I Tried Being Humble and it backfired horribly

Let me tell you a story about humility. You know, that thing everyone says you should have? Like, "Stay humble!" or "Don't brag!"? Well, I tried. As a software engineer, I thought being humble meant admitting when I didn't know something, asking questions, and avoiding acting like a know-it-all. Turns out, in the real world, humility is like wearing a sign that says, "Please doubt me."

Humility is the worst shitty advice you should give to your worst f*ing enemy right now. Go and try it right now! No need to finish reading this crappy post. Just stay if you wanna read me whinning about my personal results.

I tried being humble. The summary of my observations:

1. "I'm not sure" constantly got missunderstood for "I don't know anything."
   In meetings, if I said, "I'm not sure, maybe we should test this idea first", people suddenly looked at me like I'd confessed I'd never used a keyboard before. One time, a teammate rewrote my entire feature "just to be safe". Only cause I suggested that believing this new feature I commited would work flawlessly would be beyond over-confident. Meanwhile, the person who bragged with "This will take 10 minutes!" (spoiler: it took 10 days) earned their Lead Engineer status.
2. Explaining your limits is inviting others to ignore you.
   Period. And a different thing is what those viral cringe LinkedIn posts are saying.
3. The workplace loves people who sound right, not people who are right.
4. Non-coder POs, PMs and Managers confuse confidence with competence. If you're humble, people assume you're hiding incompetence. If you're loud and wrong, you're a "leader".
5. If you act unsure, people will fill in the blanks with their worst assumptions. And that's when the shitty advice of staying humble will fire you back ruthlessly. You will find yourself having to spend way too much time convincing others their assumptions are wrong. Totally avoidable if you ignore the shitty "act humble" advice.

I'm adjusting my value to inflation. You should do the same.

So here's my two cents, the secret I've learnt after paying the price: You don't have to be arrogant. But... Trust me, just stop downplaying yourself.

Instead of saying, "This might be stupid, but…", say, "Here's an idea."

Instead of apologizing for needing time to learn, say, "I'll solve this." Just save humility for moments that actually matter, like when you truly mess up. Life will force you to be humble at times anyways. Don't force yourself to artificially sound humble when is not needed.

This doesn't mean you should lie or pretend. But in an industry where everyone's pretending to be Albert Einstein you are stupidly firing on your feet for no reason.

So yeah, be kind. Be honest. But for the love of God, stop saying "I'm still learning" out loud in this industry. You are sorrounded by folks that are constantly shouting loud they already know it all.

You are undervaluing yourself in a market suffering from inflation because of people selling themselves up. And by being humble, which may be just trying to display your true value, you're indirectly setting your value lower.

Just go with the flow and adjust your value upwards. 🤷 No guilt.

Thanks for reading,