why i stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room
the rush projects at école 42 taught me something i did not expect to learn.
we would work until 4am, sometimes later. three or four of us huddled around screens, debugging some memory leak that made no sense. i remember thinking i had to be the one to find the solution first. had to prove i belonged there.
but the best solutions came when someone would say "wait, what if we are thinking about this wrong" and we would start over. completely. the person who asked the dumb question usually unlocked what we had been missing for hours.
those late-night collaborations should have taught me everything i needed to know. but somehow, i forgot the lesson.
the mistake at my previous company
at my previous company, i doubled down on being the smart one. we had to ship fast, features every week. i thought the way to stand out was to have all the answers.
ugly code? did not matter as long as it worked. someone suggested a refactor? i would explain why my approach was better. code reviews became debates i had to win.
looking back, i solved problems, sure. but i also created new ones. team tension, knowledge silos, technical debt that someone else would have to fix later.
the code worked but the team did not.
the uncomfortable truth
now at my current company, i am surrounded by people who make me feel dumb every day. not in a bad way. in the best possible way.
they ask questions i never thought to ask. they see patterns i miss completely. they know about distributed systems concepts that i have never heard of. when they explain something, i realize how much i do not know.
it is uncomfortable. really uncomfortable. but it is also exactly where i need to be.
what changed
the shift happened gradually. instead of trying to prove i knew something, i started asking "can you explain that part again" or "what would happen if we did it this way instead."
turns out, admitting you do not know something is not a weakness. it is information gathering.
the senior engineers i respect most are the ones who say "i am not sure, let me think about that" in meetings. they ask follow-up questions. they change their mind when they learn new information. they are not trying to be the smartest person in the room. they are trying to make the room smarter.
the real lesson
being the smartest person in the room is not a goal worth having. if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.
but even more than that, trying to be the smartest person makes you worse at your job. you stop listening. you stop learning. you start optimizing for being right instead of getting things right.
the best teams i have worked with are not collections of the smartest individuals. they are groups of people who make each other smarter.
at école 42, our best projects came from late-night collaboration, not individual brilliance. at my current company, the solutions that work are the ones we build together, not the ones i come up with alone.
maybe the real skill is not having all the answers. maybe it is asking the right questions and creating space for others to share what they know.
turns out, being comfortable with not knowing everything is the smartest move you can make.