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I have this unhappy experience every day, when I find people don't know things that are essential to doing their jobs. I try hard not to let it show too much or

I have this unhappy experience every day, when I find people don't know things that are essential to doing their jobs. I try hard not to let it show too much or fall into the trap of acting superior, but the soul-crushing depression makes this hard.

shubb 12y ago
The more I learn, the clearer it becomes that I know very little. Things that I used to know fade away - a few years out of college, I can't do matrix maths anymore. Software engineering is a big job. Software engineers might know about assembly code, pointers, design patterns, UML, functional programming, algorithms, AI, statistics, reverse engineering, driver programming, SQL, NoSQL, matrix calculations and numeric simulation, control theory, cloud scaling, devops, unit testing, XML schema design... Then, if you think about the things outside programming an engineer might need to know, like marketing, sales, budget control, estimating, project management, user experience design, graphic design, human psychology. And the domain they are working in of course. That's a lot to know. Even the basics. I don't know the basics of a lot of those things. Doesn't meeting all these people who don't know things make you wonder what you don't know that you don't know?
- judk 12y ago
  Of course I don't know everything. But the stuff I don't know is irrelevant to my job. If you join my team, I expect you to know everything relevant to your new job, not whatever trivia you might have found amusing elsewhere.