Comment by no-s

on the subject of "dumb problems" and undeserved acclamation:

One day I walked into the break room and observed one of the dev team leaders pissing on about how the vending machine didn't have the snack he wanted. I tapped on the glass right in front of him and he was instantly chagrined at the appearance of what he was missing right in front of his face.

This happens often enough I have some stock humor saved up for the occasion. In a serious tone I told him not to fret, I had observed this was a common problem with good developers who don't take enough breaks and with a little self-examination he could overcome it. In a kidding tone, I told him he was obviously stuck in trap of working too hard to work smart. "Just check your assumptions with a Pareto graph and a lot of life's little dilemmas will fall apart into easy pieces," I sez with a chuckle.

Later on it turned out he had told his team and they had a chuckle over how I enjoyed kidding them. Then they turned to the problem at hand and my guy had an aha moment and realized one of the grounding assumptions they had since literally the beginning of the project was subtly off. The week before I had solved someone's Java boxing/unboxing problem literally by accident in a single glance at the debugging trace whilst kidding him over his attempt to cast Integer into Long (int promoted to Integer in a library call). The team added up all my bad jokes and occasional "accidental" help, and in a collective Aha decided I was some kind of software engineering guru (I'm not - just a lot of painful painful experience to make light of).

And for a few months thereafter the devs would intently ponder everything I said. That quarter I actually got devs assigned to my issues because they all clamored to rub up against my supposed enlightenment, heheh. After I realized what was going on I got my top ten addressed and then suggested they needed to apply their learning to other people's issues...before they discovered my feet of clay...