I kept this one intentional as a thesis statement, but the concrete examples live in the companion pieces — like a bug that took 7 years to find because I kept assuming my mental model was right (https://agilitza.com/blog/the-7-year-bug-that-took-3-minutes...).
That one's the humility and persistence lesson in action.
From a pure tech perspective the article is correct.
But the problem with this approach is that in real life the majority of people are not like this. Many people are vastly overconfident and arrogant in their skills, I've had encounters with very good developers who simple refused to even hear an alternative solution or who did not do the most basic stuff to verify certain things before starting implementing them even though someone who had tons of experience in a certain niche compared to him told him to.
So a truly great engineer also needs to be arrogant/assertive/loud as that is the only way to fight other arrogant people. The "quiet confident" engineers opinion will be overruled by loud incomptent engineers.
I did have this situation several times in the past. One thing that has worked well for me is to be a bit of a stubborn mofo in challenging people with arguments and not let go so easily.
I don't think you need to be arrogant, but you do need to know how to argue rationally. At least this works quite well with germanic-origin folks, maybe not so well in other contexts.
Another thing that helps is reputation, you do need to build that and that allows your arguments to be heard. No need really to be arrogant and loud IMO still.
This reputation thing, also brings other problems, because it's not good when people don't challenge you, then you need to find skeptics. This is very necessary when you do high end stuff.
Arrogance in my view is bluster with no substance.
If you have true substance.. you have earned the right to operate in a certain kind of way to the extent that your word can be trusted more than others.
No, i think character traits like _excessive_ arrogance/humility are a marker of something different from the norm. If often means that the person is an outlier (in +ve i.e. "better" or -ve i.e. "worse" directions) from the mediocre mean. So in many cases it can indicate an higher intelligence/ability/expertise particularly in the hard sciences. The caveat is that many mediocre charlatans often manipulate this for their own benefit/ego and social status.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadI kept this one intentional as a thesis statement, but the concrete examples live in the companion pieces — like a bug that took 7 years to find because I kept assuming my mental model was right (https://agilitza.com/blog/the-7-year-bug-that-took-3-minutes...).
That one's the humility and persistence lesson in action.
But the problem with this approach is that in real life the majority of people are not like this. Many people are vastly overconfident and arrogant in their skills, I've had encounters with very good developers who simple refused to even hear an alternative solution or who did not do the most basic stuff to verify certain things before starting implementing them even though someone who had tons of experience in a certain niche compared to him told him to.
So a truly great engineer also needs to be arrogant/assertive/loud as that is the only way to fight other arrogant people. The "quiet confident" engineers opinion will be overruled by loud incomptent engineers.
I don't think you need to be arrogant, but you do need to know how to argue rationally. At least this works quite well with germanic-origin folks, maybe not so well in other contexts.
Another thing that helps is reputation, you do need to build that and that allows your arguments to be heard. No need really to be arrogant and loud IMO still.
This reputation thing, also brings other problems, because it's not good when people don't challenge you, then you need to find skeptics. This is very necessary when you do high end stuff.
I would not call Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford humble...
This article is AI generated sentimental clickbait.
If you have true substance.. you have earned the right to operate in a certain kind of way to the extent that your word can be trusted more than others.
Why is this so difficult to understand? lol
Foundations of Arrogance: A Broad Survey and Framework for Research - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8101990/
Evidence for arrogance: On the relative importance of expertise, outcome, and manner - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5500344/