On not being the smartest guy in the room...

Last week, a coworker stopped by my office to pick up a piece of equipment. I started talking to him, and mentioned an issue I had been having for a long time with integrating audio drivers into the images that we use for deploying computers. Turned out that he had found a 3rd-party application that solved the problem a while back.

That made me feel pretty dumb, and angry at myself - especially since the coworker was a student employee.

Now, I work with a bunch of smart people, so I'm used to not having all the answers. But finding out that a student had solved a problem I couldn't was a blow to my ego.

The odd thing is I don't even consider myself that tech-ey a person. I'm not a programmer. Both of my degrees are in business, and I'd much rather be dealing with high-level business or management stuff than with nuts-and-bolts tech stuff. But there hasn't really been a need for that, and there have been a bunch of more tech-type things that have needed to get done, and since I'm always willing to learn something new, I've ended up doing them - things like maintaining our image or deploying software via SCCM, Microsoft's remote system management console software. I don't think I'm all that good at it, but I'm good enough to get what needs to be done.

I guess I've tried to make up for not doing what I really want to do by trying to be good at what I'm doing - and I guess that's why I get mad at myself when I realize I still have a lot to learn at it. It doesn't help that since I have my hands in a lot of things, I don't always have time to devote to mastering any of them - I often have to settle for doing something well enough so I can move onto the next thing that needs to be done.

The other reality is that even the smartest people need help sometimes. I can think of a few times where I've helped out people who are considerably smarter than I am, either because it was a problem that I had run into before and they hadn't, or because I brought a new perspective into things.

I was watching Law and Order tonight, and one of the cops made a comment to another - who wanted to work alone - that it was better to work with someone else because they could bring "fresh eyes" to the case. I think that's true in solving IT problems as solving murders - it's good to have another person's perspective. Our department at work is going through a number of changes right now, and one of them is a physical move that will combine our office with another one that does much of the same functions. It's a pain to move, but one of the benefits is having other people around to bounce ideas or problems off - to have "fresh eyes".

Of course, it means that I'll be even further down on the list of smartest people in the room. I just have to learn to accept that.