This. I work with a support guy like this. He has, at best, a hobbyist's understanding of the technology we use. He tries to paint himself in meetings as this expert who often tries to correct us and says completely mind-numbing things. When discussing a fairly complex Drupal roll-out, "Oh, why even bother with this open source stuff? We can make an access database on the network shares and give people access to it! I hear it can do web now!" I've sat him down and patiently explained to him why we do these things, how they are common and best practices, etc and he just makes frowny face like I'm the one talking crazy and he doesn't seem to learn as he brings up the same suggestions over and over. Last week he was adament that a dedicated linux server for our Asterisk PBX was overkill and that WindowsXP running some windows freeware pbx on any old desktop would be better because PBXs need so little power and XP is a super lean OS.

At my previous job where I worked and managed a few young-ish support and jr devs, I came accross a lot of the same attitudes. The funny thing is that two or three years in, they tend to shed those attitudes (at least the smart ones do). They realize that this stuff is a lot bigger than the limited experience they've gotten in school or in their hobbyist projects. Suddenly the "lets toss out everything and do it my way" motor-mouting gets turned down a notch or two, especially after I let them do things "their way" once in a while only to have it explode in their faces. Hell, 90% of managing young techies is controlling their D-K until they mature into imposter syndrome. Then you have to manage that, which is a million times easier to deal because you're not being know-it-all'd to death in every meeting.

D-K is real. The graphs he points out literally supports it. Personally, I'm getting sick of this kind of uber-skeptic mentality that's popular here and on reddit. I think there's something ego gratifying for the INTJ male about being this loud-mouth contrarian who tells everyone they're wrong. Especially if its against some popular wisdom and if the argument is unusually pedantic and trivial.