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The Engineer's Amnesia: Overcoming the "Curse of Competence"

naveed Root User
Feb 12, 2026 5 Min Read Intermediate

You spend three days fighting a distributed scraping bottleneck. You battle 403 Forbidden errors, debug obscure TCP timeouts, and finally realize the issue is a misconfigured header in your reverse proxy. You change three lines of config. The system purrs.

When the client asks what happened, you shrug and say, "Oh, it was just a small config fix."

Stop doing this. You are suffering from the "Curse of Competence." It is the single biggest reason highly skilled engineers undercharge for their work and struggle to write case studies.

The Four Stages of Learning

To understand why we forget our own achievements, we have to look at the psychological model of competence:

  • 1. Unconscious Incompetence: You don't know what you don't know. (e.g., "I'll just write a quick scraper.")
  • 2. Conscious Incompetence: You realize this is hard. (e.g., "Why is Cloudflare blocking me? What is a TLS fingerprint?")
  • 3. Conscious Competence: You can do it, but it takes extreme focus. You are sweating, Googling, and testing.
  • 4. Unconscious Competence: You just do it. Your brain automates the solution.

The "Curse" lives in Stage 4. Because the solution now comes naturally to you, you devalue it. You assume that because it was easy for you, it must be easy for everyone.

Why This Hurts Your Business

When you dismiss your work as "simple," you are billing for your typing speed, not your expertise.

That "3-line config fix" didn't take 5 minutes. It took 5 minutes plus 10 years of experience. If a junior engineer had attempted that fix, they might have spent two weeks rewriting the entire application code, never realizing the problem was in the infrastructure layer.

"The client is not paying for the time you spent typing. They are paying for the years you spent learning what to type."

The Fix: Archive Your Trauma

As engineers, our instinct is to solve a problem and immediately delete the pain from our memory to make room for the next ticket. To fight the Curse of Competence, you must interrupt this cycle.

1. Keep a "Brag Document"

Start a simple text file. Every Friday, force yourself to write down one problem you solved. Do not write "Fixed database." Write: 

Problem: Daily ingestion lag hit 4 hours.
Root Cause: MySQL InnoDB buffer pool was thrashing due to random I/O on UUID inserts.
Fix: Changed primary key to ordered UUIDs and optimized innodb_io_capacity.
Result: Ingestion time dropped to 10 minutes.

2. Use the "STAR" Method

When updating your portfolio or Clutch profile, use this framework to recover those lost memories:

  • Situation: What was broken? (e.g., The API was crashing).
  • Task: What was the goal? (e.g., Handle 10k req/sec).
  • Action: What specific technical magic did you perform? (e.g., Implemented Redis caching).
  • Result: What was the business outcome? (e.g., Zero downtime during Black Friday).

Conclusion

Your expertise is invisible to you because you live inside it. But to your clients, it is magic.

The next time you solve a "simple" data engineering problem, take a moment to appreciate the complexity you just navigated. Write it down. Charge accordingly. And remember: if it were truly easy, they wouldn't have hired you.

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