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It strikes me as more along the lines of "I knew way more than that person, and they were completely oblivious to the fact that they didn't know this stuff, AND they were in a position that required them to know stuff."

I'm fine working with non-technical people (or who don't know any given field), but I wouldn't be fine working with those people if they were insistent that they did know about these things about which they actually had no clue, or if they were in a position where they really need to know this stuff.

I have coworkers who don't know how to use the command line, but they aren't engineers and they don't try to tell me what commands to run when I pull up a console, so it's fine. If they keep insisting that I should use "dir" and that "ls" is wrong, that would be a problem. If they were the CTO, that would be a problem.

When we hire engineers for customer support, the non-technical operations guy interviews them, but he always has at least one engineer do a portion of the interview because he knows he's not fully qualified to judge someone's technical chops.

The OP isn't being condescending just because someone didn't know stuff. It's because someone didn't know stuff, but because they acted like they did. You want to be insufferable, insist you know better than the experts in a given field.




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