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For similar reasons, every programmer thinks he is the top 1% - including me ;)


I sure don't. Personally, my outlook swings between "I'm so awesome, look at what I made" to "I am an idiot - why am I in this field?" The latter comes when I'm 2 hours into a debugging session and still stumped, or when I'm looking at code written by somebody famous, or when I get an explanation of some concept or piece of code and I still don't understand. (Rebuttals: debugging is actually hard sometimes, and that coder is famous for a reason, and maybe the explainer isn't doing a god job.)

In my rational moments, I figure that 1) I'm smart enough, but not the smartest, 2) I can always improve, and 3) I should focus more on doing my best and less on comparing myself to others.


I try hard not to assume "top 1%" == "smartest 1%". I tried being very smart for awhile, and I'm really pretty good at it.

Turns out that "dedicated" and "hardworking" trump "smart" nine times out of ten. So now I'm trying for that. It's taking longer.




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