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.

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.