Shh. I’m supposed to be here, I promise. (Photo by Robert Alves de Jesus)

My Mandatory Junior Web Developer Post

Nathan Kuik
Jul 23, 2017 · 5 min read

About a year ago, I decided to take the plunge and do a coding bootcamp with Le Wagon. The decision came after I moved to Copenhagen and wanted to try tech after working 2 years as a clinical social worker. My first “real” position out of the bootcamp was for the Danish startup Klinikker, working as one of three developers on a complete overhaul from a Django app to a Rails app.

Up to this point, the learning curve had been steep. When you’re in a bootcamp, the pressure is mainly internal, especially if you want become a “real” developer. But when you venture into the real world, this internal pressure intensifies with external business realities — customers, investors, managers, and all the other stakeholders expect the things you do to work.

The Mental Game

The biggest challenge for me during this project was the mental side of the work. The cognitive load is high when writing code for applications, and this can lead to a number of uncomfortable states. For me, I noticed the tendency of my brain to enter a self-doubt cycle. It asked me what I was doing sitting there and acting like I could actually do this kind of work.

We’ve all heard about imposter’s syndrome a million times, and its causes vary widely from a mix of societal expectation, work environment, team functioning, and individual psychology. We also hear everyday about sexism, racism, ageism, and other forms of exclusion plaguing startups and tech. These “isms” are inextricably linked to what we might call a more meritocratic imposter syndrome, and I want to acknowledge the ways the industry has negatively impacted a huge number of people before making it sound like the feeling is just in people’s heads — it’s not.

That said, I hope all of you have experienced a “safer” kind of imposter’s syndrome. Let me explain.

The Hoodieless Imposter

When I started at Klinikker, I had this nagging feeling that I didn’t really belong doing this work. Simply put, there are people with more intelligence, knowledge, and experience than me. What audacity did I have to try this work?

“Whether you’ve been at it for one year or 50, you are almost certainly solving problems that seemed intractable when you began your learning journey. This isn’t a result of innate ability: before we started programming, none of us had this ability.” — Devon O’Dell (The Debugging Mindset)

My mind wanted to eat this self-pity up, but I also knew the imposter headspace is detrimental. It is the direct opposite of the growth mindset, one of the most important things in programming and development. Once we’ve become convinced that we don’t belong, we don’t belong. When I found my brain going this way, I noticed it instantly jeopardized my ability to focus on the work. Self-consciousness is the enemy flow.

Own your role — even if you feel exposed

Focus

While time is constant for humans on earth, our attention is not. We can’t control time, but we can control our attention. Unfortunately, attention’s tendency is to fray rather than cohere, so we constantly battle the wandering mind. And the costs of a wandering mind are high.

Every time my mind shifted towards imposter-like thoughts, my work instantly suffered. There could be a million reasons why the thought may have started — maybe I made stupid error in the code or spilled some coffee on my shirt because of my extreme clumsiness — and it didn’t matter; my mind had gone elsewhere and my focus had broken.

A Thousand Self-Help Books

On a cognitive level, I knew the mental frame of the imposter was useless, but knowing something doesn’t make it stop. My next step was to develop some strategies for dealing with it. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Notice the thought
Step 2: Take a deep breath (just do this whenever the mind goes a bit wild)
Step 3: Take another deep breath because it’s good for you
Step 4: Shift the mind back to the present
Step 5: Lose focus and open a tab with Reddit or Twitter (whoops)
Step 6: Start over

This advice is ubiquitous on the internet and in self-help books, but having this habitual script helped me move through the syndrome rather than wallowing in it. The effects of learned helplessness are never more apparent when it comes to writing and debugging code, and I’m constantly amazed at how my code reflects my mental state.

Prolific amounts of zen

Turn the Corner

In the moments where my mind would start to wander, I had to address the wandering, but not give it more attention than it deserved. I needed it to stop as quickly as possible, so my strategy was blind positivity — I just decided that I was capable of figuring out what I needed to do.

Did I know everything? No! But I had the capability to figure out the things I would need to make something work, or to at least develop the scaffolding for framing my questions when getting help from a more experienced developer.

This represented a turning point that helped me ignore the impostor feelings more easily. There are billion and one topics to learn when it comes to programming and development, but if you’re feeling like you don’t belong — and you stay with this thought — you’ll learn nothing.

Have some

And this is why I hope everyone has felt like an imposter. Unless you’re one of those people that just feels comfortable no matter where you are and what you’re doing (what’s your secret?), this means that you’re learning and challenging yourself — your brain wrinkles happily at the thought. So, be in that discomfort and use it as a marker that you’re in uncharted territory.

Know that this feeling is okay and is the best place to be. It’s not a reflection of your potential, but rather an indication of the stretching of your current knowledge. These feelings are an integral part to the growth process, and it is a practice of developing effective strategies when they arise rather than backing down.

Happy impostering!


What are you imposter stories? I’d love to hear about them on Twitter.

Nathan Kuik

Written by

Clinical social worker turned software developer. Exploring the ways technology impacts human experience and perception.

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