[alwa]

I don’t know—I work with tight teams of people who respect each other, but who don’t feel like we need to be the best at everything. We’re good at what we’re good at, and we suck at what we suck at. If an aspect of a task falls in the quadrant where we suck, maybe we decide to take the time to get good at it… but more likely we buy in commercial software or professional services to handle whatever it is.

I’ll caveat that I’m not sure what exactly OP was saying “suck” about: there’s a form of that that’s just an insult, and those are never helpful or appropriate.

But I and my team, for example, suck at writing and vetting kernel code, and at vetting every single package in the supply chain—so we’ll hire Red Hat or somebody. We suck more than we think we do at cryptography, so we’ll use a library rather than try and spin our own.

With respect to your alternate phrasing—when I say we suck at a thing (to our team who all communicate that way), I don’t think that means we need improvement and I don’t believe in our team to realistically wake up to be kernel hackers—they would agree—and I think that’s fine! Nobody wants us to be! Being honest and realistic about our self-appraisals helps us make better choices. As does routinely being appreciative and supportive of each other about things we don’t suck at.