Benji York <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Alex Martelli wrote: > > Disagree -- far more people THINK they're clever, than really ARE > > clever. According to a recent article in the Financial Times, over 40% > > of a typical financial firm's employees firmly believe they are among > > the 5% best employees of the firm -- and the situation, believe me, is > > no different in programming. > > It's apparently no different anywhere: > http://www.phule.net/mirrors/unskilled-and-unaware.html
Tx. Maybe it's a genetically adaptive trait: the FT points out that while there is little correlation between an employee's opinion of their skills, and the employee's actual performance, there IS positive correlation between said opinion and the employee's career advancement. One way to explain the correlation is: if you truly (albeit perhaps mistakenly) believe you're great, you project that and are more likely to get promotions or raises, than is somebody else, perhaps objectively better, who's torn by self-doubt and projects THAT. My working hypothesis would be that this effect would be far stronger in fields where it's hard to get hard quantitative measures of performance, so the managers (or clients, etc) rely to a large extent on subjective judgment which can be influenced by such "projections"... Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list