Big Tech engineers are idiots

Starting startups I realized that I was an idiot. I left Big Tech with a relatively ego, all these fast promotions, I'm good on my team, my team's grown, 16 people, leading all these cool things, whatever. And I leave all of that to realize, I don't know a damn thing. Not only had I not really coded significantly in a year and a half at this point, um, cause it was mostly ideation and leadership at this point. But to the extent that I was coding, it was narrowly on this small thing. And so I work on my small thing and then I hit go. And then within six hours, that is affecting 3 billion people and every single post that comes into Facebook. But I didn't figure out how to make that happen. I figured out how to do my little thing, but everyone else did everything else around me. Like I had never set up a simple caching layer. I'd never configured my own database. I suppose I had done some of these things at a small capacity in college, but by and large, right? And now I have to do it. And so at first, like it was super humbling. It was like, crap, this is really hard. I don't know any of this. A lot of front end stuff. I'd never written a line of front end code. And I have to learn all of a sudden at the time, like we were slinging raw jQuery, you know, using React. And now here I am on the other side of it. And I feel like I now have practical skills. You can drop me into any situation and I can figure it out. I can go to any other startup.