The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
Well, the thing is, sometimes I don’t even believe me, despite the better part of two decades of experience.
Impostor syndrome kinda sucks.
But at the same time, I’ve come to be suspicious of any engineer who doesn’t have at least a dash of impostor syndrome. It’s always a good reflex to check your assumptions, imo.
Was chatting with my manager about this last week. A fabricator of mine gave me a bit of back talk about how I wanted them to build something. He asked me why I don’t just put my foot down. Told him that I never want to be in the position where someone knows that I am wrong but is afraid to say something to me. He agreed.
Being approachable is not win-win. You deal with people undermining you but hopefully one of them has a bright idea that makes it worth it.
What you’re describing feels like the Dunning–Kruger effect. When you don’t know you know very little, you have more confidence than you’re likely to have after spending decades on a subject.
When you start asking questions in response you’re likely to pull someone further into realizing what they actually don’t know, killing their confidence. Of course this doesn’t work when they’re being zealots (or otherwise protecting their own sanity)…
Heh, yeah. Spotting DK tendencies is also an important skill, especially when you get to the point where you’re screening candidates for your team. A surprising amount of people think they can just bull through an interview without going into real detail. I have caught more than a few people blatantly misrepresenting their resumes.
Don’t get me wrong - by all means, use a bit of spin to get shit past the HR idiots. When I, as a knowledgeable and experienced engineer, ask you a pointed question about something in particular, I won’t particularly mind if you straight up tell me that you spun that on the res a bit and point out the areas of the domain you’re stronger or weaker. Depending on the context, it might actually work in your favor, because I genuinely appreciate when someone tells me the limits of their knowledge. But if you try to bullshit me, and I catch you, that’s a black mark on your candidacy. And if you keep lying, or try that more than once, I’m going to quickly end the call and remove you from consideration.
I can cite an example for each of the above situations.
