Somebody in a meeting uses a word. Amortised. Idempotent. Normal form. The memory model. Everyone nods, the conversation carries on, and you get a cold drop in your stomach, because you came into this work from a bootcamp, or from teaching, or from a warehouse and a lot of evenings, and this is one more piece of evidence that there is a floor under everybody else that is not under you.
I want to be careful here, because the reassuring version of this is not true and you would see through it. There are real gaps. Somebody who spent three years being examined on data structures, networks and concurrency does have things you do not have.
But look at what you are actually doing in that moment. You are comparing one specific piece of somebody else's knowledge against a general, shapeless sense of your own deficit. That comparison always comes out the same way, and it will come out the same way for the next twenty years, because a fog cannot win an argument against a fact.
So get the fog to become a list. When one of those words lands, note it, keep your face still, and look it up that evening. What you will find, over a few months, is that it is not an ocean. It is somewhere between fifteen and thirty named things, most of them explainable in an hour, several of which will never once come up in your job.
The other half of this, which nobody says to you out loud: a great many graduates have forgotten most of it. They studied it in a lecture theatre, never used it, and could not define the same word cleanly if you asked. Meanwhile they have their own gap, which is that nothing on their course covered how software actually reaches a customer, and you have been learning that from the first week.
And after your first job, nobody checks. They check whether you can do the work.
Pick the one word you are most embarrassed about and give it one evening this week. That is the whole scale of the thing you have been carrying.
– Asael Shinder
