For a long time, I carried a quiet insecurity into my work. As someone with a perfectly average IQ, it was intimidating to sit side by side with people who are “Mensa-level” smart. In the world of enterprise software, many engineers operate at a level of pattern recognition, systems thinking, and technical problem solving that is almost breathtaking to watch.
In my early days, that brilliance felt like a shadow over me. I worried that because I couldn’t see around corners the way they could, or architect a solution in an afternoon that might take me a week to grasp, I didn’t belong.
But lately I’ve begun to see it differently.
Different Brains, Different Gifts
One of the privileges of testing is the variety of perspectives you get to bring into the room. Software engineering teams need that variety, because no one brain type can cover all the ground.
Some people see elegant patterns where others see noise. Some can hold an entire system in their head and shift its pieces like a chessboard. My brain seems to work in another direction: connecting dots between people, clarifying processes, asking the kinds of “simple” questions that keep us grounded in what the user actually needs.
For a long time, I dismissed that as “lesser intelligence.” But I’ve started to understand that it’s not lesser—it’s different. And difference is exactly what makes a team strong.
The Tester’s Role
In testing, this difference shows up in practical ways. While others may dive deep into code optimizations or architectural elegance, I find myself tracing the human story of the product:
How will this behave for the accountant logging in after a long day? What happens if the user clicks the wrong thing at the worst time? Is the process simple, or are we expecting people to think like engineers to get through it?
The “dumb” questions—what happens if I do this? why does it feel confusing here?—often lead us to discover edge cases, usability snags, and even data integrity issues that otherwise slip through.
That doesn’t make me less valuable than my “genius” colleagues. It makes me complementary.
Building Smarter Rooms
The truth I’m learning is that the magic isn’t in being the smartest person in the room. The magic is in building a room where different kinds of intelligence get to play together.
The engineer who can juggle patterns. The tester who can feel the friction points. The designer who can see beauty in simplicity. The customer who can tell us what matters most.
When these gifts combine, software not only works—it breathes.
Closing Thought
If you sometimes feel average in a world of brilliance, don’t rush to trade your perspective for someone else’s. Instead, notice where your mind naturally goes, and offer that gift fully.
Because software needs not only genius, but also empathy, persistence, creativity, and curiosity.
And when those things work together, the whole is always smarter than the sum of its parts.
Testing Tester 
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