The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I had a rare dinner night out with a couple of girlfriends. Per usual, we turned the date into a chance to get away from our husbands, and (excluding myself) our children, and to eat the type of food we are usually not allowed to eat. This night, we chose to dine at a Korean BBQ restaurant because our husbands don’t like Korean food. And so, as Kalbi ribs sizzled before our table top grill we turned the night into a vent session, per usual. 

All three of us are well-educated, and competent in our fields. All of us are Asian females working in heavily masculine fields in the Silicon Valley, and to be honest, some of us are not appreciated or respected to the extent that we should be.  

One of my friends is a software engineer. She is known for being a pinch hitter, taking on tasks that others fail to complete after being given weeks or even months. She is then given 24 hours to complete the task, and she will begrudgingly do it, staying up until midnight to complete it.

My other friend is a software product manager. Her mind races and is often miles ahead of her coworkers. People are taken aback by her rapid fire line of questioning. The engineers working on her project love her because she is logical. But its her managers and peers she has more difficulty with, mostly because they lack some of her critical thinking skills.

As for me, I’m a competent engineer whose people skills sometimes get in the way of my career. I sometimes open my mouth when it is best to keep it shut.

Throughout the evening it became clear there was a common thread behind our work woes. You see, all of us are dealing with less competent colleagues. But even more frustrating is that they don’t realize they are incompetent and don't ask for help when appropriate. As explained by my colleague, this is called the Dunning Kruger Effect: When people are so dumb, they don’t know how dumb they are.

I don’t mind when people know that they have shortcomings. I for one, am not the brightest, nor am I the most talented. But at least I have enough critical thinking to realize when I fall short some of the time. I may not progress as quickly as I would like, but at least I know when weak areas exist. What frustrates us is when someone is so clueless, they think they can do the job, but they can’t. And then we have to pick up the pieces.

As the evening wore on, we figured out some strategies for dealing with people with Dunning Kruger, or Dunning Kruger-ites. Here are our: 

Strategies for Managing “Dunning-Kruger”-ites:

1. Keep the Dunning-Kruger-ite busy with something long and menial to get them out of your hair. God forbid if they get bored and start messing around and harming actual work (as was the case with me). They might even be happier doing a task of this sort.
2. Vent and complain to someone astute with office politics. It helps to have the situation acknowledged through a different set of eyes. In my case, I vented with a mentor, who offered some key advice (see #3 below).
3. Actively monitor the Dunning-Krugerite’s work. “You can tell when a task is too hard for someone when they make a lot of excuses, and take too long to finish,” my mentor said. If someone with Dunning-Kruger is doing something they cannot do, they won’t know it. You have to actively monitor their work to see.
4. Try to get someone else to manage the Dunning-Kruger-ite.
5. Be very very nice. Usually the Dunning-Kruger-ite has good standing in your place of work because people feel sorry for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have. People have special soft spots for people who are both dumb and nice. The smart person who is mean will usually be punished far worse than the dumb person who is nice.

A Story For When I Feel Pessimistic

There’s a lot in the world to be pessimistic about right now. When Trump was elected, I screamed inside. I didn’t know what kind of country I was going to wake up to the following morning. The country was so vehemently sexist and so full of hatred and anger, that they voted for a malignant, racist, narcissist over arguably the most qualified presidential candidate to ever exist in the history of our country. Now that the mid-term elections are nearing, my mood is in a word: pessimistic. Because of gerrymandering, and because half the country is under the thrall of conservative state TV (Fox), and because terrorist acts perpetrated by violent white men have happened in recent days, I have doubts that normal democratic processes will actually endure this coming election day. 

But something happened to me today that actually had me sobbing in my car on my way home, and sobbing even as I write these words. My V.P. of Engineering is hands down one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. Because he is getting on in years, I am sometimes the repository of his pearls of wisdom. He said something that was so prescient today, that I felt like I could, just for a moment, glimpse past the micro-problems of our day, and it had me gasping.

ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) are responsible for delivering nuclear warheads. After the rocket fuel is exhausted, the ICBM is essentially radio silent. If it isn’t radio silent than foreign enemies can hack into it and possibly jam it. If the rocket is essentially dumb/unhackable and radio silent, than how possibly can it reach it’s destination, and within feet of it? 

They launched test missiles from Edwards Air Force Base in California into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, using only simple Newtonian physics to drive them, but the missiles they launched did not reach their goal. When they relaunched the same missile after tweaking what they thought was a faulty rocket motor, the same result happened. Then some smart person realized they needed to do more than use simple idealized trajectories. The missiles had been pulled off course by tiny changes in gravity during flyover. 

So this is how we solved it. We MAPPED the earth’s gravitational disturbances. We launched a fleet of satellites and tracked their speeds and altitudes as they orbited the Earth. The extra gravitation pull from a mountain range, we logged it. The placid pull from the oceans, we mapped it. Even the minute fluctuations of the ground water, we recorded. Any ICBM that will ever be launched will be launched with a single set of mathematical coordinates. Without ever having any sensorial input on where it is in space, it will reach its target, having taken into account every ditch, hill, stream it will have passed. This might be the first and last time a gargantuan feat of science and engineering had me so awestruck, that I literally trembled in my socks.

This is WHY North Korea will be decades away from launching an accurate nuclear warhead on an ICBM, if they ever will. This is WHY we will eventually reverse global warming. This is why, even though our White House and Congress, and perhaps even our Supreme Court, is full of nincompoops, we will eventually come out on top.

The technical brilliance within our country is astounding. The technical talent is so deep, that even now it is not fully realized.

The depth and magnitude of our labor resources is breathtaking. 

We WILL pull through this. If not in this election cycle, then the next, or a couple of decades from now. Our country, even our planet, might be under threat, but we WILL meet this challenge. The next time I am feeling pessimistic about my country, or the world even, I should look back on this moment when I was awestruck.