The engineer: https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

Engineer with ADHD. Especially true.

Did you try making the thing go like *gestures* “uh” then *gestures* “uh”? That way it’ll be *gestures*, you know?

When you forget a word thats relatively common to the field, it’s the worst.

Also engineers youtube

This is an engineer?

How do you feel about architects?

EXACTLY. Add social anxiety to the mix, and something as simple as asking a question becomes a Herculean task because your mouth won’t cooperate.

This is why I prefer typing over speaking. I can go back and proofread what I said before I say it. When I speak, all that comes out half of the time is word salad.

“Ah shit, I have something else to add to what I’m talking about, I better speak faster so I don’t waste everyone’s time”

Or autism, where you are to scared to even start talking and when you do, you mumble, give up mid sentance or say somerhing wrong for no reason.

Sometimes it feels like the classic you said you like croissants, that must mean you hate bagels

You put in so much effort to make your point crystal clear, choosing your words extra carefully to form a sentence that means exactly what you need it to mean, and then some people just interpret the wildest things.

I do this enough that I’m convinced my friends gaslight me. It would be easier to just say that I’ll watch something later. Instead I’ll tell someone I know of it and why I haven’t watched it yet. Easy for them to interpret I’m not interested and then later they’ll tell me I’m not interested in it and I’ll be very confused and then multiple people will agree.

The problem is that they probably never gaslight me, and that fear stems from a situation where I so vividly internalise a situation that leads to the conclusion they don’t gaslight me that I forget the end result. The example being I have no idea which pronunciation of yoghurt is American and Which is British, because I used to be made fun of for saying it wrong. I only remember I was made fun of, I don’t remember what I used to say or what the right way is.

Edit: The fact I bring up yoghurt tells you everything

If this is about your fellow programmers, they probably also have ADHD and missed your first sentence entirely.

Hello, me

Are you me?

You sound like a people person.

The art in this is to know/guess where you have to dumb down things how far to get your point across.

For example, I’m often explaining Kubernetes to business people as “a layer on top of our servers, so we can define which apps we want to run and how, k8s then sorts itself out, how exactly to deploy everything”. That’s wildly simplified, but usually gives them a rough idea of what they’re dealing with.

I’ve had to endure a coworker explaining k8s by starting with manifests, then switching over to volume claims, finally something about ingresses… He was talking to a guy from a government office, whose job it was to do administrative tasks. That guy had no idea what my coworker was talking about and left the meeting more confused than before.

This is very true. I work with a lot of software developers and most of them have huge egos. I started in a business role and moved to software engineer and am really gold at not letting my ego take over. I always take criticism and try to get better.

As an engineer who plays games, it drives me fucking nuts how much influence forum users and streamers are given when it comes to ongoing game design. It very clearly has ruined many games, and there are times when the user base just need to be ignored. Or at least managed better.

If you can’t explain a concept to a five year old, then you’re not an expert on that concept.

Not trying to boast, but I appear to be one of the “smartest” people in my field. My evidence for this is that regardless of what company I work for, and I’ve worked for several at this point in my career, I become the “go to” person for solving complex issues that stump my co-workers. I often can solve whatever problem brought them to me in a reasonable time frame, or at least propose a solution that will lead to the desired outcome.

Personally, I would mainly attribute this to my propensity for learning everything I can about everything I touch. I’m not just looking for the “how do I make this work” of it, I’m always looking for “why is it broken and what do I need to do to make it not broken”. It’s a small difference, but the former is very results focused, fix it, regardless of whether the solution makes sense, and the latter is understanding the issue and finding a way to make it work from there. I don’t think I have any special ability or intelligence that others don’t have, nor that I’m smarter or better than anyone.

I spent years studying human behaviour. I’m certain I’ve lost friends due to my efforts. I spent a lot of time carefully paying attention to everything from body language, tone, phrasing, vocabulary, speech pacing… Just everything I possibly could. I examined the presentation of statements and the responses based on all those factors to try to find trends for how to approach making statements that people reacted positively to.

I’m neurodivergent, I have ADHD. I may have a touch of autism in there but that’s never been checked nor verified, so I hesitate to say that I’m on that spectrum. I feel as though people are far too frequently saying that “I think I’m autistic” or something of the sort, without any proof thereof, and IMO, that cheapens the diagnosis. We’ve seen such callous disregard of serious disorders before, particularly with OCD and statements like “I’m a little OCD”. Unless you’ve been diagnosed with the condition, you’re not. You probably don’t understand OCD well enough to say whether any activity is classifiably OCD or not, and the misuse of the term has led to it becoming a meme at this point. I don’t want to contribute to that happening to another condition.

Regardless: after years of effort and observation, I have been described as helpful and approachable, which has always been my aim.

I know of people whom I would consider to be easily more intelligent than I am, who get regarded as combative and difficult; mainly because they haven’t spent as much time as I have examining the nuances of communication and putting in active efforts to adjust how their statements are made so that they are recieved in a more positive light. They have, instead, spent most of their time enhancing their knowledge, and have understanding in many complex topics that I simply have not spent the time learning in order to understand.

I explain all of this to contribute to your point. Social capability does not and should not imply someone’s intelligence or knowledge. There’s a lot of factors that go into someone’s perception of another person that aren’t things that you can really quantify well. From emotional intelligence, tone, the phrasing of the words used, even the selection of words, among many other factors, can be very deceptive in demonstrating someone’s intelligence.

There’s also the factor of having a deep knowledge in something you’re interested in, and a very limited knowledge of everything else. You can be extremely well spoken in your area of expertise and make completely irrational and insane statements regarding things you know little about. There’s also the matter of vocabulary. Even very well larned topics can be portrayed as something you know little about, simply because you either lack the vocabulary to speak about it, or that your vocabulary on the topic is so advanced that it comes across like you don’t know what you’re talking about, since nobody knows what you’re saying, and it sounds like you’re making things up to sound like you know more than you do.

There’s a lot of factors here and there all important to the perception of whether a person is intelligent or not.

I’ve worked with plenty of people who were regarded as “brilliant” by management and a few other employees (from different departments). And nearly every time it was they were just really charismatic. Like, they could have easily have been highly successful as a used car salesmen at a junk yard.

That only applies to people who don’t speak that language well enough to go straight from concept to words in that language in their minds, without passing via an intermediary language.

People who need to translate between languages in their heads as they speak in a second language are at the same level in speaking foreign languages as those who need to count with their fingers are in Maths.

On the upside, once you start going directly from concept to words in a language you’re reasonable good at, it becomes possible to do it in languages you’re not at all good at.

That depends on how you learn the second language. I speak three languages, but I learned them organically. If I speak in English, then I also think in English at that time. But that leads to a different problem - I cannot translate between languages I know. I can explain what is written in language A to a person speaking language B, but that won’t be a translation, it will be just a free form description. My brain just don’t have connections between words in different languages. I understand them, but can’t make links between them.

It is easy to answer that particular question. I’d just answer with: Probably somewhere at B1 or B2 level, although I haven’t been assessed in ages regarding that.

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I used to work in an engineering firm and the way I’d explain some of my coworkers’ inanity to my wife at dinner is that the engineering mindset is to search for simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and in cases where there is no such simple solution (let’s take social or political issues as a common thread, here) that tends to lead to the engineer preferring a spherical-chickens-in-a-vacuum oversimplification over the complex and nuanced reality – usually accompanied by protestations that “If only people would act rationally!” their ideas would work and make things better.

There’s some overlap as well between engineers and the sort of mentality that one is a disembodied intelligence piloting a meat puppet, which feeds into those sorts of thought patterns. Like, dude, you may think of yourself as a purely logical being, but the fact of the matter is that like all of us you’re a bodge-job mess of higher-order thinking strapped to a tribal ape with duct tape and baling wire. You can’t ignore the rough edges that come with that if you want to find social or political ideas that actually work.

(and I’m fully aware this comment won’t land well in this community)

What do you mean?

Jk jk jk

In my experience, half of my engineering professors were terrible teachers

This phenomenon is known as the “curse of knowledge”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Understanding the subject is necessary but not sufficient to being a good teacher.

I’m an engineers who works with engineers. There are no rules. You have the dumb smoothtalkers and the smart… dumbtalkers.

It’s pretty entertaining seeing management eat the bullshit some engineers give them. It’s a crime for a manager not to be technical or at least have understanding of what is going on. If you want to see an engineer fucking a manager, put a manager who doesn’t know shit about engineering.

Why not get their job in that case? Make at least twice as much for much less physical effort.

Sounds like he knew what he was doing if you know anything about Jaguars.

Sounds absent minded. Is this person also unable to analyze things, grasp complex topics, etc?

This is more an example of P!=NP