True

As an engineer, this is painfully true.

Ever heard of ADHD? Ya, the thought is perfectly intelligible. But as it travels to the mouth it gets mangled by six other thoughts along the way

People don't understand that I choose every word carefully in a sentence to convey the most meaning and answer follow-up questions up front. Then they think I said something that literally contradicts what I said or that I already accounted for in my first sentence.

Yes I'm a programmer with Autism and ADHD, why do you ask?

The code when I think about it: A well structured systematic machine

The code when I try to talk about it: haha function go buuurrrrr

• Okay. (2)

• What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers.

• Yes. Yes. That's That's right.

• Well, then I just have to ask why couldn't the customers just take them directly to the software people, huh?

• Well, I'll tell you why. Because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

• Uh-huh. So, you physically take the specs from the customer?

• Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.

• So then you must physically bring them to the software people.

• Well... no. I mean, sometimes.

• What would you say you do here?

• Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.

This is also generally true for software engineers.

In my own experience, the difficulty is that you basically have to teach someone software engineering before they even kind of understand what youre saying before they believe you.

Which is basically 99% of people, especially in a work setting.

The very rare 1% of people will usually give up and go, well, youre the expert, probably you know what youre talking about.

The rest will be angered by their own dunning-krueger effect and/or ego and be abusive.

EDIT: This is 100% true when talking to a video game player, unless they are somehow also a programmer.

There are 0 exceptions to the category of someone who has only played video games. None of them anything about programming, and they will be more angry and rude than the general public.

People who appear intelligent to the average person, are either slightly more intelligent than their audience, or charismatic.

Really smart people can be hard to follow unless they put efforts in communication skills or are charismatic (but that might be the same thing?)

To be fair though, most engineers I know overestimate their intelligence and just ignore entire fields of knowledge. And are even weirdly proud of that. Cringe

Have you fucking met me? And English not being my native language makes it 10 times worse. There is always this "translation layer" that I have to process everything I hear/say through.

Just take anyone who speaks a second language and ask them to explain their expertise in the second language. Almost everyone will start sounding stupid trying to do the translation in their head to the second language.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think said person is stupid at all. There's just difficulty speaking about a concept you would innately know and have learned in one language and translate it to a second one. Except for all those genius polyglots out there of course.

Which is why I gave up talking to clients unless I have to. That and they don't listen anyway.

"Spec calls for this part"

"They stopped making that part in 2003"

"YOU WILL FOLLOW THE SPEC AND DO WHAT I SAY OR I WILL SUE YOU AND BACK CHARGE YOU AND YELL AT YOUR MANAGER DEMANDING THAT HE FIRE YOU AND YOU ARE BEING RUDE AND I HAVE YOU KNOW I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR 80 YEARS..."

Then I buy it used off eBay.

Not an engineer, but I feel this as an autistic person

In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we're absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider's perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.

I work under engineers. They spend enormous effort articulating complex solutions to simple problem. If anything theyre the opposite of what this meme implies: they are very dense but use flowery language to disguise it.

Define "intelligent". I know a lot of engineers through my job, they may be professionally competent, but ... Let me give you a short example: The engineer that actually was the team leader building a huge crane on tracks parks his car behind that thing in the blind spot for the operator. Shortly before a test. There went his beloved Jaguar. Old, but true story.

This is "Neurodivergence: the thread"

They're called Pakleds.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pakled

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

Well that's just ruuuude. I speak very goood.

I can speak intelligently, but put a pen in my hand and ask me to write down the same thing and my hand won't move. Tests in school involving more than a sentence were torturous. Essays were brutal. I was in school before computers were available for anything other than computer class. They did help as typing was a far easier method to get things out of my head.

Oh god is that why I’m this way?!

I’m in this image and I don’t like it.

Well I ain't stupid if my shit does work god damnit!

I spend a good amount of my day talking to these people on lemmy.

Or. A mirror? Wait a reversed mirror. Uh oh.

That's me.... :(

As an engineer, the demographics of stupidity did not spare my category. Whatever this sentence was supposed to mean.

Yeah. No. I mean. You see. What I'm trying to say is.

Usual Asperger.

No.

Idk as long as you can communicate exclusively in flow charts you can communicate with software engineers pretty efficiently

Reddit is not a microblog.

Engineers are good at following certain rules to solve a very specific, if broad, subset of human problems.

It sure as fuck don't make them intelligent.

I wouldn't trust an engineer to be able to solve the most trivial societal issues we face over some tennis player's.

Our strength as a species comes from every single one of us going in depth and be experts at the most random things. Being a supreme expert at any one thing does not mean you are a supreme expert at every single thing.