Are you the smartest person in the room?

I share their sentiment completely. I've had so many conversations that end up fizzling out because the coworkers I'm around don't share the same depth of knowledge in many of the topics they wish to discuss, which just becomes frustrating because it devolves into a pissing contest of "But where did you get that information from? Are they biased? Has it been well-tested?" and so on and so on, but then it just ends there. No follow up, no learning, no shared struggle for the truth of something or for verification. They have their "bibles" that they trust, and outside that it seems like a mountain climb just to get to a point where they're willing to accept new information about something they're already decided on.

To make matters worse, the topics will be of any sort of topic, even those where there's really no more room to argue about the truths of the subject (or even the concept of "truth", which was especially exhausting if they reject the idea of propaganda). Yet they only ever fall back to their bibles and continue to make the same mistakes and never really get better as developers, and in some cases, as people.

Now I do have to agree a bit with it sounding like a big ego problem, but you never want to actually be the smartest person in the room either. You have nothing to gain from it except an ego boost while everyone else gains from your knowledge and expands themselves. Ideally, you want to be somewhere in the middle, that way you have knowledge to give, but also room to grow and challenge yourself to achieve the level of those above you.

My favorite job was when I was surrounded by coworkers that had expansive knowledge in areas I knew nothing about, as they had a lot of great insight to share and resources they would suggest to me so I wouldn't have to rely on them.

The important thing is to understand domains and the scope of your knowledge. For some concerns, I am the smartest person in the room. For others, I'm absolutely not.

If you persistently feel like you're the smartest person in the room, either you have an exceptionally large number of mentoring opportunities or you need to do some introspection. Almost certainly the latter.

At work, I've never felt like it mattered one way or the other. If a colleague's ego is too big then THAT's the problem, not who is or isn't smart. I've never found all that much correlation between how smart someone is and how they handle their ego, sadly.

Not often. I prefer not to be the smartest person in the room. My colleagues are talented and intelligent and they keep me humble. If I'm the smartest person in the room, then I'm in the wrong room.

Not often, and I like it that way. I enjoy being around people who are demonstrably better in some dimension. It's a great way to learn something new all the time.