[granularity]

Are the scare quotes around wisdom because you're embarrassed to admit that such a thing exists? ;)

Since it seems you've thought about it a bit, I'm interested to hear your definition of what is / isn't wisdom in an engineering context.

[ajkjk]

I was trying to mark the word wisdom as a designated 'term' instead of just the colloquial word. Sorta like how people sometimes write "$wisdom". I suppose single quotes would have worked better. I've never quite internalized the fact that some people parse double quotes as scare quotes, even though I've gotten that feedback from a couple people before...

I think of intelligence as all the stuff that is easy to say if it's 'right' or not, such as picking up knowledge, producing features, etc. Whereas wisdom is all the stuff that is harder to point at but is nevertheless valuable: making good decisions, intervening in things when it matters, fighting for things that are important, picking the better of two strategies without knowing the right answer, not getting bogged down in details, etc...

People who are intelligent but not as wise will do lots of "good" work but things will get worse over time. (Picture: large quantities of code that get things done but are a slog to read; giant architectures that feel work but feel unnecessarily complicated) People who are wise but not as intelligent will make things better over time, but make mistakes or be slow or struggle or be sloppy (Picture: small surgical changes that make everyone's lives better; making types of bugs impossible.) They also complain a lot if they feel disempowered to fix things. People who are intelligent and wise (and, I suppose, motivated) are the 10x engineers, the people that make something "amazing" instead of "fine".

Wisdom largely seems to require a combination of: (a) experience, so your intuitions are good, (b) confidence, such that you trust and give weight to your intuitions instead of doing what you're told, and (b) conviction, such that you care about doing a good job and will change things in order to do a better job, rather than trying to conform to norms around you.

It is very hard to apply wisdom to work if you can't see a reward that would come from caring more---it requires either a personal satisfaction from doing good work or a social reward from the people around you or some sort of long-term career benefits. Most places seem to go out of their way to avoid anything like those.