I can relate to this. I wonder if forums like HN exacerbate it -- here, someone is always an expert on whatever you're talking about, just by the sheer volume of folks who come here. So it sometimes seems like everyone is a published expert with a sweet funded startup using Haskell and Go and algorithms I can't comprehend, fending off offers from Google and Facebook.

It's easy to forget that there are a lot of programmers diddling with enterprise java and php on a day to day basis, not doing anything particularly mind-blowing, just dutifully closing their tickets.