What is obvious in your profession that YOU don't know?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread.

So you’re a professional, you’re good at your job, been doing it a while. But everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. What is a part of your job that you’re not great at, or not as good as you should be?

Hope mine isn’t too alarming… I’m a pilot. Used to be an airline guy, now I fly chartered jets. I have two weak-ish areas, which is to say I can do a workmanlike, even professional job of it, but it doesn’t come as naturally to me as to many of my colleagues.

I don’t have a great sense of direction

This is less of a big deal than you might think. When I was a teenager with a new driver’s license I got lost all the time. It’s actually much easier in an aircraft for several reasons, but I still had to work at it. When I trained for my instrument rating it got a bit challenging because you sometimes have to think in directions other than the one you’re currently going.

Even today, I have to think for a moment when things get complicated. Whereas I see some of my colleagues can do it instantaneously without a thought. However, there have been times I’ve caught them in mistakes because they went too quickly.

I don’t have a great understanding of electricity

When we train to fly a new kind of plane we spend a huge amount of time on aircraft systems. Looking at wiring diagrams, hydraulic systems, pneumatics, engines etc. I always struggle with the electrical system. I know the kindergarten stuff - volts is the size of the hose, amps is the amount of water, a closed switch means electricity is flowing and open means it’s not… But I can’t do it intuitively.

Some of my colleagues sound like they have electrical engineering degrees and can rattle off stuff like, “Well, we’re getting 28 volts instead of 24 because the emergency contacter is open and not the battery contacter, which means the battery is being charged when it shouldn’t be and the emergency bus is powering everything.” I’ll get there eventually, but not that fast.

Luckily for me, the industry is going toward more simplicity on this sort of thing. In modern planes if the gauge is in the green, that’s good, red is bad and then you read the checklist. But when I did this stuff on an old turboprop with 18 electrical busses I felt very out of my depth.

Who else will be brave enough to share?

2

I work in financial services and I’m horrible with fundamental analysis. I never took accounting and so all of those revenue, net income, and all the ratios go right over my head.

Thankfully, it’s not part of my current job.

3

I’m a cashier. I am not a people person. If I never had to interact with another human being in my lifetime, I’d be fine with it.

Nonetheless, my co-workers respect me and the customers like me.

I also only have one good hand, having messed up my left hand in an accident. I was the worst cashier the store ever had the first week I was there, and they considered letting me good. The second week, the higher ups were pleasantly pleased with my progress, the Boss telling me “The worst of this week is better than the best of last week.” The third week the boss was astonished, and the fourth week he was totally dropped jawed. I am probably the fastest one handed cashier in history.

4

What a fun thread idea!

I’m a mechanical engineer. Here we go!

  • I’m bad at arithmetic—I make a lot of errors. My math skills are merely average for an engineer when it comes to things like taking the occasional integral. Still, I do a fair amount of math with numerical methods. But because I make so many errors with pencil and paper, I do almost all of my math on a computer.

  • I’m politically liberal and non-religious. That sounds like it’s not work-related, and it shouldn’t be, but IME a majority of mechanical engineers are politically conservative and many of those are evangelical Christians. This was a shock to me when I started grad school. Even now, I occasionally have colleagues approach me with the obvious assumption that I’m also conservative and that I’m a Christian of one persuasion or another. I really believe I’m an outlier in that way.

5

I am a senior management consultant in IT. I know how to program quite well and I am an expert in gigantic applications that run whole companies. I am The Boss and quite well regarded.

However, don’t ask me anything about networking or how to fix your iPhone because, while I may stand a better chance than the average person, I know remarkably little about such things. Find your teenage niece or nephew if you need that kind of help. I specialize in things that don’t apply to consumer products and I hire people when I don’t know something.

I never expect people that work under me to know everything either. There are always people that know much more and that is the key. I never hesitate to pick up the phone to find someone that can help. That is good life advise in general.

My (excellent) General Practitioner doctor never hesitates to refer me to a specialist even after all those years of medical school and experience. I don’t expect him to be able to cure cancer. He just needs to know who I need to go to for any problem that comes up.

6

I’m an English professor. I was pretty crap at making sense of literary theory to begin with, and now that I’m a dozen years out of grad school it has all blurred together. If somebody says they are doing a Deleuzian reading of such-and-such, I couldn’t begin to tell you what that actually means.

Fortunately, I’m in a subfield where it’s a lot more important to understand other types of scholarship (like, say, theatre history), and at an institution where 75% of my job is undergraduate teaching and the other 25% is committee meetings, and if I do any research at all that’s considered gravy.

Oh, and I never learned how to use the online gradebook in our LMS, either.

7

I’m an artist, and ever since I was a kid I’ve always been very good at actually doing the art. These days, I’m working in a unique medium, and had to learn all sorts of skills I never knew before.

But the one thing I just suck at is communicating with galleries and gallery owners. I don’t know how to SELL my work, other than saying “Here’s what I do; take it or leave it.” I see absolute crap in galleries, and I wonder how anyone got it there.

8

As a package application implementation consultant I feel I am an expert at the package features, functions, and technical underpinnings, and the execution of the tasks to implement the package.

I am often put in the position of leading the project, which involves organization and facilitation and management reporting - project management lite. I am not a project manager (I appreciate that Project Management is a different skill set).

But, what I am most unable to do is estimate time durations for implementation. And naturally, this is a key question that I get asked by the client - how long will this take? There are real dollars and hours at stake depending on the answer to that question. Yet, I have never had a handle on how to answer that question going in the door. In my brain, it’s always a very fuzzy “it depends”, it could be 6 months, it could be 2 years, “it depends”. What is the scope? What is the size, availability and skill set of the team? What is the organizational readiness and leadership buy-in? How much money do you plan on allocating to the effort? These are questions that become clearer over time, but certainly not at the beginning, or early in a project. So, I hope the higher ups that sold me to the client on the project did a good enough job of sizing, and after that we do what we can, and like the man said in “Shakespeare in Love” - “I don’t know, it’s a mystery!”

9

As long as they aren’t 1)takeoff and 2)landing, I think we’re okay.

I’d suggest, if you want a suggestion, you watch some EE type youtube channels. People like AVE cover a lot of that stuff, but it’s mixed in with other things so it’s not that hard to digest. Bigclivedotcom (that’s the youtube channel name), mostly takes apart small and medium size electronics and talks about how they work. Granted, you probably don’t need to know how this capacitor interacts with that transistor, but a lot of the theory can be similar.
And, oddly enough some of the car mechanics, specifically (my favorite) South Main Auto (Eric O) spend a lot of time with wiring diagrams and he makes it really easy to understand while at the same time going really in depth as he’s figuring out why something isn’t working.

I spend more time than I’d prefer on a register (which isn’t much) and I have to push myself to make sure I greet customers. It absolutely doesn’t come naturally to me to talk to random people like that. I’m enough of an introvert that in college when friends would drag me to parties, they’d spend the next day explaining to people that I didn’t dislike them, I’m just quiet and don’t talk much in those situations.

10

I have no idea how much you make, but it sounds like you need an agent, or whatever they’re called in the art world. Someone that can speak both ‘artist’ and ‘owner’. Someone that can take what you do and sell it. Plus they’ll likely already have an in at the galleries and know where you’re work is likely to do best.

11

I’m an electrical engineer, and I’m bad at circuit design and analysis. If you show me a circuit diagram and ask me what happens if you swap capacitor C1=100µF with a resistor R1= 100Ω and a capacitor C2= 150µF or such like, I couldn’t intuitively tell you what would happen to the output voltage. Sure, if I had the equations remembered like I had when I graduated, I could figure it easily out, but only after crunching numbers. That intuition was never there, that’s why I straightly went into computers and IT, already with my thesis at college. Now, 25 years later, I’m a jack of all trades in IT, from programming over network to database administration, soft- and hardware support, and that’s ok, it covers a wide area, and I’m good at it. But I’ll never be the guy designing circuits in SPICE (that was the standard tool in 1994, please educate me if it’s obsolete ;)) and later realize it with a soldering ion.

Oh yeah, that’s also true: I’m an electrical engineer and the worst solderer you’ll ever meet.

ETA: I just noticed that this is a thing that always bugged and I have never really confessed to anybody. It reminds me of the impostor syndrome which I’ve read about lately in a different thread, but It’s not so bad in my case. I know what I’m able to and what not, and the things I’m able to are good enough, if specialized.

12

I’m a technical consultant. I’ve been a system admin for various applications, security admin, incident/problem/change coordinator. I’ve worked a couple dozen contracts for half a dozen companies over the past 25 years.

  1. I don’t have any certifications.
  2. I don’t program anything.
  3. I’m not a manager or a team lead.

This knocks me out of the running for a lot of contracts, but I still manage to find work.

13

You and me both. I have really good degrees but not in IT. I have zero certifications but I do have security clearances. I don’t pay attention to any certifications when I hire someone. As a matter of fact, having them counts against them because it is amateur level work. Only certain people are cut out for it and I can spot it instantly. I don’t even require any degrees at all and I don’t do bullshit interview sessions with dumb problems that will never happen.

I started programming when I was 8 years old. One of my best friends that I did it with invented the special effects for many of the most popular movies that you have seen. There is no way anyone is going to learn that in one 3 month course. There is nothing I can teach someone if they don’t already have it in them.

14

I analyze big datasets for a living, but it takes me an embarrassingly long time to do basic arithmetic in my head. Like, I’m the kind of person who needs absolute silence while I’m estimating a 20% tip.

15

I’ve looked at a few hundred air brake chambers in my short career so far, and today is the first time I’ve seen a brake caging bolt actually hung on the rear of the chamber.

The guy I was assisting with inspections asked about it, and while I was vaguely familiar with the practice it took me a minute. Then I was all like, as the kids say, duuuuh.

Probably better if drivers don’t have access to one as a matter of routine, IMPO.

16

I’ve drawn up a few budgets in my life, and I admit it was mostly guesswork.

Although I learned early on to add 10% to staff time, because no one worked as fast as I did; 10% to expenses, just to be prudent; and 10% to whatever final number I quoted, because we had to give the client room to negotiate. Maybe I wasn’t as bad as I think I was.

17

I’m a human resource generalist and I know nothing about compensation. I can’t analyze a position to figure out how much it should pay to save my life.

18

I am a distillery consultant (and breweries and wineries) I’m great at the mechanical engineering side of my job and I can make excellent booze but I’m not good with organic chemistry. I’venever taken a course on it and I’m 100% self taught. I get the basics of how the various chemicals interact and why we do what we do but when I start trying to force reactions to reach a particular end point it takes me forever to figure out what I need and how to do it.

Luckily, most of my clients don’t want to know the why and are satisfied with vague answers in the chemistry realm as long as the juice is amazing and the facility efficient.

19

The last couple of years before retirement I was working on advanced microprocessors. Most of the stuff we saw in the realm of defects involved very complicated circuit design.
When I was in college and grad school MOS transistors were in the back of the book, which we got to the last week of the term when you don’t really learn anything. So I’m very weak on that. Plus, my PhD is in computer architecture, the other end of the spectrum from circuit design. Even people working in my detailed area got it in school - when I was in school there was almost no theory for it, and in any case I wouldn’t have taken it, since I switched fields on graduation.
Fortunately I was good at a lot of stuff no one else was.

20

Retired consultant in Pharma regulation, specialising in everything to do with dosage form development, manufacturing and testing. I’m old enough to have been grandfathered in, and served my apprenticeship (as it were) actually designing, making and testing the damn things.

As the area of Pharma regulation became a discipline in itself (“Regulatory Affairs” - that’s what my job was called) young snots with a master’s degree in it would start turning up. Got the qualification, but oh my - talk about wet behind the ears. So my major selling point was that, unlike these guys, I had actually worked on just about every standard or standard-ish dosage form you could care to mention. I had prepped oral liquids, mixed powders, designed tablets and injections, filled semi-solids…but I never actually worked on…capsules. I would guess in terms of volume that’s the second most frequent dosage form. It was only really four or five years before I retired that I had a clear idea how they were actually made.

The way to bluff this: within my jack-of-all-trades portfolio, I’m a bit of an expert on powder technology and mixing. Capsule? Powder in a shell, right?

Oh, and read up - there’s a lot of information out there to put you on an equal footing (ie knowing the theory only) with the kiddies with masters degrees. And there’s a world of Youtube videos to show you how its done.

I got by.

j