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Ask HN: How do you work with people who are "not quite smart"?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: How do you work with people who are "not quite smart"?

Hey,

This is a touchy subject, and that might be a lack of awareness or empathy from my part. But trust that it comes from a genuine willingness of making things better for everyone.

We all work with people who we find "not as good", have different ways or work ethics. After being told for decades that this is usually a problem with communication or point of view, I had somewhat internalized the idea. And it is often true, but what I've realized as of late, is that there's a category of people who are not just working a different way, but are - to put it bluntly - plainly not smart.

What I'm talking about is people below average when it comes to understanding concepts, or conceptualizing altogether. Their intuition is always twisted and wrong. Completely lack critical feedback. Work needs to be decomposed for them in extremely precise steps if you want anything to happen. The type of person where you know anything assigned to them will be badly done. When you open a document or code written by them, you do it with the anticipation that it's gonna be bad in novel ways. And despite all of your efforts to try and coach them, seem to make no progress (where the same coach/coaching on others works).

And I know there might be other causes for that, maybe something that happens in their life, lack of interest in the task or motivation overall. But I think I can make a clear distinction between someone who doesn't give a crap, and someone who does but is not equipped to achieve the task at hand.

Some of them are direct colleagues whom I can provide feedback about - but then what do you tell them/their manager? "It's very hard to explain you concepts, you should work on conceptualization"?

Some of them are transverse. I don't even know what to do about these people. An "experienced" PM who systematically gives you hot garbage, apart from pointing the lack of research and the absence of evidence-based reasoning, how do you tell someone "what you gave me is plain dumb, and that's not just a difference of opinion in how we should approach this product/feature, it's inconsistent and pure shit"?

I'm not in a management position, I can't "just fire them". Plus I don't want to go and tell them "you're just not equipped for your job you should find another". It's quite disheartening, does anyone have techniques they've used? Am I just missing something?

Discussion 77 comments · 50 points · charles_f · 2024-12-20
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