[mseebach]

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it.

And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

[stephenhuey]

I'm sure loads of amazing projects throughout history have been pulled off with great assistance from amazingly competent people who were hesitant about their abilities. It'd be interesting to find out if more teams are successful with arrogant or humble people. Perhaps you're just more likely to hear about the successes of arrogant people thanks to their loud trumpeting about themselves.

[pekk]

What a pile of bullying bullshit. If someone is skilled, they are skilled completely apart from whether they are constantly advertising themselves and putting other people down as worse than them.

[rhizome]

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time?

Think of it this way: someone who is concerned with not doing the wrong thing is going to be more sure that what they do come up with is the right thing, that they aren't reinventing the wheel badly.

[sliverstorm]

Yes, but someone who is paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing is never going to invent the wheel, forget about whether or not it has actually been invented yet.

[rhizome]

It seems a little extreme to jump to "paralyzed by fear." I mean, the person got the job in the first place.