Almost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes.

In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"

dumbness is ranking intelligence, which is a positive trait, dumbness is just a metric for how often intelligence fails.

Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons.

You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.

Btw how do you know your current manager is not doing that.

I'm not a manager and I don't stack rank people, but I am 100% capable of knowing when one of my co-workers or predecessors is a fucking moron.

The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like

    // @ts-nocheck
    // obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it?
    async function upsertWidget() {
      try {
        // await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... })
        // 20 line block of commented-out useless code
        // pretend this went on much longer
        let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c })
        if (!result.ok) {
           result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun
           if (!result.ok) {
             result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating
           }
        }
        // notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently
        // also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript
        return result
      } catch (error) {
        return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object 
      }
    }

    function doSomething() {
      const widget = await upsertWidget()
    }

...except even worse, because instead of createWidget the name was something far less descriptive, the nesting was deeper and involved loops, there were random assignments that made no goddamn sense, and the API calls just went to an unnecessary microservice that was only called from here and which literally just passed the data through to a third party with minor changes. Those minor changes resulted in an internal API that was actually worse than the unmodified third party API.

I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.