Admitting ignorance often may be a good pragmatic practice when you are trying to get something specific done where that knowledge is important but it's not necessarily great for your career.
I have met numerous people in my career who seem incredibly impressive when you first meet them, like they are so smart and know something about everything but if you try and pin them down on specifics you realize that they are mostly full of hot air and are just parroting something they heard somebody else say. These people can often get promoted fast, assuming that they can do it convincingly because for every person that called their bluff they left that sparkling first impression on 50 more.
I wonder if it's that they are so good at BS that they have convinced the organization that they really are an expert or whether the organization actually values people who can convincingly BS for more senior positions? If you are in a position negotiating a large contract for example, it's definitely a good thing to look like you know what you are talking about.
In many , many cases you can get away with this BS because the issue itself might not actually be very important. If you can say "uh huh yes, I am familiar with framework X" and the conversation moves on to something else because it was never really about framework X in the first place, admitting ignorance may not be the best strategy.
I had a guy like that working for me after I was given a team of 16 network designers and engineers to manage. The guy in question was leading a team of 4 network engineers. A couple of the engineers came into my office and complained that this team leader did not actually appear to know anything about network design. I contacted HR and asked for his hiring resume and also wanted to know who interviewed him. Four of the five interviewers were still with the company and all 5 were non-technical people. Alarm bells. I read the resume and it was all kind of vague. I brought him into my office and gave him a kind of technical interview. He was evasive and vague about things. If he had been a jobseeker I would have sent him a polite letter saying no. But he had been on payroll for over a year, was widely considered to be a technical rockstar, and made 20k pounds more than me. One thing that this guy claimed was a CCIE. I checked with Cisco and they had no record of the guy.
I went to my boss, and laid out what I knew. He mentioned that the guy had already been to him complaining about me. I pointed out that the guy had ordered the new style company business cards and put CCIE on it. This means that he was defrauding our customers when he handed out the cards. I explained that every CCIE has a CCIE number and that if he gave us a number, we could check it with Cisco. My boss said that because it was now a sensitive HR situation he wanted to handle it. He advised me to go out for a long lunch that day.
When I got back, the guy's desk had been cleared which was very unusual because in the UK people normally work out their notice period, even if they take a job with a competitor or are laid off. My boss called me in at the end of the day, and thanked me for my investigation and then said that he managed to convince HR to raise my salary by 20k pounds.
Working in large corporate environments in more than one country, I have seen this kind of thing again and again. One particular case was the CEO in New York of a multinational technical company that I had joined. He only lasted two years though because the company was spending too fast.
Now I am always suspicious of people who are considered rockstars or geniuses. If they were really so smart then maybe they would apply that intelligence to sweeping stuff under the rug and pulling the wool over management's eyes, like a certain operations manager at a multinational Internet SaaS company that I once worked at. Technically he was pure incompetence but he managed to hide it for several years by staying online 24x7 and hacking his way around issues in secret until he literally went nuts and collapsed due to lack of sleep and 24x7 stress.
I have met numerous people in my career who seem incredibly impressive when you first meet them, like they are so smart and know something about everything but if you try and pin them down on specifics you realize that they are mostly full of hot air and are just parroting something they heard somebody else say. These people can often get promoted fast, assuming that they can do it convincingly because for every person that called their bluff they left that sparkling first impression on 50 more.
I wonder if it's that they are so good at BS that they have convinced the organization that they really are an expert or whether the organization actually values people who can convincingly BS for more senior positions? If you are in a position negotiating a large contract for example, it's definitely a good thing to look like you know what you are talking about.
In many , many cases you can get away with this BS because the issue itself might not actually be very important. If you can say "uh huh yes, I am familiar with framework X" and the conversation moves on to something else because it was never really about framework X in the first place, admitting ignorance may not be the best strategy.