I wasn't even 30 when I took my first office job, a sales and coordinator role. Most of the people I was now working alongside had been in the industry longer than I'd been alive in it, and more than a few of them let me know, one way or another, that they didn't think I belonged in that chair yet.
Then I landed my first real contract, a big oil and gas exploration company, and we put our most senior field consultant on the job to oversee it. Guy had over 30 years in the field. I had 3.
He didn't like the equipment I'd picked. Told me the formations were too tough for that setup, that I was risking a downhole failure, and that it could cost the company real money if I was wrong.
And for a minute, I believed him. Not because he proved anything, just because of who he was. 30 years against my 3 is a hard thing to argue with in your head.
But instead of just backing down, I went back to the data. Pulled every log and equipment record from that area going back five years, and went through it inch by inch.
Buried in there was the answer. On a handful of past jobs, we'd drilled past our target zone by accident, into the zone right underneath it. Different formation, usually needs different equipment. But on those few jobs, the rate of penetration had actually ticked up slightly once we hit that lower zone with the same setup I'd picked. That told me the equipment I'd chosen wasn't just adequate, it was working better than expected in that exact ground.
I didn't argue with him. I called him into the office, sat him down, and showed him the data. He looked at it for a while, and said I might be onto something.
He ran the job with my equipment selection. Finished fast, clean, zero issues.
After that, he never just shot me down again. If he disagreed with an equipment call, he'd ask how I got there. I'd walk him through it, and if the reasoning held up, that was the end of it. That respect carried straight through into when I moved into operations manager. But there was a moment, right before I pulled that data, where I almost let someone else's resume talk me out of my own work.
That's the part nobody warns you about when you move off the field. You expect to be tested. You don't expect the hardest test to be whether you'll trust your own numbers when someone with more grey hair than you tells you you're wrong.
I learned two things out of that job that stuck with me for the next 25 years.
First, experience earns you the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't make you right automatically, and it doesn't excuse you from checking your own work just because someone senior disagrees with it. If I'd have just deferred, we'd have run a more expensive setup for no reason, and I'd never have known there was a better answer sitting in five years of data nobody had bothered to connect.
Second, the fastest way to earn real respect in a room full of people who don't think you belong there isn't to argue louder. It's to show your work. He didn't come around because I convinced him I was right. He came around because I showed him I'd actually done the digging, and he could see it for himself.
That one job changed how people in that office dealt with me going forward. Not because I won an argument, but because I stopped being someone they had to double check.
