About Smartness, or the appearance of…
In Hacker News this week I found two articles, right next to each other, that shared a theme. I’ll call this theme “I’m not as smart as I seem” or maybe “A crisis in confidence and I don’t care”.
The first article , “The Developer’s Dystopian Future”
caught my eye because the title suggested an end times scenario for all of humanity brought on by the technological house of cards that we’re building all around and under us at and at such an astonishing pace. This is one of my favorite themes as it resonates with my own lack of confidence in my ability to design and test as fast as I can build new information systems.
This article is actually more about how the author is doubting his ongoing role or even interest in the relentless march of technical skills and tools. He has spent decades in the web development lifecycle from design to deployment. His list of skill sets is broad by most standards but he is getting tired of the constant grind to stay on top of it all.
“My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles.”
And he readily admits what a lot of people think to themselves but won’t admit out loud (myself included), that the weight of technology is overwhelming our mental capacity to understand it all.
“Have you ever tried setting up something on AWS? There are a billion buttons and settings and new, invented words. I don’t understand. I have no clue how any of that stuff works.”
And he closes with…
“I’m scared that either the job “web developer” is outpacing me, or my skills are atrophying.Where will I be in 10 years? I don’t know. I hope I still will have some in-demand skills to pay the bills. “
Dystopian is probably accurate at a personal level. Maybe just committing it to written word was cathartic.
The worrisome part is that the web, for all it’s faults, is a mirror to society. And there is a certain amount of group think going on as we tend to seek out content that agrees with ourselves. Do I care? Am I worried? Not so much because I have designed a gradual obsolescence into my life. I know I can’t and don’t want to keep up with the lemmings on technology bluff. What the author needs is some financial planning and a hobby.
The second article, The Curse of Smart People
provides a more outward and cynical view of the mental capacity of the authors colleagues in the workforce.
His job puts him shoulder to shoulder with “some of the worlds smartest people” as proclaimed by the employer and themselves.
“Overall, very nearly everybody, across the board, surprises or impresses me with how smart they are.”
Smartness is a relative term. As they say in Lake Wobegon, “All the children are above average.”
His problem with this is that sometimes the smartness is actually a very clever rationale for their view of the world.
“Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. You can makedecisions based on whatever input you choose. “
This leads to
“It’s a setup that makes it very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team’s greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people’s capriciousness.”
Those few who don’t see the world in that lens are said to suffer from a lack of confidence called the “Impostor Syndrome” .
Yet the author believes that the Impostor Syndrome is actually a valuable tool to :
“an intuitive sense that around here, logic does not always agree with reality, and the obviously right solution does not lead to obviously happy customers, and it’s unsettling because maybe smartness isn’t enough, and maybe if we don’t feel like we know what we’re doing, it’s because we don’t.“
This is called clue train, being sensitive to subtle and not-so-subtle hints that you are somewhat delusory. He wraps up with:
“Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can’t hear that voice.
So, in conclusion…
Should we capitulate to the ongoing grind of knowledge acquisition and admit we as mortals, are not equipped to know it all as in the first article?
Or do we take our lack of confidence, our inner Impostor Syndrome, and use it to drive ourselves to a better, more realistic knowledge?
Different day, different answer.
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[…] is not the first time I’ve written about articles on this theme. (see an earlier blog post: “About Smartness, or the appearance of…”) . Yet another observation is that these authors, in all practical senses of the word, ARE […]