You are unwise. You're supposed to be, right out of school—its a peculiarity of this industry that we look at peers who are like five minutes more experienced and see someone presenting themselves as "senior". Humility is a good thing. It sounds like you're self-aware enough to have it, so take that and run with it and realize that your university degree provides you a solid foundation to start learning—its not the end state of the learned.
Yes. But our culture does not value humility much. It values arrogance and over-confidence much more. Take a look at characters like Iron Man, or sit through some managerial or high level analyst interviews.
Not sure if you and I just run in different circles, but folks that are not impressed with blowhards are out there.
I want to find some posts I've seen here on HN that show this attitude.
edit: arrogance is less prevalent amongst technical people, but you can see examples amongst management, traders (read Michael Lewis's books, especially Liar's Poker), salesmen, etc.
A favorite saying I encountered during grad school:
<after finishing undergrad>: "I know everything!"
<after finishing Master's>: "I know nothing..."
<after finishing PhD>: "Nobody knows anything."
When I first joined HN about 6 months ago I couldn't comprehend 80% of the material. I remember browsing through and thinking it all looked like Assembly code. It felt great to be surrounded by such brilliant minds, which is why I kept coming back, but I did feel like a lost puppy. Now, months later, I don't yet consider myself knowledgable enough to be posting comments (this is probably my 5th comment), necessarily, but it feels great to now be able to follow at least 50% of the content. This is the result of two things: a, Browsing HN pretty much daily and b, Programming more, focusing on the things I don't already know.
There aren't many lessons to be learned in your comfort zone. Good luck!
There was a thread a while back about this exact topic, and someone mentioned that John Carmack doesn't know SQL or anything about relational databases. True masters are rarely generalists.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/457916010234777600
How can someone accomplish so much and not know anything about SQL/RDBMS. Pretty surprising though.
Instead of spending time learning SQL, which he'd never use while creating a game, he only learned and practiced the skills he used for games. It's incidental that a lot of those skills are fairly universal and low-level, which gives us the false impression that Carmack is a generalist.
There's a universe of programmers that don't work in the LAMP stack (including me) because it doesn't suit what they are trying to accomplish.
Speak for yourself, what do you do? Personally, I'll read anything that looks interesting, regardless of whether it's something I may be able to comment on.
My first computer program compiled and ran in the summer of 1967. I have spent most of my life since then learning about computers. There is far more information than I can ever hope to learn. New languages crop up nearly every day. I only know about a dozen well enough to write a respectable program in them. I frequrntly get on HN (Hacker News)and find articles about "New release of Zarbodog" and I sometimes click through to see whatI am missing (I've never heard of Zarbodog). Often the article tells about speed improvements, space savings, interoperability with some API but never actually states what Zarbodog is. A well-written article will start off with a sentence or two which tell what it is (hardware, software, website), what OS (Operating System) it is for, what language it is in (or compatible with), and what it is useful for. I see a lot of ACRONYM(Abbreviated Capitalized Randomly Ordered Names Yielding Madness) usage which is not explained upon first usage. This is also a good practice. If your failure to understand the titles or articles stems from lack of background, it is no sign of stupidity. You may never have enough background knowledge to fully understand all of the articles. "Knowledge is being aware that you're on a one-way street; wisdom is knowing to look both ways before crossing it." - old saying
But then there's the "lol startup ruby app lol javascript framework!" type articles that convinces me to stay in the deep end of the pool, even if it feels like drowning.
There is always someone who is smarter and more knowledgeable than you. What matters is that HN provides easy access to those smart minds and I love it.
There may be people who are not as knowledgeable as you. In that case, I love teaching them what I know.
Then I'll even try to look up the meaning of an unfamiliar term, but the definition itself uses 5 other terms that I also don't know. So I'll go look up those 5 terms, but by then I'm three levels deep and sure as hell not any closer to the original topic I was trying to learn about.
Yeah man, HN has taught me that I'm straight-up useless! Shew...
If one has the patience to go 3 levels deep every time he/she faces some strange vocabulary, then with each unfamiliar post here, that person will get to witness dozens of new technology which in the end may help him/her to find the right one to scratch beyond the surface.
Hacker News, imho, is one of the places where hard consumption is beneficial for the reader as long as he/she stays sceptical which is a rare occasion in other common social media sources.
Also the more you post here the more you realize how many doofuses there are here (not naming names). If you see someone posting something that makes you think they're smart, start digging thru their post history and see if they're (a) actually smart, (b) just sound smart, or (c) might be smart in this one narrow focused area but have really dumb thoughts about other things.
There will come a day where conversation on HN is no longer humbling, but recognizable as running in circles on topics that have become within your wheelhouse. With any luck you'll be able to differentiate between the handful of knowledgeable people here well-versed in domains you didn't pursue and the people talking out of their ass.
Think about the area you have identified. Chiefly, is it worth learning? Would you find it stimulating or useful? Channel your decision in to confident curiosity, and your curiosity in to learning.
One day, if you keep going, you can confidently launch in to this sort of broad, deep, out-of-context learning routinely and without stress or great difficulty.
Just remember: life's too short to try to learn everything. Some people love being the expert at something, others prefer a more distant, 'renaissance man' or talented generalist approach. There is no single path, just be confident building your own.
And that's fine, actually. I've been exposed to a great amount of things that, had I not been here, I would never had seen.
Being in the lowest 20%, or at least my self-perception of that, means there's a whole lot I can do to improve and rise up the scale, as and when or if I choose to.
Don't spend too much time reading about other people doing.
Spend your time learning and not being entertained.
You'll be just fine.
1. Startup Culture is "meme"-able (see https://archive.is/UZ5Wp)
2. Political Correctness trolls / beta male white knights (the jackals)
3. The normal deficiencies that come with any karma based system, "circle jerk".
That said, I get away with truths here that'd never fly on reddit. Ranked by freedom of thought (Worst -> Best):
DevShed Forums -> StackOverflow (Unconstructive) -> Reddit (Paoist) -> Reddit (Pre-Pao) -> HN -> /g/
/g/'s huge benefit is anonymity and karma-less system. You get used to ignoring the cruft. The problem is it's the ultimate extreme end of the spectrum.