I was originally a chip designer. Then I shifted into embedded development. Now I’m mainly a C# guy.
But when I shifted into embedded development, I also shifted into doing power engineering. I grabbed a couple of books on the topic at hand, taught myself a lot, and designed the electronics to meet the need. We sold the product to city utilities.
I remember one time I was in a room with probably 10 engineers from one of the utilities. After having described the product to them, and went through a lot of our settings and stuff, I was explaining the difference between two of algorithms we put in (because different utilities use different algorithms, and I just wanted one device that could do both). At some point I was like “which of the two algorithms do you use?” and one responded “well, which do you recommend?” So I talked about why I thought one was better than the other.
They all started looking at each other and nodding and saying “Yeah, that’s the one were going to use.” I realize I could have said anything at that point and they would have agreed. They thought I was expert. And that was my “last two frames” of this comic moment.
Now as a senior dev, I’ve seen enough shit to realize that most people have no idea what is going on, and are flying by the seat of their pants. So I figure my ignorance is a little less than theirs, and that gives me a lot of confidence, but I also realize that I can learn a lot from most people.
I’ve always felt like I don’t deserve my role, I climbed the proverbial ladder quick and I am very young for my position (Principal Engineer). But I sleep fine at night because at the end of the day I was always honest with my skills, my intentions and my motivations, and I’m always sure to get full agreement from everyone before doing stuff. If after all that nobody figured out I’m a fucking idiot just making an informed guess, that’s on them.
I always fear the next company I join will have “real technical leaders” who will inevitably show me my place, but it hasn’t happened so far (3-4 massive companies in the last decade).
Maybe one day I will meet this person, but it is not this day… And then I try to teach the same to younger engineers to work through problems as a team and just do it until somebody stops you, because in a lot of cases nobody has a clue either, and that’s what it means to lead.
I’m not in software development, but this is how the entire company I work for operates.
We’re just kinda going forward with no clear direction, keeping stuff ticking over and constantly coming up with future plans that never come to fruition.
This is how the world is. No one is really an expert. No one really has the answer.
Embrace agile programming. Add what the customer wants and laugh at their poor decisions.
inb4 senior delegates critical decision-making to juniors and only shows up once stuff is on fire
That was me in the first few months after I had to replace the senior dev when he took a better job. I was only junior for like 5 months prior to this, I also lied about having 2 years of experience in the interview and the team misunderstood my quick learning with expertise. At the end they thought I was good enough for the position but I was freaking out because I was lacking a lot of experience, I still took it because the raise was huge. I couldn’t sleep well for months while I was trying my best to learn how to do my job.
One of my favorite managers once told me while I was struggling with a severe case of imposter syndrome “if you’re faking it well enough that others can’t tell, you might not be faking it as much as you think.”
Yup, the good old imposter syndrome. The truth is no one really knows what they’re doing,
