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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.
I was the head of software development at a 10 year old "startup" with ~50 employees.
The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don't have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, "some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us".
I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says "Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that."
Needless to say, not a single "nerd" bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.
That device was a total flop.
But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.
I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don't understand nerds or open source.
Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.
I just had to scroll back up to double check what you said your job was, because I was sure you said you were in charge of software development, and then I thought, "no, I must be misremembering that, because there's no way the CEO and marketing person could genuinely believe that they know more about open source software development than a software developer." But no, you really did say your job was head of software development, and the CEO and marketing person really did think they know more than you.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is very real in marketing and executives.
Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so "head of software development" meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.
Even if you'd said you were "just" a software developer, not even a head of a small team of developers, I'd still work on the assumption that you know more about software development than a CEO and a marketing person. Relevant professional experience gives you much more credibility than they had. :)
I guess they just sort of... bullshit their way through life, and so few people call them on it that they just keep getting more power based on nothing more than them manipulating people into believing they're more competent than they are. And because they just say a lot of bullshit, they think everybody else does too, and so they don't listen when they're given real information from people that actually know what they're talking about.
As far as I can tell, humans generally think they know more about literally anything they have passing familiarity with than anyone else on the planet.