When I took my first job out of college, I was working for a small "control house" designing controls and hardware for various contracts. One day, shortly after I got to work, the owner, an arrogant man of the "good ole' boy" persuasion, told me that another engineer was sick and I was going to have to make a presentation in an hour on his project to the project team at a local mill! I knew nothing about the project and had never met the project team. I was petrified. The boss gave me about a 5 minute useless summary of the project, thrust a bunch of drawings into my hands and said that the engineer at the company was less informed than me and that I shouldn't believe a thing the electricians said. At the meeting, I spent about a half an hour trying to fake my way through, when I finally gave up and did a core dump to the group. Once they found out I knew nothing, and wasn't the project engineer, the tension melted, they gave me a full brief, and sent me on my way feeling much better. I was made project lead and wrote a program to control the system. During installation, I saw one of the dreaded electricians working at my laptop. I ran over and asked him what he thought he was doing to which he replied that he'd noticed a few parts of my program that could be improved. He'd copied it and rewritten it under a different name so I could use it or not - his improvements cut my program size by 2/3 and made it work better. I learned a couple valuable lessons on that job - be honest and listen to the guys who actually do the work.
