“Nothing you can do impresses me”
When I first came to Silicon Valley, I had a couple of senior engineers as my mentors.  The most important lesson I learned from them is that they were extremely supportive.  I had a couple of ideas for new features, and instead of shooting them down and telling me why it wouldn't work, their responses were always "Hmmm, sounds interesting.  Why don't you spend some time on it and let's see how it works out."  When I did something dumb, they would point out the mistakes after implementation, but never in a "I'm smarter than you" way.<p>Of course, since then I've had many jobs where the other engineers were always hypercritical as this article points out.  In this industry there certainly is an undercurrent of everyone trying to prove how smart they are by showing why everyone else is dumber than them.<p>However, I'll never forget my first mentors and I try to respond exactly as they did, which is be supportive to any of the junior engineers that I mentor.  I always try to not say "no", even if I feel they are wrong, and I always engage in a conversation.  Even if I disagree with what they want to do, I'll try give them the opportunity to prove me wrong (within reason) as opposed to simply shutting them down with a curt "you're wrong, no."