Ask HN: What's a surprisingly useful tech skill that's underrated today?

1. Giving a damn. The majority of people don’t care at all about the work being performed. You can easily distinguish yourself by simply caring about whatever it is you’re working on.

2. A natural consequence of the above: fully reading the documentation, be it man pages or the official technical reference for a given technology. It’s incredible how many people don’t read documentation. You can become one of the foremost experts in your company simply by reading the documentation from front to back. You will seem like a genius.

> Giving a damn.

This is an underrated skill. I agree, the bar is so low that even a little bit of care/user empathy will make you stand out.

> You can easily distinguish yourself by simply caring about whatever it is you’re working on.

Care about the business, not specifically the thing you’re doing.

If giving a damn makes you stand out, it seems like that would indicate none of your peers or colleagues give a damn. Working at a place where you are the only person that gives a damn feels like torture.

I also wonder how much tangible value can be created by a group of incompetent people that care, compared to a group of skilled people that don't.

Well, the incompetent will find a way to make it work. Since management usually only cares about that, it will be fine. The competent who dont give a damn will basically result to vibe coding and receive similar results. Just with lower cost.

It's interesting how personal experience colors this view.

Personally I've had the odd colleague who didn't care, but they typically moved on, or got moved on, after a while.

But lots of people here have obviously experienced it, perhaps at multiple places, and so project that to "all companies".

I guess it does matter where you work, and perhaps numbering staff in thousands, or tens of thousands, means you end up with a lot of dross?

If I may add to your second point, generating good documentation is also important. Of-course if you give a damn, this may flow naturally.

There was a great article posted here that basically said the difference between knowing nothing and being an “expert” is usually reading a single book on the subject.

Just to add: only give a damn about things that you really give a damn about.

Some people give a damn about everything, which is probably a sickness.

re: 2: read all the docs, but don't memorize them. When faced with a question it's often enough to remember there are docs about the topic at all. If you don't know it exists you won't know to look it up.

Sounds like a prime example of Dunning-Kruger?