Not disagreeing with you. Successfull people tend to have IQs between 120 and 135. (citation needed) It makes sense because there are a LOT more people in that range than in the 135+ range. 120-135 is often sufficient. I suspect that something similar on the rich scale. People like Gates, Bezos and Musk were not fabulous wealthy, but they had enough to be able to bet big and take big chances.

> We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.

There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....

> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.

I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment.

I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)

Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.

It's a side effect of rewarding 20-somethings with lots of money to do 'smart' things with stuff they learn in an undergraduate degree.

It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.

Given the state of politics all these complaints are not really a young person problem; stubborn judges who refuse to step aside despite cancer in their geriatric years. Reps and Senators sliding into dementia live on TV!

Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.

CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?

Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.

The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.

> "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

- Attributed to Nasrudin

> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.

There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.

I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.