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Discussion on: A special case of Impostor Syndrome

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Sébastien Kalb

When it's "my turn" to believe that I'm a fraud, I tell myself that even if I were that bad of a developer, someone would have complained already! A harsh IM message, an endless code review on gitlab, an awkward meeting with your manager to give you a fair warning...

What if they don't complain? Then either they have nothing against you or they are phonies. Haters gonna hate.

What if I get a bad review? Well, that's a fair warning. I got a couple of fair warnings and that's all. It happens, and it gets better. Many amazing people were a bit hard to control by management and HR, you'll be fine.

What if they just fire me without a prior fair warning? Really? With that kind of management, sooner or later something low would have happened. It's worth jumping out for your own sake then.

What if I really feel day-in-day-out that I don't cut it? Think deeply if what you do is motivating. Not as your favorite langauge but as a whole. Are you on low-end libraries while you wanted to build APIs instead? Are you doing B2B while you expected more B2C? Maybe something is wrong there and you're missing some motivation.

In either case I see no reason to panic. We all suck at first and the we all manage to suck slightly less over time. Programming is hard guys! There's only a handful of ways that the code will actually do what you want, while every other way the code would provoke a catastrophic mess. So yes, it is hard, no wonder we worry from time to time.