“Five of Us Walked In. One Engineer Overwhelmed Us.” — The Shock of Meeting World-Class Engineers in London
Back When I Still Had Confidence Whoa! My entire “map of what an engineer should be” was completely rewritten in London. It was my eighth year as a working professional. By then, I had already gained solid experience building systems. Java 4. At the time, it was considered cutting-edge technology, and I had been involved in managing advanced enterprise systems. I had worked on multiple domestic projects in Japan, and little by little, my confidence as an engineer had grown. “Working together with overseas system engineers.” Just hearing that excited me. And the location was London — one of the world’s financial technology centers. Before the training began, I thoroughly studied massive amounts of documentation. System architecture. Operational design. Failure handling flows. But something immediately surprised me. “How can such a specialized system have documentation this detailed?” The system itself was extremely unique. It was heavily customized and built internally....