What Iknow Everyone Should Know

An AntiPattern, wherein persons with rather specialized and/or frequently obscure skills will loudly insist to all and sundry that anybody who wishes to be considered competent, should acquire at minimum the same skillset.

In some cases, the skills in question are indeed things which competetent professionals should be able to muster. In other cases, the skill in questions is significantly obscure or specialized that it would be highly un-economical for all professionals to acquire it, as doing so would be a waste of time for most of them. Oten, this sort of boasting amounts to little more than a roundabout way of proclaiming superiority over one's colleagues, and implying that everyone else on the team is incompetent for being unable to, for example, mentally disassemble a hex dump of a program binary (thanks to TomStambaugh for telling us of an excellent example of this).

In other words, it's a way of engaging in a PissingContest with one's peers.

See also SpecializationIsForInsects. But note the difference: while the proclaimer of WhatIknowEveryoneShouldKnow will happily claim that his skillset is congruent with the requirements for a True Professional; he will also proudly state that those areas of the discipline in which he is unskilled are superfluous, trivial, contemptible, or otherwise unnecessary--and that any deficiencies in his abilities in those areas, are of no significance.

SmugSmalltalkWeenie: WhatIknowEveryoneShouldKnow.

Somebody else: IfSmalltalkIsSoGoodWhyDoesNobodyUseIt?