From time to time, this feeling sneaks up on me: I know everything. It happened again a few days ago.

I had dinner with a friend. We were talking about the situation in our country and imagining what it would be like to move somewhere else. He has wanted to go to the USA or Europe for a long time. He even interviewed for a job in Europe, but it did not work out. That interview showed him that he was not as strong a specialist as he had thought. His experience was not enough for the role.

I will skip the interview details. What matters is the conclusion we made: specialists in our country are often not as competitive as specialists in the USA or Europe.

When he finished his story, he asked me: “What about you? Do you think you are a good specialist? Do you think you could pass an interview in the USA or Europe?”

I said: “I think I know almost everything in my field. Maybe I miss some details in a few technologies, but I know the fundamentals, and I know them deeply.” I listed several things I knew less confidently and left it there.

Every day after that, I kept thinking about what I had said. My answer felt incomplete. I started to realize that I do not know everything. Even the things I think I know well are not as solid as I assume. I cannot fully prove it, but I feel I am not as strong a specialist as I imagine.

Some time ago, I learned how the GDB client <-> GDB server <-> Programmer <-> Target chain works. Before that, I thought this knowledge was useless. Now I understand that it is not. How can an embedded engineer not know how GDB works with a programmer? That feels strange to me now.

When I remember that conversation, I start thinking about other things that once seemed useless to me. That is where I can clearly see my knowledge gaps.

Assembly, compilers, JTAG boundary-scan testing: I know these topics in theory, but if you asked me to do real work with them, I would probably fail.

So now I come back to a quote often attributed to Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” And right now, I am not ready for interviews in the USA or Europe.

Over and over and over again…