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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I think I have to disagree with humility in engineering. There's a certain arrogance intrinsic to engineering, in that you have to be capable of believing you can find a better solution to a problem than literally every other person in history. Obviously it needs to be tempered in interactions with the outside world, but without that core idea, an engineer can't do their job effectively, like a surgeon who loses their nerve when it comes to taking lives in their hands.

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> There's a certain arrogance intrinsic to engineering...

I don't agree. You can take pride in what you've accomplished, and you should do that, but you can be humble at the same time. Accepting there will be better individuals than you or better solutions than yours is both sobering and motivating to be and do better.

When you accept that you're very smart, but not the smartest, you unlock the potential to be one of the the 10x-100x engineers others aspire.

I'm a very motivated individual, and did some pretty impressive things back in the day, and I'm still capable of doing these things. However, I'm not the best, or won't be the best for long. This is how the world works.

Being able to say thanks, and being able to say sorry goes a long way, and takes you beyond where unabashed arrogance takes you.

Lastly, arrogance makes you fragile. Fragility is not good under stress, and under real world circumstances.

That isn't the best example, because surgical error due to the stereotypical cowboy surgeon was common and measurably improved with better process, ie surgical checklists: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24973186/

Lack of humility can lead to the wrong limbs being amputated. The parallels to understanding your personal limits and knowing when to trust other people directly applies here. Confidence != arrogance.

> There's a certain arrogance intrinsic to engineering, in that you have to be capable of believing you can find a better solution to a problem than literally every other person in history.

As a programmer, I have never once believed that. I just believe that the problems I am being presented with are novel enough (usually because of the context and constraints surrounding it) to have not been encountered before and solved.

Just like you never cross the same river twice, I don't think you ever solve the same problem twice.

I think the core skill engineering requires is persistence: the belief that you can find a workable solution even when the problem itself gives you absolutely no positive feedback during the process.

That applies to problems that can be solved by 1 person.

But huge majority of the problems require whole teams of people to solve, especially in the commercial world. Senior engineer who can 2x team of 10 people is better than a single engineer who is 10x himself.

I agree that arrogance is common, but I'm not sure I'd call it necessary. I know a lot of good engineers who are very confident that they are good enough to build a great solution, but not arrogant.

I think there needs to be a mix of humility and arrogance. Humility because sometimes there’s an issue that’s unsolvable and a good engineer needs to know to pull back. Arrogance because it takes at least some arrogance to believe there’s a solution where others haven’t found one.

There are plenty of times in my career where I wish I were more arrogant. I’d probably be in a completely different place altogether if I were even slightly more arrogant and that lack of it has held me back in some ways.

Wouldn't "confidence" be a better word than "arrogance"?

Sorta, confidence is nice but arrogance is the difference between “I can do that” and “people have tried and failed but I know I can do it because I’m better.” There’s a particular example where I was arrogant (one of the few times) about something, said yes to the project that someone else had already architected, and I re-designed the architecture because I believed I was a better engineer. I need a little more of that. Particularly now, when I have an idea for a company I want to start but internally I’m scared. I’m confident in my ability, but I’m lacking the arrogance to just fucking go for it. I spend more time beating myself up over it than just doing the work. And I wish I just had the dab of arrogance to go for it, as opposed to just confidence.

Right, but humility is crucial in machine learning (and particularly in the area of self driving cars) where you're constantly calibrating uncertainty and risk with lives on the line.

You are onto something.

For hard tasks like engineering, you need a balance of ego (I can do this) and humility (this is hard, I need to work as a team and study the problem). Too much of either results in negative outcomes.

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