Someone is generally classified as a smartass when the balance of intelligence is on the smartass side. So this is just giving idiot managers carte blanche to fire people smarter than they are. For job security I guess.
Not sure I agree. I've worked with a few "smartasses" in my time, and it can be a real pain. Some people are absolute masters of the technical details of a subject, but fail to see the wider context.
For example, you get developers optimising the hell out of a block of code - making it unmaintainable in the process - when the real bottleneck is developer time, not processor time. Or someone builds a giant vector autoregression model powered by MCMC when a rolling mean would have been adequate for the task.
Build the simplest tool that will solve the task at hand is not a mantra that comes easily to some people.
I've worked with smartasses, and I've worked with many people smarter than me. While there can be overlap, there generally isn't, in my experience.
Smartassery is something I've most often witnessed in people having a need for self-assertion. Most really smart colleagues I've had are confident enough in their skills that they don't need to prove them by being smartasses.
> Someone is generally classified as a smartass when the balance of intelligence is on the smartass side.
Sometimes that's true, when a dumbass is involved.
At least equally often, though, that's what smartasses tell themselves either to avoid facing their social deficiencies or because they lack the self-awareness to recognize them.
