Who me?
If you follow coding culture at all, youāre probably familiar with the concept of Imposter Syndrome. In the event that youāre not, I wonāt be as cruel as to link you via LMGTFY. Impostor Syndrome is
ā¦a feeling of āphoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.ā While these people āare highly motivated to achieve,ā > they also ālive in fear of being āfound outā or exposed as frauds.ā source
This is usually the part where the article youāre reading will ask, āSound familiar?ā But not me. It didnāt sound familiar to me at all when I first learned about it. I didnāt identify with it until I was in the throes of it myself.
During my first week at The Iron Yard, all cohorts gathered together and we had a discussion about this as a community. But I couldnāt identify with the common definition. I told myself that I couldnāt suffer from impostor syndrome because:
How can I feel like a fake if I acknowledge that Iām a n00b? I canāt be found out if I am under no pretenses that I know much. Impostor Syndrome definitions often mention āsuccess.ā I wouldnāt put what I was doing anywhere near the category of āsuccess.ā
Of course I donāt belong - Iām a female POC trying to break through in a predominantly white, male field.
Iām not alone. Iām sitting in a room full of other people trying to learn how to code and are hoping theyāll get a job after 12 weeks. I had read questions (and the sometimes unnecessarily mean answers) on StackOverflow and Reddit before. Iād been persuaded to join the CodeNewbies Slack team. If thereās a thriving community of other n00bs, then itās a simple fact that I am not alone.
I carried these explanations with me all throughout my TIY experience. But then I got a new job that required me to use my programming knowledge. This also happened to be the convenient time when I forgot all about Impostor Syndrome, because I felt that I had more important things to worry about, such as figuring out this bug.
Then one day I posted the āI have no ideaā meme on Facebook. And a few of my former web dev colleagues responded along the lines of, āand you still wonāt 10 years laterā or āwelcome to the club!ā OK, cool. Good to know.
A few months later, I was asked to fix something written by a colleague who suddenly went on leave. The non-tech people on the team were panicking and it spread to me. Mid freaking out, I shot a blubbering text to a dev friend of mine. Hereās what I wrote:
Sometimes I wonder: why did I do this? I have no idea what theyāre [non-tech team members panicking] talking about. I have no idea why my colleague wrote what he wrote. What am I going to do? Will it matter if it takes me all day to Google and string together the script this guy wrote? Will everyone be upset?
Like a true friend, he said some calming words and gave encouraging tips, but all of this was preceded by one sentence.
This sounds like imposter syndrome.
Wow, OK.I just thought it was my anxiety that made me react like this. But I guess heās right. Huh. Yeah, I guess me panicking about not being able to solve a problem fast enough is really another interpretation of being exposed as a fraud. I truly believed that people think I know more than I really do.
But on the whole, I still didnāt believe I was suffering from full-blown Impostor Syndrome. I still wouldnāt call myself successful. And besides, it really was just luck that I ended up tracing down that root cause. And my job now? That was pure luck and timing that I even got an offer. Itās equally probable that I would still be stuck at my old job. Boy, I was ignorant of my own situation.
It took a 5 minute podcast segment before the light bulb went off. Itās an unlikely podcast for me to relate to. Itās hosted by three white males with many years of experience with .NET development. They donāt only discuss coding culture, so I actually learn something each time I listen. I find their discussions are relevant to a lot of OOP as well as my day-to-day job duties, and theyāre technical, but not dry.
They hit on Impostor Syndrome in Episode 43 - Nulls, Procs and Impostor Syndrome. You can fast forward to 1:11:00 for the discussion on Impostor Syndrome. The moment when I went ding! was when one of them (sorry, CB hosts, I can tell your voices apart but still have no clue which one of you is doing the talking) said that he does concede that part of his achievements, however big or small, is due to luck and timing. Ultimately, itās him that places himself in the situation that makes the luck and timing fortuitous. And itās easy to get a task that makes you feel stupid, simply because you should know. But in web development, thereās so much to learn that it can become crippling when you think about how much more there is to learn and how you may be behind the curve because you donāt know it all yet and, goodness gracious, that small bit of knowledge about xyz framework could be the answer to the task that you canāt quite figure out.
DING, DING, DING! Yo, I totally have Impostorās Syndrome because I feel like this on the reg.
I feel like this every time I do anything dev related (which is often). It may not feel like āIām going to found out and lose my jobā every single time, but itās enough doubt to make me worry that Iāll look like a fool the moment my work gets reviewed. And it took micro-examples for me to finally relate and admit to myself that I suffer from Impostor Syndrome. The good news? Admitting I had a problem abated the problem at the same time. Itās a reminder that the feeling of insecurity dissipates when you call it out because it feeds upon itself.
So where does this leave me? Do I still freak out a little every time I submit something? Yes, but. But what? But Iāve been motivated to spend a few more minutes every day learning some new part of my craft. But now Iāve taken on meditation to help me feel more grounded and myself so that Iām more aware of the anxiety I feel when I submit that thing. But now I have an audio byte that I replay when I need to relate to someone else. But now I feel less ashamed when I express these feelings of inadequacy to someone else. I have Impostor Syndrome, but thatās OK.