General question / discussion - knowledge gaps for X YOE?

[tidal stirrup]

I've been working since 2020, so I'd say I have around 4-5 years of "work experience". But when people say they have a "_ yoe", I'm sure it'll vary wildly from person to person depending on what their responsibilities were during that time. Just wondering how others felt about their years of experience and actual confidence in adapting to new jobs.

I guess since software engineering is such an expansive skillset, it feels like there's such a massive amount that I don't know. I have 4-5 "yoe" but it seems it's been in pretty miscellaneous areas.

For example, I'd say I'm extremely comfortable with putting up a frontend app from scratch with react/js/css etc, I can read and understand an existing backend/frontend codebase comfortably enough to implement new endpoints, etc.. I But I haven't actually set stuff like production databases from scratch, I haven't set up a live backend from scratch, (apart from on my local machine for small projects), etc

is it normal to feel this way? I'm applying for new jobs and wanted to see if this impostor syndrome was normal - part of me also feels that not too many established jobs will actually want you to set something up from nothing (exception of startups, senior positions, etc) but that's just me guessing based off of two different jobs.

[slim thistle]

yeah, it's completely normal and well adjusted to feel that way.

[inland heron]

It's normal to be more specialized. There is too much to know in this field for one person to really know everything, at least without having like 30+ years of experience

If you focused more on frontend development, then knowing more backend and infra stuff isn't really your domain of experience and that's ok

but it's not bad to want to be more well-rounded either

[tidal stirrup]

thanks for your thoughts guys. while I know a lot more than when I started, I still feel like I'll need to consult google for the setup phase for a majority of things.

that being said I think I do feel like i can do almost anything if I use google so I guess that's a big part of swe.