Deliver value without pretending to know everything

Deliver value without pretending to know everything

A few years after completing my pre-baccalaureate major, I entered the call center industry. Back then, especially in technical support, anyone who sounded remotely fluent in IT could appear legendary.

Mention commands such as curl, netstat, or even the humble ipconfig, and you could instantly become the unofficial TED Talk speaker of a drinking session. In the Philippines, we call that person the banka ng inuman, this is the one carrying the entire conversation.

I used to be that person.

But if we could bring those drinking sessions forward to 2026, how much of what we confidently discussed would survive technical scrutiny?

I cannot speak for anyone else, but I can speak for myself because some of my confidence was theatrical.

In 2013, I claimed that I knew Active Directory. The truth was that I did not properly understand it until 2021. At one point, I even thought Event Viewer and Active Directory were essentially the same thing. That small knowledge of interpretation made me believe already that I knew AD. Parang gago lang diba? Gago nga talaga! Hahaha

Yes, I said that.

There was even a time during a technical interview on that year , I was asked how many cores an Intel Core i7 had. With complete confidence and absolutely no supporting research, I answered of course 7! I was loud, proud, technically incorrect and hired anyway.

That answer now makes me laugh, but it also captures who I was then because confidence arrived long before technical accuracy. The job opened the door, and the years that followed taught me how to earn my place inside it.

During my early 20s, validation mattered more to me than accuracy. I wanted to sound knowledgeable, so I described ordinary remote-support work as though it involved technologies I barely understood.

That was not expertise. That was confidence wearing a borrowed ID.

It just came years later when I supported an on-premises enterprise product with LDAP integration. I installed Active Directory in VMware, worked with the technology directly, and finally understood what I had once pretended to know.

Today, I can say that I understand Active Directory, but technology has already moved forward. Azure Active Directory became Microsoft Entra ID, giving me another homework to study.

This time, I will study it before becoming the banka.

That is maturity because not knowing something is no longer humiliating. Pretending to know it is.

Knowledge has boundaries

Whether we are posting online, talking to relatives, or carrying a drinking-session conversation, we should not stretch our knowledge beyond its actual boundaries.

Technical vocabulary may impress people temporarily, but jargon without understanding is just a cosmetic confidence, and cosmetic confidence eventually cracks.

Working in IT does not mean knowing every technology bearing a technical name. It means understanding what we actually work with, remaining curious about what we do not know, and learning without manufacturing expertise.

There is no shame in saying, That is outside my current knowledge, because the shame arrives when somebody trusts an answer we fabricated merely to sound important.

Relevance is not expertise

Staying relevant has become more difficult. There is constant pressure to appear informed, accomplished, and ahead of everyone else.

You could attend your nephew’s christening, tell family relatives that you work in IT, casually add quantum computing to the conversation, and watch the entire table react with admiration.

The problem begins when you have no idea what you are talking about.

People remember confident claims. Before long, your relatives may describe you as an expert in a field you mentioned only once between spaghetti and lumpia. Now you must either maintain the performance or admit that the original claim was exaggerated.

That is an exhausting way to live.

There are human reasons why people exaggerate. Sometimes it is insecurity. Sometimes it is survival. Sometimes we simply want to feel important.

I understand that impulse because I have lived it. Understanding the reason, however, does not make the behavior useful.

Today, saying I do not know feels more impressive to me than delivering a polished explanation built on guesswork. Our knowledge is not a finished product because what we do not understand today can become tomorrow’s lesson, but here is the but, only if we stop pretending that the learning has already happened.

LLMs have made information easier to access, but they do not eliminate human responsibility. We still need to ask better questions, verify claims, test our understanding, and admit uncertainty. The tools became faster. Accountability did not disappear.

Deliver something true

Perhaps this is simply part of growing older. I no longer chase reactions the way I once did. I would rather deliver something ordinary and accurate than something impressive and false because value does not need to sound revolutionary.

Sometimes value is a correct answer. Sometimes it is a useful clarification. Sometimes it is the courage to say, I do not know yet, but I will find out.

If you start coming clean early, you will spend less time later repairing stories invented for validation.

I learned that lesson later than I should have. The only lie I regularly tell now is that I will not feed my cats when they scratch at my door.

They are scratching again as I write this.

I already know how this ends.