this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
25 points (93.1% liked)
Programming
24097 readers
240 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Intelligence is a often-misunderstood concept. It's kinda like height in basketball.
A person that's 1.50m tall will have little chance becoming a successful professional basketball player, but that doesn't mean that a person that's 2m tall is guaranteed to be great at basketball without practice.
It takes both. And a 1.50m tall person who has played a lot of basketball will likely be better than a 2m person who hasn't, but if the 2m person starts practicing they will overtake the 1.5m person quite quickly.
Smart people like to claim that "it's all just hard work", mostly as a kind of humble-brag ("I am not something special, but I work really hard"), but it's not true. Accomplishing things in intelligence-based fields is a combination of being smart and working hard.
Usain Bolt isn't such an amazing runner only because he works hard, but he has the right genetics for the task. But if he didn't work hard, he wouldn't be such an amazing runner either.
Usually when we say that it's in response to someone that hasn't put in the work saying we're smart as a way to justify continuing to not put in the work. I spent the first several years of my professional career learning outside of work and still keep tabs on technology in a way that others don't. My skill level is because I methodically cultivated it over years. Maybe I'm "smart" or maybe I'm not, but it's upsetting when someone acts like I was just born good at technology when I spent a lot of time and effort to get this way.
Do you think there is such a thing as a "gifted musician"? Someone with a "talent for arts" or design? Someone who's just "naturally good with people"? Someone who's "naturally really good with organization"?
That's all the same. Yes, there are people who are naturally good in all sorts of fields. And yes, it still takes a ton of work to keep on top. A "gifted musician" still has to put in hundreds or thousands of hours of practice to actually be able to make good music. But someone who has no talent for music can put in infinite hours of practice and it will still amount to nothing.
But there's another important distinction in regards to tech and IT: people in these fields tend to think that their high level of skills should be default and anyone who doesn't have that skill level must be automatically stupid and lazy. It's almost seen as a moral failing to not be good with tech. Terms like "tech illiterate" reinforce that.
We don't talk about "musically illiterate", "arts illiterate" or "medically illiterate" when someone isn't a great musician, artist or pharmacologist.
Are you really good in every single field that exists? Are you justifying not putting work into e.g. your plumbing or car maintainance skills? Why aren't you fixing the plumbing or the electric wireing in your house yourself?
People have different specializations and there's no shame in not knowing everything.
(Btw, if someone tells you "It's really impressive what you can do, you must be so smart, I couldn't do that", they are doing that as a compliment. If you then give them a sassy retort, that's not exactly nice.)
I think exactly the same thing as I said before. Maybe the people that are really good at it are naturally gifted to some degree but the main bulk of their skill is putting in the time. The people that say "oh I could never draw" or "I could never play an instrument" are both doing themselves a disservice and minimizing the time an effort that the skilled people put into it.
Of course not. I'm talking about other professional software developers when I say they don't put in the work. You're putting words in my mouth.
Oh fuck off. I never said I was making a snappy comeback. You're just making shit up about me in your head.