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Smart People Choke Under Pressure
People perceived as the most likely to succeed might also be the most likely to crumble under pressure.
A new study finds that individuals with high working-memory capacity, which normally allows them to excel, crack under pressure and do worse on simple exams than when allowed to work with no constraints. Those with less capacity score low, too, but they tend not to be affected by pressure.
Smart people are expected not to make mistakes and not to fail. We are all (even some of the smartest people) nothing but human, therefore we do make mistakes and sometimes fail. But, since you are smart people are likely to expect more from you.
"Let's see you get out of this.."
"You are so smart, why can't you..."
What people need to understand is that sometimes even the best of us make the wrong judgement. This things happen.
I don't know how to feel about this...
I'm most certainly a 'geek', by all measures. I can't help but become totally immersed in whatever I find interesting...in depth and breadth.
However, I've always been noted for my ability to work best under pressure--without the pressure I either get nothing accomplished or I 'wander aimlessly forever'...I'm sure many of you can identify.
However, I'm an 'undercover.' Nobody I meet ever suspects that I have held engineer positions, owned my own business or spent multiple hours a day researching (anything of interest) in painful depth.
To sum it up, I think (without RTFA, admittedly) I think that it's far to dynamic of a subject to boil down to black-n-whites such as this.
But then again, perhaps I'm just not 'one of those'..."those" being the majority of geekdom.
colour me skeptical.
-Dan
I suspect that you are one of those people that I meet far too often who love to complain about the fact the world just doesn't know the "correct" way to see how smart they really are. I suspect that you are one of those people I meet far too often who constantly espouse the firm belief that they have these great genius level ideas, but that nobody recognizes it.
I would like to take this opportunity to call bullsh*t on you.
Thanks!
Why engineers want info up front can be broken up roughly into the following problems. Usually it's a combination.
1. Bad management.
It's more common than you think to be blamed for not reading the client's mind. (You should have just known that when they explicitly wrote "save when exitting every field", they actually meant "we don't want the info to disappear, but we don't really want disk access every time we hit TAB." Whatever gave them the idea that info just disappears in a form. It's your fault when they come back complaining about performance.)
Or when it's not outright "you're to blame, you horrible monster", it's being asked to do overtime to "fix" it. Because the boss is too weak to tell a big client that those changes cost extra time to implement.
I can tell you that it doesn't take more than 1-2 such projects, to give one the idea "no, you don't. Not again. Give me a good spec up front this time." Because anything short of a full spec simply comes back to screw you with a chainsaw lately.
2. Bad management again: changing the same thing back and forth, just because the client can't make up his/her mind.
It's been said that the most depressive thing you can do for example to a prisoner is to just make him do not something that's hard work, but something that's obviously _useless_. Such as asking the prisoners to move a big pile of sand from here to there, and then back to the same point. That "I'm doing useless stuff" thought saps someone's self-esteem and ultimately even health faster than if you tortured them or made them break rocks with a pickaxe.
And the same applies to software projects.
I've _actually_ been in one project where for a whole _year_ the client manager couldn't make up his mind whether he wants the reports landscape or portrait. Never mind that the program included a report designer, where he can lay them out in whatever goddamn way he needs. No siree, bob. He's not gonna accept the program until the reports are landscape... then portrait... then landscape again... then portrait again. Repeat ad nauseam. For a year.
Going through something like this will make it _very_ tempting to say "screw this, I want a signed spec up front".
3. Bad design.
Most programs are basically Write-Only. People give no thought to maintenance later, and even the smallest change means rewriting half the stuff.
Now I'm not a fan of extreme programming as such. (And please, if anyone feels like taking it as an opportunty to preach, have mercy and spare both my time and yours.) But I do think that they did get the basic ideas right. (It's just the turning it all to the max that I disaggree with.) Programs should be written to be easily changed.
4. Lack of test-cases.
That's probably the worst anti-pattern. So you most often have not only a spaghetti program that's hard to change, but it's not even possible to be sure you didn't break something else.
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