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Fran Méndez

The dumbest person in the room

Published 1 day ago • 2 min read

The best engineers I've ever worked with were all convinced they were the worst one in the room.

I know, because I was one of them, and years later I asked around.

When I moved from Badajoz to Barcelona, I landed at a company full of people I was sure were smarter than me. Then a startup founded by the people who'd go on to build Factorial, and I felt even smaller. Then New Relic, with engineers flying in from Silicon Valley, and I was certain I was the dumbest person on every call.

At one point I gave a talk in Silicon Valley about AsyncAPI (the spec I had just created), and I spent the whole flight thinking: what is a kid from Badajoz doing here? This is a joke. They're going to find me out.

What I understood later, once I actually talked to the people I'd put on pedestals, is that they all felt exactly the same. Every one of them was sure everyone else was the genius and they were the fraud. Including the ones who scared me. LOL, it's funny and sad at the same time.

That feeling comes from the room you're standing in, not from your work. Stand a good engineer next to greater ones and they'll feel like an impostor, every time. It says nothing about what they can actually do.

And the people who look like gods from the outside? Half the time you're handing them value they never claimed. Read that last sentence again. They're not better engineers. They're just louder about the work they do.

So if you've been telling yourself you're "just a normal engineer," and that's your reason to stay quiet, you've got it backwards. You don't have to be the best engineer alive to deserve to be known. You have to be good, and you have to let people see it.

That's most of us. Me included, for more than a decade.

P.S. — In that panel at Silicon Valley, I was sharing the stage with:

  • Matt McLarty: Author of O'Reilly books Microservice Architecture and Securing Microservice APIs.
  • Varun Talwar: Product Management lead for gRPC and Istio at Google (at the time).
  • Mike Sample: Director of Technology / Principal Developer at Hootsuite (at the time).
  • Ryan Blain: CTO at Arvata.

Every one of them, genuinely brilliant. I sat on that stage certain I was the one who'd been invited by mistake.

I wasn't. And neither are you.

Have you ever felt like the dumbest person in the room?

Reply on Commune or simply reply to this email if you don't want to share it publicly. I get it.

Btw, I just launched a new thing. Have a look as I think it could be of your interest:

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Unrejectable: Founding Cohort

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Av. Joaquín Costa, 16, Badajoz, Badajoz 06001
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Fran Méndez

Creator of AsyncAPI | Empowering Staff+ Engineers & Architects to master Event-Driven Architectures with proven tools, processes, and best practices.

Hey hey! I'm Fran, the creator of the AsyncAPI specification (the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs). Subscribe to my newsletter —The Weekly Shift— where I share expert advice about building Event-Driven Architecture and share my journey writing my first book, Shift: The Playbook for Event-Driven Architecture Advocacy.

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