I joined a big semiconductor company in their Toronto branch 6 months ago as a performance modeling software developer. I have a master's degree in heterogeneous computing for CPU-GPU systems and worked on .NET software development for a little over a year for an industrial automation company. I was hired one level above an entry-level engineer because of my degree and work experience and all of my team is working from home for now.
In my current job, I am required to improve and enhance the software model of my HW block using C++. However, learning about the HW I am working on has been a bigger challenge for me. There were just lots of acronyms and computer engineering concepts that I knew little about. Until now, I was running some hardware tests for my team (we need those for our model), doing research and learning about the concepts I have to know (acronyms, terminology, etc.), superficially going over the codebase and learning about the work my team does in general (where my work fits the bigger picture, for example).
After 6 months, my knowledge is still superficial. I know where I should go to find the information I need but I don't yet know even fundamental concepts by heart. This past week, my technical lead was helping me debug some code and even though he didn't directly say it, it seemed he was not happy with my progress. He asked me how I am feeling now that I have been in the company for 6 months, how I think the team can improve, etc. He advised me to talk with more senior engineers to learn as much as possible about the hardware.
Now I am working on the bug my tech lead helped my zero in on and I am feeling exhausted. I have been reading the C++ code to figure out the problem and I feel there are so many core concepts I don't know. I can probably figure out the problem soon enough but right now, the variables in the code and their ambiguity is overwhelming me. My exhaustion is compounded with the feeling that my manager may be disappointed with me. I am feeling that after 6 months, I should have been in a better position than this.
How should I tackle my feeling of exhaustion and the fear of having made insufficient progress?