big deal. Selective attention is a danger of high intelligence.
- d23 11y agoIt's kind of a key component of navigating oneself to a place.