You know, I’ve asked myself that question, “why are you so dumb?” more times than I can count. Not usually out loud, mind you. It’s more of that internal voice when I’m wrestling with something that just doesn’t make sense, or when I see folks, myself included, banging their heads against the same wall.
It’s Not Always About Brains
See, it’s rarely about actual intelligence, is it? It’s more about the situations we get ourselves into, or the systems we find ourselves working within. I remember this one gig I had, years back. We were building this pretty straightforward internal tool. Nothing revolutionary, just something to make a particular department’s life a bit easier.
But the way we were forced to build it? Man, oh man.
- We had to use this ancient, clunky framework because “that’s what we’ve always used.”
- Every tiny change needed approval from three different managers, two of whom barely understood the project.
- The database was a mess, a relic from a project ten years prior, and nobody wanted to touch it.
So there we were, a team of reasonably smart people, feeling utterly dumb. We’d spend days trying to implement a simple feature that should have taken hours. We’d have meetings about meetings. The code we were producing felt like we were trying to build a race car with wooden wheels. It was frustrating, to say the least.
The Moment I Just… Shook My Head
I distinctly recall one afternoon. We’d spent the better part of a week trying to get a specific data export working. The requirements kept changing, not because the end-users were fickle, but because the managers kept having “bright ideas” without understanding the implications. I was looking at this convoluted piece of logic I’d just written, a workaround for a workaround, and I just put my head in my hands.
“This is dumb,” I thought. “We are all participating in something incredibly dumb.”
It wasn’t that any single person was malicious or incompetent. It was the system. The inertia. The fear of doing things differently. It was like everyone was so used to the inefficiency that they couldn’t see it anymore. Or maybe they did, but felt powerless to change it.
I brought up some suggestions, you know, trying to simplify things. Maybe use a more modern library for that one tricky part? Or streamline the approval process? Nope. “Too risky.” “Not in the budget.” “This is how we do things here.” The usual stuff.
That experience taught me a lot. Mostly about how good people can get stuck in bad processes. And how sometimes, the “dumbest” things are a result of a whole lot of small, seemingly rational decisions piling up over time, until the whole thing is just a tangled mess.
I didn’t stay there much longer after that particular project wrapped. I realized I needed to be somewhere where I didn’t feel like I was fighting the system just to do decent work. Somewhere I didn’t have to ask myself, or the process, “why are you so dumb?” quite so often. It’s a work in progress, finding that perfect spot, but that gig was a real eye-opener. Made me appreciate clarity and common sense a whole lot more, that’s for sure.
