[afavour]

You're talking about different things.

You are talking about the restrictive, punitive world of academia where you constantly have to please the powers that be in order to step up. OP was talking about their own feelings about their own abilities in their job.

The parallel to software engineering feels correct to me, particularly if we're talking about working at a giant company like Google. No matter how good of a developer you are you still need to battle yearly reviews, stack ranking, peer review etc. etc in order to advance. But you can strip all that away and still recognize that after two years in the industry you're not that advanced as a developer.

The crucial difference is that in the software engineering world you can take your misplaced confidence, strike out and try something. Worst case it'll fail and you move on. As a teacher with misplaced confidence you can strike our, try something and mess up the educations of children and parents who put their trust in you.