I loved programming. I loved being able to create something out of nothing. Solving the puzzle of the program and seeing it come to life. Constantl...
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This is great advice and a great reminder to look outside ourselves. Anxiety and imposter syndrome can make us too focused on ourselves, I've definitely experienced that! When I go out of my way to do what you mentioned, complimenting people on their work or encouraging them, I benefit too and feel encouraged myself. We need to connect with the people around us and remembering to do that can be a challenge.
Thanks for your comment. I agree it can be a challenge to think of others when you are struggling yourself.
Yep. Great point, as are the rest. Nobody is universally skilled or unskilled. We all bring valuable knowledge, background, perspective, and talent.
yes, but we do not seem to know what the management wants and thus we are a genuine impostors
Thanks Ben :)
I've actually been struggling with this a lot myself for almost a year now, but it's only been recently that I've started to identify the problem to try to fix it. I truly hate waking up every day and thinking "Is today the day everyone figures out I'm awful at everything?," even though 99.99999% of the negativity I face professionally is self-generated.
This was a great read and something I definitely needed to see. Thank you!
Thanks for your reply. I am glad you liked it :)
It's OK to fail. In fact it's a necessary and important part of life. Learn from it.
Very important, as Dev's we have days where we fail but we come back stronger. When you lose don't lose the lesson.
I love this post. I feel you have shared a rather sensitive side a lot of people shy away from. Talking about it does help and we also need to connect with those around us.
Excellent article! Although I also write and speak on this topic, this is a constant struggle for me too, especially as I just released a whole bunch of code. I find myself worrying that was I wrote isn't good enough, isn't clever enough (or is too clever?), isn't useful enough, etc. This reminder couldn't have been more timely. Thank you!
Thank you for this article. Imposter syndrome is something that does hit us all, and working in a great and safe team which reminds you of your knowledge and helps you fill in the gaps is part of combating that. We have a "cheers" slack channel at work where we recognise the value each of us bring to the team.
Also run team meetings as a team building/ brainstorming session that helps stop one upmanship - which can lead to feelings of negativity and impostor syndrome.
This is a top tip in your article too:
"Teach others, it will help you realise how much you do know."
It is always recommend. It doesn't have to be teaching at work - eg helping out at a CoderDojo can remind you why you became a developer in the first place.
Great post! I work with a lot of people suffering from this. I definitely went through a phase of self doubt as well. Ironically it was after a very large success. I put pressure on myself that my next project(s) had to be just as successful and it made me afraid to try anything at all for fear of failure.
It's still a work in progress, but for me, embracing failure was a big part of getting through it, as well as studying mindfulness and self-compassion. I wrote a blog post recently about embracing failure. Still need to post it on dev.to, but here's the link from my personal blog:
jlhood.com/dont-worry-about-failure/
Thanks again for sharing your experience!
Hi James - I am glad you liked it, and thanks for sharing yours.
This is a great post Carl, it's something I have been struggling with for the past six months. Even though I have done a fair share of coding, over the last six months I constantly feel that I am nowhere as good as I want to be, and I am not trying hard enough. I feel like in this line of work, which bares a solitude inherently, it is crucial for one to be in a supportive community. Thank you very much for reminding me that. :)
Hi Nick thanks for sharing. I am glad you liked the post. It is very common for developers to be introverts, which may well amplify the issue.
Story of my life. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent post, and, for sure, only a person who is not an impostor by himself can think so deeply and share it with others.
As a matter of fact, the real impostors do never experience the feeling of not knowing enough, let alone that of admitting it publicly.
For starting to be worried about how much you miss to know, you should really do have to master a lot of knowledge in your own field(s).
Unfortunately, many times in life all that ones misses for knowing more is the chance of doing so. If a person has proven valuable skills in one field, he has no reason of not proving the same in many other fields ... but, usually, not the best ones are those who are given the chance of raising and developing as by what they deserve.
Career fights do matter a lot in one's chances to progress further, and mostly not in a positive and constructive way.
Bookmarked this for reference. I am working on a few of these. Mostly by trying to give more talks at our local python meetup and to start each day by reflecting on where I was yesterday and where I am today. Doesn't always work but it has been a good start.
Wish you the best of luck and please don't give up.
Carl, this article warmed my soul. As I'm about to change my job to another one in a different language, I was very concerned about the "fact" that I'm not good enough in that new language and asking myself: what the new team is expecting about my skills? Thanks man.
Hi Katie thanks for your comment. It is a good point to make that often you are comparing yourself to the public image of others. This is usually a warped view where you think they know much more than you. Especially the public face of people on the internet, as they may be well above the average standard of developer. For every one of them there is probably a thousand developers who do not have that public image and are not as good - and that is fine.
This hit home for me to - I have tried to start living by not comparing myself to anyone but myself, and if I can just do one litte thing to better myself, then it's a successful day.
Enjoyed the whole article, kudos.
The rest is sort of unrelated. I have fallen out of love with programming after 17years. I was in love with programming right from the start, I would go over my development books as I was taking other classes. And would code into the night breathlessly waiting to see if I could fix that bug or come up with a feature I wanted.
I'm not sure when it happen, slowly over 2 years. But the things that used to excite me, no longer thrill me anymore, so I decided to make a change.
And that change, to move into a data science or machine learning roll, has been one of the greatest times I can remember in a really long time. Now there are awesome new things to learn, a lot of math I'll need to push myself to get through.
So just my story if someone sees it - is that it also might just be time for a change.
Said as it is! Thanks for this.
Thank you for sharing your story. This a great post and advice. I will denitively remember that, next time I face it. For me the syndrome gets more present the more experience I have. The more I learn, the more I feel there is still much more to learn and I will never get it. Then you have the feeling of not being good enough 😞. As you said, we need to take a break and remind ourselves all we have accomplished
Hi Juan, and thanks for your comment. I was the same I found the more experienced I became the more I realised I do not know.
I was facing this syndrome a few months ago.
I went to therapy and it helped me realize that i'm working in the wrong area.
Maybe this problem happens because you become frustrated with the IT business.
Thanks for the open and inspiring way of talking about this. I really think programming has a lot of ways to become dreadful when it doesn't have to be, and it's contributions and statements like this that can help all of us. Thank you!!
(Tiny sidenote, and I feel like an a-hole now, but may I ask to check the use of "your" where it should be "you're"? There's a few of them.)
Hi Bart. Thanks for your comment. Do not feel bad I appreciate your feedback (should be fixed now!). There is always a place for constructive feedback. I certainly was not expecting my writing to be perfect. :)
The best advice to me was compare yourself only to yourself. It's the best way to remember that every day we learn something new and became better.
If there is someone in our team who knows a lot about one tecnology, we can learn with this person and share our experiences.
Hi Pedro thanks for contributing. It is easy to start comparing yourself to the younger people who have fresh knowledge on a subject when yours is becoming stale. It is tough to find some balance so that you can keep up, but not let it become a problem.
Remember me my first experience as a consultant in a big tech company. I just want to add an advice: we're all different but the advice is: trust on yourself, yourself as a unique human being. Never compare yourself to others, we're all different.
When I started my trainee program (6 months ago) I felt the same. Now, I'm more confident about my developments and stuff I do.
I think asking myself why I choose this carreer, what I love to do and recognizing I'm not perfect (and no one would achieve that) helped me to overcome this situation.
Also, in some moments telling myself "If he can do, I can do it too" gives me the courage to stop thinking and concentrate. It's more like auto motivating me to do the stuff.
Great read, and I think recognisable for the most of us. It's articles like this that make sure that others recognise what's happening sooner and don't get themselves in a depression or even choose another career over something we, apparently, all experience. I also think that one of the problems we face, is that it's in 'our' as developers to always look at the best available.
So we follow the best blogs on development, follow the top 1% of developers on twitter, etc.. and it always seems like these people are flawless and way more skilled.
The owner of the previous company I worked (who has a proper developing background) used to tell me that I should realise that the people I surround myself with on the internet are indeed the cream of the crop, but that doesn't take anything away from my own skills. "Stop staring so hard!" in other words..
I still find it fun, but my boss have unrealistic expectations of me... I only work with programming for one year and a half, and yet he expects me to be able to do everything alone; develop, design, engineer, configure, deploy, create an app for Android and iOS and everything is "due tomorrow"... Hence I'm working up to 3am everyday (even at this January 1st) when I have to get up at 6am to go to work...
And when I can't figure something out (for example I simply can't figure out how to compile a React Native app for iOS, because the steps in the documentation gives errors, Google is of no help and I never used a Mac in my life, yet I had two days to make the app, which is now due), he makes sure to let me know how much I am disappointing and how much I cost...
Being the only developer of the company is not helping either, since they "can't afford" to let me take my vacation.
A few more weeks of this and I'm loosing it...
Thank you for this article. This is very enlightening. I can relate to what you've gone through -- those days when you just don't like going to work because of anxiety is a tough one. Again, thank you!
wow. This is gold. You just took my thought and wrote them down. Thank you !
Thanks for sharing this — I think it's a topic/area that is important but yet the community rarely talks about.
Great article, thank you 👍
This was a great read and i have faced this problem for so long. I have worked as a software engineer/developer for 12 years now but there are a few things that i have noticed that i would want to share. I have figured out in this time that i am not a genius or a super human but then there are people who are born with that ability which is so unfair considering the amount of effort i put daily to write solutions for problems/issues i face. there are people/devs out there who work on niche topics like AI, machine learning systems that help in self driving autonomous vehicles. Dont you think we should compare our selves to them and try to out smart them by putting in more effort? then we are restricted by human factors such as relationships, family and getting tired.
I've done this to myself, had no idea it was a common thing (or even had a name). Thanks for this post!
Reading the first few paragraphs was like reading my own mind, you're not alone in feeling this way!
Thank you for sharing this.
Great article. It really hits home in a couple of points, I've been wanting to write something like this for a while now. Thanks again.
Hi Rolando. I wanted to write this post many times in the past but never did. I guess that was still the part of me that felt like an impostor :). Go ahead and write your thoughts, it will help you and others.
Thanks for your story. Great advice!
Very good, exactly how i felt!
Thank you. =)
Thank you very much for your words. I didn't know that what I feel was this. Now I know what to do. Thank you.
Your post help me a lot. Thank you.
I once vocalised this feeling to my closest friends without knowing there’s actually a term for this. They all agreed that they too feel the same way, and that I’m the only one they know who’s ever said it out loud!
Thanks for the advise. I've been feeling in that way a long time.
thank you, this is really great article!!
It's not only true for programming, but for a lot of other domains
I found the problem that I had in the last two years of my life. Thanks for sharing this great article.
Love this! Thanks for a sign of relief. I can give an example of how I feel - day by day, I look at the number of repos/contributions by different people and feel low!
I think some of these points are things I recognize in myself... D:
I agree with you. That Same Feeling!
Very nice article. Feels relieved to know not being the only victim to it. Will try to counterfeit by applying given techniques. Thanks :)
This is really fantastic.
This is very helpful. In fact, I am affected by this. Thanks a lot!!!
This is good advice, unfortunately I really am an impostor °_°
Spot on
It's in words... Thank you.
Thank you, I think this was something I needed to read.