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It's very common to feel mediocre when comparing ourselves to our peers. It's similar to the Instagram effect; we see our own struggles and trials and see other people's successes and ask ourselves why it came so easy for them and so hard for us. The reality is that you're not seeing the whole picture.

I was an engineer at Google for a while and have a few very applicable examples.

When I first started I was being shown around and there was some art on the wall that was taken with a gigapixel camera that an engineer had built from scratch (~2005). 20 years later I still have no idea how I'd begin to approach a project like that.

A few years later I was on a team with another engineer who was in a model rocketry club. One day I asked how his weekend went and he talked about his model rocket launch. Turns out it was 15 feet tall, they had launched eastward from Nevada, and had almost made a full orbit before it broke up over the Pacific. I was embarrassed by how I had spent my weekend (I think I was brewing beer).

Then I was in the other position. Plus hadn't launched yet, but it was being tested and used internally. There was a hackathon and we built a kegerator. You would badge into it and it would post to Plus who was getting beer, how much you got, and what temperature it was. When the weight got too low it would post a poll for what beer to get next. When it got even lower the poll would close and the admin would be sent an email. That summer we showed it to an intern and we saw the same deer-in-the-headlights look of "oh god, if these people can do this like it's no big deal how am I going to succeed?"

I'm not saying that nobody is good or fast at their job. I'm just saying that you haven't seen the work, the failures, and the history that got them to that point. I'm sure there are things in your own history that I wouldn't have any idea how to approach, just like there are probably things in my history that you wouldn't know how to approach.

Instead of feeling like a failure try learning from them, get some familiarity, and eventually you'll see that some look when you tell people about your projects.




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