You can’t believe what people say because you see a dichotomy between what you do and what you want to do. They’re saying it because they see what you do compared to what they expect/what the average person would do. You just need to readjust your scope a little bit.

Regarding the smart thing, it may be more the way you go about work, rather than retention of codility (I have no idea what that is, but I assume it’s coding) information. Have you ever seen someone come up with one or more cool tricks to speed things up? That’s the sort of thing that makes us call someone a smart person, regardless of the context.

Signed, an immigrant with a very good but imperfect knowledge of my new country’s language. I can recognize patterns in German grammar that, as far as I can tell, have not been previously described in grammar texts (getting a masters in German, so I have read a lot of grammar resources), but I also can’t remember whether I should say “das hilft sehr” or “das hilft viel” (“that helps very/a lot,” which should be obvious, but I always think it’s different from English) when someone gives me a lot of change at work.