I suck, but I guess it’s OK
I have this habit of doing a self-assessment on my progress now and then. Both as an individual and as a professional. Gives a good idea on where my ship’s sailing.
Looking back, these have been fantastic times. I am still a junior developer by the standards of the talent in my organization, and yet I enjoy enormous independence. I am respected as a contributor and often looked up as a mentor. If I would walk into office one fine day and tear down the entire codebase just to rebuild it, I am confident there won’t be any major flutter.
Feels like I have lived the ultimate corporate programmer’s dream, right?
Except that’s what it appears from the outside. I failed my self-assessment. Terribly. I realized I am just like Kenan’s Feldspar VR demo. I could make people believe what I wanted but beyond that demo its just shitty technology.

The inside
Have you ever walked out of a performance knowing you made a fool of yourself, but people would still appreciate you, because social norms dictates so? Sucks! Now imagine going through it, repeatedly, over and over again, every time you try to put up a show.
The Feeling that you are way more ordinary than you perceived. That you just got lucky. That one day people will stop being modest. One day someone will catch your bluff and ask you to show your hand. Yup. That’s what I have been feeling for most part of the last 4 years as a Software developer.
That cute little optimization: Stolen from stackoverflow
That architectural re-design I proposed?: Lifted from someones’ techblog
The nasty bug that I caught in your review: Happened to have done similar mistake myself.
Behind the excellent programmer that the world sees, there is guinea pig running circles in this vicious cycle.

Before I realized the fun of learning was gone. It was fear that drove me. Fear of being wrong. Every code change that I pushed/deployed, was followed by a bout of paranoia that it’s going to fail, and burn the entire system with it. I would do my review ten times over and always yet leave home convinced that evidence of my incompetence are stained all over the commit diff for the world to see. I stopped doing reviews. When I did, I took herculean efforts to make sure that my comments make sense. One mistake and boom. Your mask’s gone Mr. developer. I limited my comments even when they could be valuable in the fear that I would be exposed.
It’s not that I was losing passion or motivation in my job. I loved my job and still do, but I was working in constant pressure of justifying what the world believed. My aspirations were not to climb the career ladder, but to keep my feet on the rung of skills that the environment around me had made.
At some point in my career I did tried to rationalize this problem. Can I try toning down my show. Well it should have been simple. I just needed to back off a bit. Let someone else take the driver’s seat. In software development this usually translates to avoiding design discussions, ignoring reviews altogether, agreeing when someone tries to sell you horse shit, doing the wrong thing if your reviewers want it to be so.
Except that it didn’t work. Apparently when you have been playing an act for too long, it engulfs your own personality and soon it’s inseparable. I would eventually burst at some point and then cringe from inside for reacting. This, in fact had a negative effect on what I was trying to achieve. The drama would be passed as confidence, and the cycle would continue.
I tried other more passive ways too. I figured out if I don’t share my achievements, weights would eventually go down on the scale. But then somehow it would get leaked either when I let my guard down, or when someone got to know it from other sources and spilled the beans. And then its the same story over again.
Its ironic though that none of the expectations saved me from the judgement of people around me. In my brief career of 4 years, I have managed to earn the title of being arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed and a purist. People somehow managed to find arrogance in me but they couldn’t find the scared mole shivering under the thick layers of self-confidence. May be I was playing it too well?
Am I really faking it?
(Learning about impostor syndrome and fixing it)
Whatever be the cause, it had to be fixed. Yesterday, I sat down and decided that I will conquer this dilemma or surrender to it in its completeness. The first thing that to try was confiding this feeling that has been buried for so long inside me. I confessed to a good friend that it was a fraud all along. Told her all points in life where life decided to go easy on me. It felt throwing that additional ballast off my deck. Only to realize that this confession went down as an act of modesty in her opinion. Consolation was the last thing wanted at that moment. It took enormous courage to part with that secret of my life and it got the exact opposite reaction. That afternoon, I almost broke down fearing I have to live with this.
I gave up on the confiding business as definitely didn’t need any more applause for the show I was trying to close forever. And when all hopes are lost, I did what is often the last resort. I turned to the internet for solutions.
That’s when I realized what I am going through is a well known thing. The impostor experience. In fact there are several other articles on medium quoting this same experience. This awesome article by Alicia Liu describes very aptly what I might have been going through. The fact that we share the same domain makes the article more easy to relate. Researching more on this topic made me realize that there are so many of us, feeling similar manifestations of the load that I was carrying. This journal definitely needs to be published now.
How do I fix it?
Ok. So now we have a fancy name for whatever I have been referring to as “my act”. Well, finding the root cause is step 1, and rather big, but equally challenging part is fixing it. Human philosophy is a rather queer subject. How do I make myself believe that I am not an impostor? Unfortunately there is no switch which I can turn off and be a fearless cheerful lad that once was.
On this breezy Saturday night when the world sleeps in serenity, a simple programmer is struggling to find answers to one of these intricate life problems which unfortunately cannot be answered by any procedural algorithm.
That’s when it clicked. I have been running actively for last one year. In fact running has been my stress buster on so many occasions, and I have become pretty good at it. Why do I not feel the same stress about running. Why do I not constantly clock myself? Unlike programming,measuring performance in running is far more real and deterministic. After all people know I am good at it, and yet I don’t care about their opinion on running. I run because I enjoy it.
May be its time, I code because I enjoy it. There has been days when I wasn’t able to complete 5 kms on a stretch and then there were days where 21 kms didn’t feel like a thing. There will be days when my code will fail, my design will suck, when I will let down people around me. But then it’s OK. Because this isn’t an act. This is life. And it’s real.
