Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest

I definitely agree with this article. I’m at the stage of my career where my primary limiting factor is my inability to tolerate situations where it’s clear co-workers aren’t pulling their weight, don’t have the same philosophy I have about a project, or when they disagree about how to implement a solution. And nothing makes me angrier than when the tech lead or director in charge is clueless, which happens more often than not.

Accepting that this is just the way things are is difficult the more emotionally invested you are in your technical work, if you happen to be on a non-technical or semi-technical team. I think this article is helpful for situations where either the pay compensates for bad work culture, or where you’re simply stuck on a team where maybe you are the “smartest” person in the room and it makes you hate your job. At least that’s how I’m interpreting it for my situation.

>Here in YC you can probably go full on with your tech/science knowledge/ideas/theories/whatever and people will judge you purely on your points made, and the people listening are in the same boat.

I would disagree with this, even here it is important to be kind. Too often I find the comments on a given thread are full of self importance or worse disdain for the "shortcomings" of the topic in question. Whether or not that disdain might be due to a wealth of knowledge and experience, it brings the general experience of being here down, and in my opinion lowers the quality of the site and the person doing the disdaining.

I'm not asking for fawning over every submission like it is a new revelation, but the adage that "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" springs to mind. HN is going to be full of people from differing experiences and walks of life. Tech is too big now for us to all be on the same page, or even within the same general age range. When someone drops a "Show HN" link to some hobby or passion project of theirs, and the comments are full of "experienced" people critiquing the project as if it were supposed to be a google scale web service or even as if it needed to be a viable commercial product – no matter how correct those assessments may be – that's damaging to our shared sense of community.

My own philosophy over time has been to only offer critique if it is also accompanied by my own efforts at providing what solutions I can directly (code, documentation whatever). If it bothers me enough to think I should say something, then it should bother me enough to also put in the effort to be/submit the change I want to see. Anything less is at best a piling on of cheap criticism ("cheap" in this case in the sense of "a dime a dozen"), and at worst unkindness for the sake of showing off knowledge. Absent something to contribute beyond criticism / critique, the goal I set for myself is either to engage with the subject and the creator on the assumption of earnest passion for the project, or if I'm disinterested for whatever reason, to not engage at all.

I definitely don't always succeed in this endeavor, but over the decades I've grown increasingly tired of the airs of cynicism that permeates the "smart" spaces I've been in. Be kind in all audiences, whether peers, betters or lay people and you will usually avoid being pretentious, confidently incorrect or condescending respectively. And those are 3 things I think we could do with less of in most communities.

Yep. You have to be. You can provide feedback to them or their manager if possible but the reality is that the employment status of your incompetent coworker is not under your control.

If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence? Because 100% fall in the latter category in my experience.

One of the problems with engineers counter-signalling engineering values (like actual technical competence) is that we live in a world where those values are extremely underrated while every manager, HR-bot etc. are already pushing values like kindness.

E.g. if you ever wonder why government doesn't work it's because they're absurdly skewed towards HR-values and opposed to engineering-values.

I’m guessing you work at a startup where you are nice 60% of the time? And I’m also guessing your coworkers actually give a shit about the job vs just trying to game the FAANG compensation algorithm?