14 Years In and I Still Google the Same Command

It was a Tuesday, 9:47 in the morning, and I was in a standup I'd been in roughly three thousand times before. The team lead asked me to walk through a fix I'd pushed the night before. I pulled up the terminal, typed the wrong flag, and then — without thinking, in front of everyone on the call — I opened a new browser tab and Googled the command I have typed approximately four hundred times in fourteen years.

Nobody said anything. Muted squares. I found the answer in about eight seconds, typed it correctly, the thing ran, and we moved on. But I sat there for the rest of the standup thinking about what it means that I still can't hold that one particular string in my head. Not embarrassed, exactly. More like: this is the job, actually. Knowing where to look is the whole thing. I've just been too proud to admit it for most of the last decade.

I have been a remote software engineer since before remote was a selling point. I started when you had to explain to people what you meant by "I work from home" and they assumed you meant you were between jobs. I have debugged things at midnight, shipped things I didn't fully understand, and once spent four hours on a problem that turned out to be a missing semicolon. The job has been good to me. It has also, slowly, taught me exactly how much I don't know — which turns out to be a lot, and which I am only now making peace with.

How a Tuesday Standup Made Me Count Fourteen Years of Googling

I got into engineering the way a lot of people my age did — sideways. Not through a CS program with a clean narrative arc. Through a community college course, a forum, a guy who showed me something cool, and then a series of jobs where I figured out just enough to keep going before the next thing came up. By the time I had a title that said "senior" on it, I had accumulated a lot of knowledge and also a very specific set of blind spots I'd been quietly routing around for years.

The Google habit is the most honest artifact of that. I don't look up concepts I don't know. I look up the exact syntax for things I've done a hundred times, because my brain has decided it will not store that particular sequence of characters no matter how many times I type it. git stash pop. The exact argument order for grep -r. Which direction the cp arguments go. I know what all of those do. I just apparently need the internet to remind me how to say it every single time.

After that standup, I started actually paying attention to how often I did it. I kept a notepad file — I have notepad files from 2010 that I still use as a diary, so this is not unusual for me — and I made a mark every time I Googled something I felt like I should already know. I stopped after three days because the marks were making me feel a type of way. But the data was clear. The job had not made me a person who knows things. It had made me a person who is very fast at finding them.

The Part Where I Realized the Job Is Mostly Knowing Where to Look

I mentioned the standup thing to John that weekend. We were watching something he wanted me to see about a data center in Nevada — I wasn't really tracking the thesis — and I told him about the Google tab and the muted squares and the whole thing. He didn't miss a beat.

"Man, if you already knew everything, they wouldn't need to pay you to show up."

Which is a very John thing to say, and also, annoyingly, the most useful framing I'd heard in a while. He meant it as a conspiracy-adjacent point about how institutions keep you dependent on their systems, but I took it at face value and moved on.

The thing is, fourteen years in, the job has changed more than I have in some ways. The languages shift. The tooling shifts. The thing we were all very confident about in 2018 is now the thing we're quietly deprecating. I've watched three different architectural philosophies come in as the obvious correct answer and then quietly get complicated. What I've kept across all of it is not a specific skill set — it's the ability to read an error message without panicking, to stay in the problem long enough to find the edge of it, and to know which Stack Overflow answer is from 2014 and probably wrong.

That's not nothing. It took a long time to learn. It's just not the impressive-sounding thing I used to imagine expertise would feel like. I thought by now I'd have it memorized. Instead I have very fast fingers and a browser history that would embarrass me if anyone saw it.

There's a version of this that connects to the hustle side of my life too. I've written before about counting the hours I don't get paid for — the prep, the context-switching, the mental overhead that doesn't show up anywhere. The day job has its version of that too. The hours I spend reading documentation for something I should have memorized. The half-hour I lose every time I come back to a codebase after a week away. Those don't disappear just because there's a salary attached.

What Fourteen Years of Staying Current Actually Runs You

There's the obvious cost, which is time. Not dramatic time — not the kind of crisis hours that make a good story. It's the slow drip of an hour here, ninety minutes there, spent on a tutorial for something the industry decided was important this year. I've done courses on my lunch break. I've done them at 10 p.m. when the kids were in bed and I should have been watching something on Netflix. I've started probably eleven courses and finished maybe three.

There's also a cost I didn't expect, which is the ongoing mild anxiety of not knowing if you're keeping up. I can't tell you if I am. I know I'm employed. I know my work ships. I know that on the days I feel like I'm behind, I'm usually still ahead of the actual problem. But the feeling doesn't go away just because the evidence contradicts it. That's its own kind of tax.

The brother-in-law asked me once, during one of his periodic pitches for something that was going to change everything, why I didn't just go independent. Consulting. My own rates. No boss. I gave him the honest answer, which is that the salary is the thing I am not willing to gamble with right now, and the floor it puts under everything else — the grocery runs, the hustle experiments, the offers I've considered and walked away from — is the only reason any of it is possible. He nodded like I'd said something sad. I did not feel sad about it.

The continuing education, the certification I did two years ago that I'm not sure I've used, the conference I watched on YouTube instead of attending — I don't have a clean dollar figure for all of it. Some of it the company covered. Some of it I covered. Some of it cost me nothing but three weekends I would have rather spent doing something else. I'm not good at adding up the soft costs. I just know they're there.

What I Actually Kept After Fourteen Years of Figuring It Out as I Go

I kept the job. That sounds obvious, but it's the thing. I have watched people leave for something bigger and come back. I've watched people leave for something better and not come back, which I respect. I've had my own moments of wondering — and some of those moments were serious enough that I wrote them down in one of those notepad files — but I've stayed, and the staying has compounded in ways that are hard to quantify and easy to undervalue.

What I dropped is the idea that expertise feels like certainty. I used to think that at some point I'd reach a level where I stopped second-guessing myself, stopped Googling the basics, stopped feeling like I was one sprint away from being found out. That level does not exist. The people I respect most in this field are the fastest Googlers I know. They just don't apologize for it.

I also dropped the performance of knowing things. Not entirely — I still have my moments, usually in code review — but mostly. There's a version of me from five years ago who would have closed that browser tab before anyone could see it. The version of me who left it open in the standup and just found the answer and moved on is, I think, slightly more useful to everyone in the room, including himself.

The hustle side of my life runs on the same engine, actually. The driveway standups, the weird little tools I build and sometimes ship, the DoorDash nights when I need the week's groceries covered — none of it works if the day job stops working. I've never pretended otherwise. The floor is the floor. You don't get to ignore it just because you've been standing on it long enough to forget it's there.

The notepad file is still open on my desktop. Three days of tally marks and then nothing, because I got busy and also because I didn't love what it was telling me. I'll probably look at it again sometime. Or I'll open a new tab and Google something I've Googled before, and the build will run, and we'll move on.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.