If You’re So Damn Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?

Unless you're debating esoterica of a specialized domain, the smartest people manage to communicate in a simple, effective manner(1). The person accused of using too many syllables, in contrast, tends to be someone who isn't actually terribly smart at all, and the compensation is a verbal find/replace of commonplace words with a cargo cult collection of "smart" words, because that's what they think smart people do.

When someone says "you're too smart", or "you sound too smart" or "try to dumb yourself down", most of the time they're not really saying that you're too smart. They're saying "can the act."

(1) - The best example of this, I think, was Richard Feynman. He never tried to sell the idea that he was smart -- anyone who needed to know that already knew it -- but instead managed to communicate the most incredible ideas clearly and effectively.

I mean, I think the difference is more in the person than in the job. At yahoo, if my brother wanted to, he would have been able to skate by doing almost no real work at all... but he didn't. well, part of that was me pushing him a little... if I get you a job I expect you not to embarrass me. But I think he would have done useful things anyhow.

In my experience, yeah, you aren't always expected to accomplish much... but if you decide to do something useful anyhow, people almost never go out of their way to stop you. (they might not help you... but they won't stop you if you don't require anything of them.)

I remember my first programming job was littered with finished projects that were never put into production because that would have been work. (I converted our access billing system from a shared-file db that was crashing once a week because 300 people accessed the file over a NT share at the same time to an ODBC connected database... never implemented because the parent company was going to replace it anyhow. We continued repairing the database for the rest of the year I worked there.)

But enough of the shit I wrote had enough of an 'immediate need' (customer impacting seemed to be the line) to get implemented that I was pretty happy with the job.

Actually, that job was /really satisfying/ because so much was so obviously broken that a few small fixes on my end (a three line patch to apache to make dynamically configured mass virtual hosting work with our weird naming scheme/directory layout, and a few lines of c to make our pop3 redirector use a real db rather than a seperate file for each of our three million emails to determine where to redirect the user) made some really dramatic improvements to the service. Yeah, that was really, really fun. Honestly, I'm not sure I've been quite as productive since.

Part of it might have been that nobody knew what to do with. I was hired up from tech support (god, I sucked at phone tech support) to the NOC, but the rest of the NOC were network guys and i was hired as a programmer. (Hah. that was a laugh. I had read the white book in high school, and I taught myself perl while I was on phone support at night.) and the boss was some leathery EE who was great fun at first, then it was switched out to a MBA who wanted to be my friend, but otherwise pretty much let me do what I wanted as long as I didn't piss off the ops guys.

Funny story, I found one of the ops guys who worked with me at that job many years later, after the .com crash... working in a deli, and I hired him.