Date: 2025-07-01
Theme: Growth and Mentorship
"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality." - Seneca
I had to take an emergency on-call shift recently during the weekend, a time when team availability is very limited, if not nonexistent. While I have a basic understanding of how our systems operate, the team domain I support is nuanced and highly sensitive. We deal with authentication, authorization, and security - areas where the margin for error is thin. An incorrect response in an incident doesn’t just mean degraded service - it can mean serious consequences for access, trust, or customer security.
Taking the shift was a no-brainer. I believe in showing up for my team. I went in with confidence that I’d do my best if something happened. And yet, as the hours passed, I started to feel a quiet but growing anxiety.
What if I get paged at 3 a.m.?
What if I take the wrong action?
What if my decision makes things worse?
Nothing serious happened in the end. But the experience left a mark. It reminded me of how dangerous a little knowledge can be - not just practically, but emotionally.
The anxiety I felt wasn’t because I believed I was helpless - it was because my mind wandered to hundreds of ways things could go wrong. On-call is not the time for that kind of mental spiral. Stress and fear don’t help you respond better, they distract, they break your judgment, and they make outcomes worse.
So the question I wrestled with was this: How do you carry responsibility when you only have a little knowledge? And how do you manage your mind in those moments?
This experience reminded me that a little knowledge is a double-edged sword. It opens the door to stepping up, but it also opens the door to self-doubt and spiraling.
But there's a hidden blessing here too: knowing that I don’t know enough means I have a path forward. It’s under my control. I can prepare. I can learn. I can build muscle for these moments, not just technical muscle, but emotional resilience.
In reality, the danger wasn’t the potential of making a mistake. Most mistakes in software are reversible. The real danger was the anxiety, the fear of being exposed, of not being good enough, of being unprepared. That fear has weight. And it lingers.
- If or when something will happen that I’m unprepared for
- The unknown unknowns that exist in complex systems
- Whether my knowledge will be enough in every situation
- Learning something every day
- Proactively preparing for known risks and scenarios
- How I respond when I’m unsure or caught off guard
- My mindset when facing ambiguity or escalation
- Knowledge builds confidence, but humility builds resilience
- Preparation is not just technical, it’s emotional
- Fear is not always a signal to run, sometimes it’s a reminder to prepare
Daily:
- Learn something new every day, even small things
- Keep a “what I don’t know” log to make the unknown visible
- Put myself in controlled discomfort, volunteer for tricky situations
Weekly:
- Run through an incident scenario I’d struggle to handle
- Ask a teammate to explain a part of the system I don’t fully understand
- Reflect on a recent moment of fear or anxiety, what triggered it?
I came out of that on-call shift with a deeper respect for the complexity we operate in, and for the emotional cost of partial understanding. The good news is: I can do something about it.
This wasn’t just a lesson in technical readiness. It was a lesson in mental discipline, in owning what I know and what I don’t. I can’t promise I’ll never feel that anxiety again. But next time, I’ll be more prepared, not just as an engineer, but as a person.