[throwaway0asd]

> As others have noted, part of the problem here is that the engineers in question are actually not yet smart enough.

That is highly subjective and purely a result of both perspective and bias. While you can point fingers to say that someone is not yet smart enough they are likely pointing a finger back at you and claiming the same.

The only solution for something like Dunning-Kruger is humility. The only solution to find the best solution (objectively) to any criteria is by comparing measurements. The actual problem is that almost nobody measures things, because the effort is too great. Instead most people will compensate for their lack of measures with a hearty dose of confidence.

There are people who sell confidence for a living, such as salesmen and pundits. That is highly appealing to people who lack the necessary critical nature to ask the right questions or apply the smallest amount of doubt.

[yowlingcat]

Hard disagree. Perhaps "not smart enough" is too strong a statement but "not capable enough" is certainly correct. Spend enough time in this industry and you'll find plenty of folks who can work well in a vacuum but cannot actually be strong both independently and working in a group setting. The latter has a lot of concrete details attached to it which has nothing to do with either perspective or bias. Ironically, you're applying an accusation of "perspective and bias" with a very sloppy brush of perspective and bias.

[throwaway0asd]

> Spend enough time in this industry…

I have 20 years in this industry. It’s full of stupid people pointing fingers somewhere else. Any time this is pointed out developers play the special snowflake game and pretend that software is something special or unique, but it isn’t. Everything is measurable just like any other industry.

[yowlingcat]

What have you accomplished in your 20 years in the industry, out of curiosity?

[throwaway0asd]

I have written the fastest network transmission implementation for Node.js and made the front page of HN (under a different account) for creating an original diff algorithm among various other things. While I was doing that I was also holding a part time job in middle management in an unrelated industry. This original software wasn’t written by whining and blaming people for my sadness.

[chrchang523]

Note that my advice, if followed, has the effect of giving the OP's engineers more space to develop efficient implementations than they would probably get if OP acts on their instincts.

This is not a coincidence. If you look at my own public work at e.g. https://github.com/chrchang/plink-ng/tree/master/2.0/ and https://github.com/grailbio/base/tree/master/simd , you can see that I play the role of the "not yet smart enough" engineer, not the manager.