Comment by Dove

I had a very similar observation about engineering early in my career. The first project I worked on professionally felt vast compared to anything I'd seen in school. At first I was embarrassed to be new, to have to ask questions, to have to deal with solving problems in areas I didn't fully understand. It took months and months to "come up to speed", and I felt that I was drowning in complexity and unqualified for the work I was doing. Ultimately I came to understand that this is the normal state of engineering, especially when innovation is happening. The bulk of the work in engineering (not all of it, but the vast majority, especially in software) is fully understanding the problem space, the tradeoffs between alternative paths, understanding how your solution holds up and fixing bugs. In short, once you've gotten all your questions answered and finally feel fully qualified and no longer ignorant, you've also solved the problem you were working on. Time to move on to the next thing.

When I realized that, I realized that feeling dumb was actually normal, and that I should embrace it and expect to spend the majority of my career in that state. Not only did this dissolve my embarrassment, but it made me seek out ways to thrive in uncertainty and chaos -- which skills have been to my advantage for many years.

It is uncomfortable to admit you don't know things, or you don't know the best way to proceed, or you don't understand something. The temptation is to downplay that, to pretend you understand, to retreat toward the things you understand well. But poking at the unknown is how you get smarter, and ultimately how you solve problems. It takes courage, especially in a crowd, but it is also what solving problems normally feels like.