confronting the buffoon

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i frequently find myself thinking that i am the dumbest possible person in any room i enter, and that feeling is exacerbated by technology. at work and in my personal tech life, i, presumably like most people, exclusively build upon abstraction. the tools i use have been built by others that understand things better than i could. at best, i have only a high-level understanding - if at all - of what exactly the concepts i interface with daily are

for most tasks this is sufficient. depending on where you work, people might not care about how you solve an issue, only that it is being solved. the "how" doesn't matter as long as you're not introducing another immediately obvious problem with your solution. an example i frequently encounter is openid connect, or oidc for short. i don't know how it technically works, but i know how to configure it to leverage identity providers for authentication and claims for authorization purposes. i have looked at uml diagrams describing the flow of oidc plenty of times, yet remember nothing and couldn't describe it to you if my life depended on it. but from the view of an employer i know my shit because i solve the issue of lack of single sign-on. even if i did understand oidc, it wouldn't matter to me because oidc is boring. but not understanding still bothers me

an easy way of getting acquainted with anything is reading the fucking manual as they say. whenever i try to not just skim it, my brain quickly turns off and i stop. i don't come back to it either because reading technical details is not fun compared to say watching a youtube video on mascot horror. reading anything technical feels like i'm wasting my precious time which is ironic considering that watching a youtube video is much more meaningless in the context of what most people would call a productive and fulfilling life. "just watch a youtube video on the subject then" is something one might suggest, however i find that to be a cheap way out of being a functioning person. i want to do it "the hard way" by buckling down and just diving into the text. it's like my body is rejecting this however. also, i put the literature down much faster if it either does a long-winded introduction to basic concepts i might already have spent a lot of time on (even if i don't understand them anymore) or contains a lot of references to other complex technology i don't understand

the result is that i google primitive shit a lot. i have outsourced the deep understanding part to other people and hope those same people post the solution to whatever issue i might encounter in my daily struggle. my colleagues tell me this is normal. no one can remember every little thing about everything after all. yet it does not feel normal to me. it feels like i should know and understand the entire stack of any piece of technology i use. not only because it makes working with the stack easier, but also because of how unsatisfying it is to be a bumbling buffoon who just barely gets by on account of the luck of not being challenged to a degree where deeper knowledge would be required. lexers, compilers, linkers, it all sounds so interesting, but my lack of interest in the science behind it all makes it a chore to engage with the concepts of acyclic graphs or abstract syntax trees

back in 2014, in my head i developed this idea of becoming a hacker. not in the contemporary sense of the word i.e. breaking into systems (though pursuing a red team job has also been a goal in the past), but rather in the esr sense of the word (disclaimer: i find any tech personality and the article in general really cringe but i was young back then). a curious mind pursuing the art of programming with the goal of solving interesting technical problems in the most elegant and efficient manner, contributing brain power to complex joint effort projects. i suppose it's about time to acknowledge that i am not a hacker and probably never will be. my mind is mostly uncurious. i'm an IT employee strictly because i don't know what else to do with myself and i have wasted so much time on computers that it's now impractical to not continue down the road. the money is good and it affords a lifestyle i have become accustomed to. while i do enjoy tinkering with stuff for the sake of tinkering in my free time, i mostly produce toys and really nothing of much worth

don't get me wrong. it's not that i'm incapable of producing quality work. i have rather strict quality standards that i expect myself (and unfortunately others) to adhere to and release only work that i can be proud of, whether the result meets the standards of others or not. my crime is ignorance but i wouldn't necessarily describe this as malicious behavior

speaking of maliciousness, let's talk about harm. is me not pursuing my ultimate form by pushing past my reluctance or perhaps natural inability to get smart harmful to my employer? especially considering that i'm now part of a smaller crew where the failings of one person might affect the whole more than in a giant corp? if one can assume that my hypothetical replacements were more competent and dedicated to the craft than me 100% of the time, then it's 100% harmful. this is hard to prove however, and until it can be proven, i suppose i will continue taking my chances, doing the best i can with my limited amount of drive

one could assume it's a good thing that at least i have made peace with who i am and my limitations, but make no mistake, it's not a good thing and i am very much not at peace. i don't choose to limit myself, it's done for me, and it's cruel if anything

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath