[hinkley]

There are worse outcomes than that. Software devs are clever people. Not all of us can be confrontational, and confrontation is not the only tool available to those who can.

If you as a boss find yourself to be very busy all of a sudden, it is likely because you have pissed off and alienated your reports by questioning and overriding their judgment too many times. Suddenly the team needs your “help” to make every decision, and every bad outcome of those decisions suddenly becomes a surprise to them.

They’re letting you choke to death on your own arrogance and control issues.

[ninetyninenine]

Software devs also all think they're smart and they talk that way and take pride in it. The reality is many software devs are dumb af.

[hinkley]

We are by and large hired for cleverness, so there’s a lot of selection that makes that true even if undergrads are not far off from average.

It would be better if we were hired for wisdom. Don’t confuse cleverness and foolishness. You can be both.

But devs aren’t usually the ones treating their reports like children and then acting surprised when their prophecies become self fulfilling. You can blame Taylor for that.

[marcosdumay]

> You can blame Taylor for that.

No, you can't. Taylor was a huge advocate for standardizing people's work so it could be studied and improved. He was also an advocate for well-studied people to go and teach workers how to do their jobs, and a not intense advocate for thinking ill of workers based on everything you can expect from a rich 19 century guy.

What he advocate a lot against was doing power games against workers or automatically dismissing everything they say.

[hinkley]

Standardizing people’s work turned them into automatons to be studied and improved by a management elite.

Which all came crashing down when Deming had to go to Japan to get people to listen to his ideas and triggered a massive recession in the US.

Deming and (to a lesser extent) Goldratt pull the employees back into the conversation. Tether are closest to the problem and even if they can’t solve it, they can help you shape the answer. Taylor was neofeudalism and he can rot.

[marcosdumay]

The one thing people are complaining upthread is not Taylor's fault. He actively fought against it.

The stuff you are complaining on the first line is. But also, Taylor was an advocate for listening what the workers had to say too. You can't really blame Taylorism on him, he invented only the mildest parts of it.

And that said, Deming advocated standardizing work too. You just can't run a factory without doing that.

[hinkley]

I can’t blame Taylorism on Taylor?

Collaboration is between peers. Taylor was top-down. That’s dictatorial, not collaboration. When you take collab out of the mix it’s a product manager and one dev and that’s a power imbalance.

[appreciatorBus]

Developers may be hired for cleverness, but cleverness in code and technical matters does not necessarily carry over into cleverness with respect to office politics or good management.

[InexSquirrel]

Hired for ultimately a fairly narrow field of expertise. But do need support in the sense of building the right thing, ensuring that thing aligns with business objectives, that constraints and requirements and customer needs have been communicated.

So in that light - either you give engineers the support they need (which can be quite a lot, more than I think most care to admit), or accept they're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. Probably technically correct and good, but still wrong.

[hinkley]

Management often spends less time with the users than we do.

[ninetyninenine]

Cleverness in code actually correlates with cleverness in social aspects. People come up with this artificial dichotomy of the awkward nerd with high iq but zero social skill but the reality is both of the two correlate slightly.

At the very least we know there isn’t an inverse correlation meaning the stereotype isn’t really true.

[ninetyninenine]

It’s not clever to brag about how smart you are or imply you and your entire cohort are smarter than other occupations. It’s a sign of how much you are the opposite of clever.

Additionally the average IQ of software developers is measured to be 110-113. That’s barely above one std of the average so you’re actually wrong. Software devs aren’t particularly clever but a disproportionate number likes to think they are smarter than normal.

So bragging about something that you’re completely wrong about… is that clever? No.

[ahdidhd]

While I mostly agree with your original post (egos in this field are huge), it’s hard to interpret that IQ stat without more data. Kinda low IQ to present it like that without additional info cause it’s impossible to really evaluate.

[ninetyninenine]

Only because while you don’t brag about it you truly do believe you’re smarter. It’s not even about acting humble. The ego is real because despite me saying software engineers have roughly above average intelligence you couldn’t take it.

https://brght.org/iq/study/software-engineering/

[tptacek]

I'll ask you too, given your 110-113 stat: when was the cross-sectional survey of IQ that would be required to generate this stat been done?

[tonyedgecombe]

Meanwhile the average IQ of computer science graduates is 130. Draw what conclusion you want from that.

[tptacek]

This stat seems far-fetched. When has a cross-sectional IQ survey of CS graduates ever been taken?

[ninetyninenine]

Did you deep dive into this? Given the amount of downvotes I have I’m sure you weren’t the only one if you did.

About 30 percent of developers have no degree. Which means… if the average graduate of CS is 130, how low does the average swe without it a degree have to be in order to bring it down to 110?

I mean I spelled out the math. Dear readers, Draw what conclusion you want from that while asking yourself: “Do I have a degree?”

I will say that iq varies heavily across schools as well.

[binary132]

“trust nobody, not even yourself” applies here for sure.