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.

That feeling is almost universal when you start out in this trade. And it’s mostly a trap — not because you secretly know more than you think (you might not), but 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 leaned in and 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’s the whole secret, handed to me in one sentence by a guy who’d been doing this for decades and had every right to pretend otherwise.

What hit me wasn’t the comfort of it. It was the accuracy. 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 finding it wasn’t enough. The competence I was staring at wasn’t knowing everything. It was knowing how to close the gap, fast, every single time.

The circle that doesn’t exist

Here’s the part I had to draw before it made sense to me.

Picture every person you work with as a circle. The circle is everything they actually know — their real, bounded competence. The senior PLC guy has a big circle, but it’s shaped a certain way: 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. Every one has a shape — with big gaps in it, including the impressive ones.

Now here’s the trap, and it’s almost invisible while it’s happening. As a beginner, you don’t see those as separate circles. You blur them. Without meaning to, you take the senior guy’s Siemens knowledge and the safety specialist’s ProfiSafe fluency and the electrician’s plant memory and the project lead’s commercial instinct, and you smear them all together into one enormous circle — and that impossible blob is what you hold your own small, honest circle up against.

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

Once that clicked, the “I know nothing” feeling got a lot quieter. It didn’t disappear. It just stopped being a verdict and started being math I was doing wrong.

This is a known thing, and it has names

It turns out the feeling has been studied for decades, and seeing the research helped me take it less personally.

In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described what they called the impostor phenomenon — capable people who can’t internalize their own competence and live with a quiet fear of being found out as frauds. The detail that matters: it tends to show up in people who are actually doing well. It isn’t a reliable signal that you’re behind. Often it’s loudest in exactly the people who are fine and just can’t feel it.

There’s a related wrinkle in the work of David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999). The famous half of their finding is that the least skilled tend to overestimate themselves. The quieter half is that the strongest performers in their studies underestimated how they stacked up against everyone else. Read that next to the feeling you’ve got: blank confidence tends to come before you know anything, and the doubt arrives later — once you’ve seen enough of the field to grasp how big it actually is.

And the shape of getting good is itself well mapped. In 1980, Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus laid out a five-stage model of skill acquisition — novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert — and the whole point of it is that 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 isn’t magic. He’s 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 — not something you either have or don’t.

And it isn’t only in your head, either. The trade itself 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 got installed before you were born. 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 are 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 at once.

The discomfort is normal. It might never fully leave; plenty of engineers twenty years in still feel a flicker of it on an unfamiliar system, and that’s the honest answer to when does it stop. But it gets quieter the moment you stop measuring against an imaginary giant and start measuring against the only thing that actually counts: are you a bigger circle than you were last month, and do you know how to close the gap when you hit the edge of one.

That’s the job. Not knowing everything. Knowing how to do it, how to find it, or who to ask — and growing your own circle a little every time you do.