You don't know nothing. You're comparing yourself to a blur.

I spent most of my first year quietly convinced I was the only one in the building who didn’t know what he was doing.

You know the feeling. You’re standing at a panel, an alarm you’ve never seen is latched on the HMI, and the people around you are talking about ProfiSafe addresses and drive parameters and a fieldbus fault like it’s the weather. You nod. You write things down so it looks like you’re keeping up. And the whole time one sentence runs on a loop in the back of your head: everyone here knows what they’re doing except me.

Almost everyone starts out in this trade with that feeling. It’s a trap, because the thing you’re measuring yourself against doesn’t exist.

“Nobody here knows what they’re doing”

A while back I asked one of the older engineers a question I’d been sitting on for months. Not a technical one. I asked him, more or less, when do I get to the point where I actually understand all of this?

He said something I’ve thought about ever since:

“Nobody here knows what they’re doing completely. Either you know how to do it, you know how to google it, or you know who to ask.”

That came from a guy who’d been doing this for decades and had every right to pretend otherwise.

What hit me was how accurate it was. The people I’d been quietly idolizing weren’t walking encyclopedias. They were good at three things: doing what they knew, finding what they didn’t, and knowing who to call when they couldn’t find it themselves.

The circle that doesn’t exist

I had to draw this before it made sense to me.

Picture every person you work with as a circle. The circle is everything they actually know. The senior PLC guy has a big circle, but it has a shape: deep on Siemens, thinner on ABB, basically empty on the mechanical side. The safety specialist has a big circle pointing in a completely different direction. The electrician who’s been on the same plant for twenty years knows things about it nobody else does, and couldn’t write a line of structured text to save his life.

Every circle is real, every circle is bounded, and every one has gaps in it, including the impressive ones.

As a beginner you don’t see them as separate circles. You blur them. Without meaning to, you take the senior guy’s Siemens knowledge, the safety specialist’s ProfiSafe fluency, the electrician’s plant memory and the project lead’s commercial instinct, and you smear them together into one enormous circle. Then you hold your own small, honest circle up against that.

Of course you feel like you know nothing. You’re measuring one real person against a composite of every skilled person in the room. Nobody wins that comparison. The senior engineer doesn’t win it either. Put him on the safety system or a mechanical fault outside his lane and watch him reach for the phone.

This is a known thing, and it has names

The feeling has been studied for decades, and seeing that helped me take it less personally.

In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described the impostor phenomenon: capable people who can’t internalize their own competence and quietly fear being found out as frauds. The detail that matters is that it tends to show up in people who are doing well.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger added a related piece in 1999. The famous half of their finding is that the least skilled tend to overestimate themselves. The quieter half is that the strongest performers underestimated how they stacked up against everyone else. Blank confidence tends to come before you know anything. The doubt arrives later, once you’ve seen enough of the field to grasp how big it is.

The shape of getting good is mapped too. In 1980, Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus laid out a five-stage model of skill acquisition: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert. Nobody skips a stage. Everyone crawls through the early ones on explicit rules and conscious effort before any of it turns into intuition. The senior engineer whose competence looks like magic is just a long way down the same staircase you’re standing on. Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice makes the same case from the other end: expertise is accumulated, specific and hard-won.

And this trade is unusually broad. A single job can touch PLC logic, HMI and SCADA, drives, networks, functional safety, electrical design, the mechanical side and the customer relationship, across Siemens, ABB, Mitsubishi and whatever else. No one person holds all of it. The same breadth that makes you feel small is what guarantees nobody around you has the whole picture either.

The takeaway

You’re not behind. You’re a real, bounded circle standing next to other real, bounded circles, and you’ve been comparing yourself to a blur made of all of them stacked on top of each other.

The discomfort is normal and it might never fully leave. Plenty of engineers twenty years in still feel a flicker of it on an unfamiliar system. That’s the honest answer to when it stops. But it gets quieter when you measure against the only thing that counts: are you a bigger circle than you were last month?

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