Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.

[253, 29, 14, 89, 230, 208, 108, 150, 258, 211, 214, 21, 284, 106, 278, 241, 40, 186, 123, 44], k=17

253