another look at alien technology

Based on the premise of SETI, if we do start talking to aliens, the ensuing conversation could get awkward very quickly...

We generally tend to assume that if an alien species on some faraway world contacted us, it would have to be a good deal farther along in its technological development than we are. After all, they will have to embark on a mission to find intelligent life on other worlds and apply quite a bit of technological savvy to monitor countless stars and try to locate planets like their own in hopes of finding some creatures that might be willing to attempt a dialogue with them.

Just like we're doing now. And that brings us to an interesting point to consider. If we're already trying to get in touch with aliens via Active SETI and building arrays able to detect their signals, would intelligent aliens need to be any more advanced than us to get our attention?

Conversely, if the aliens trying to either contact us or listen for our signals have the same idea about our level of technological capabilities as we do of theirs, they might be severely disappointed. If they're close enough to establish two way communication, we might be beaming messages to each other in hopes of being handed the secrets of the universe by a species far more advanced than we are only to find that they expect the same of us and our technological abilities are very comparable.