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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Confidence and overt vulnerability are opposites.

No one is going to be impressed if you burst into tears during a code review. They're going to be a lot more impressed if you bullshit your way through with positivity and can-do.

This is irrespective of the quality of the code.

This culture rewards overt displays of competitive individualism and punishes weakness irrespective of actual productivity, value, or objective performance.

Generally, being confident gets you breaks, even if you're astonishingly incompetent or just plain manipulative and dishonest.

Sometimes there's pushback from the surrounding culture before something goes horribly wrong - but just as often there isn't.

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They're not! Confidence and unregulated overt vulnerability are conflicting (but not precisely opposite).

By acknowledging the possibility that you may have done something wrong, you make yourself vulnerable to judgment, and by doing so confidently you gain respect. Facing judgment is a sign of confidence and it requires making yourself vulnerable.

In a more subtle example, showing signs of vulnerability in personal relations is a way of letting others know you, and that takes courage. There'd be no point to having social interactions if you were invulnerable, any interaction would literally be inconsequential for you and thus unmotivated.

You "dress up" the vulnerability with a higher level strength (e.g. the capacity to listen to and analyze your own shortcomings), and then it's all good.

There's a difference between being vulnerable, and putting yourself in a situation that will hurt you. It's fine to show yourself vulnerable if you can do so in a way that incentives good behavior from your peers.

>> Generally, being confident gets you breaks, even if you're astonishingly incompetent or just plain manipulative and dishonest.

It gets you breaks until you reach the line which people don't want you to cross (which you will eventually cross due to your ever-inflating ego). At which point everyone you know will silently isolate you and you'll not even be able to realise what happened in time (again, due to your overly-inflated ego).

I had seen that happen. People who are full of shit always have a glass ceiling, since they are even more useless than people who are willing to directly do bad to other people (at least those are more-or-less clear in terms of the direction they take).

That glass ceiling limit seems to be at the CEO level, in the case of Elizabeth Holmes and other various "confident phonies" that get posted here on HN every few weeks. So, there doesn't seem to be a practical limit to how far overconfidence can get you in your career.

>> That glass ceiling limit seems to be at the CEO level, in the case of Elizabeth Holmes and other various "confident phonies" that get posted here on HN every few weeks.

Are you joking? Yes - she was the CEO, but she's also facing up 20 in prison after being that CEO [1].

It's not just about getting to the top. It's about whether you'll remain there and whether the history will try to forget you as soon as it can.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

> Are you joking?

Can you please edit swipey bits out of your posts to HN? Your comment would be fine without that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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