Am I an imposter?

Written with my dear colleague Rune Rapley-Møller.

I used to get sweaty hands when screensharing because I felt like someone unexpectedly entered my room while I was killing time between leftovers and watching stupid tutorials on balcony renovations (I don’t even have a balcony).

So, when my coworkers ask me to share my screen during a call, I close the browser window with the simple Google questions on how to fix the code I’m currently working on, the friends chat with complaints about the challenges at work and try to click and talk like a ‘real’ developer. Why does my lack of knowledge/experience make me feel so insecure? I’m a junior developer and everyone knows it, so I shouldn’t feel like I have anything to prove. But I do! I want to prove that I’m not just pretending to be a developer. And I don’t want to be worried that my colleagues will one day find out that I’m just an imposter and no real developer.

Am I the only one feeling this way?

- Probably not -

In my experience with starting a new career as a developer, I have noticed different steps of mental progress:

1. GROWING

Being someone who changed careers and is new to the world of software development, I initially tried to understand every line of code and absorb all knowledge I could get. I celebrated myself for creating clean code and for getting behind the matrix of components, tests and infrastructure. As people stopped “holding my hand”, it started to get more and more serious.

I tried to stay rational by assuring myself that my colleagues had been in the business for many years longer than me. I tried to compare my experience to theirs, but I became annoyed with myself for asking the same questions over and over again. I had higher expectations of myself.

2. IMPATIENCE

I assumed that the people I work with have the same expectations and requirements of me as I do.

But I didn’t want to be the weakest team member anymore. So, I laughed out loud at any tech-joke, no matter if they were funny or not (I didn’t get the punch lines anyway) and I tried to get as much work done myself as possible. This took time and nerves and didn’t always leave me with the feeling of being successful.

After all this, the solution to most of my issues — once again — was to ask for help.

3. FEAR OF FAILURE

When I asked a question, though my colleagues are very understanding and super supportive, I feared the answer: „Did you try jhgsdfjhasbclj?“ — because this would lead me even further down the path of feeling insufficient and incompetent.

But on the contrary! Almost every time I dared to ask a question, I got help. And no matter how many times I asked, people were very patient in explaining. That’s why I decided to act and choose my future work path:

PUT META ASIDE

No meta description, no meta discussion please. No one expects from me what I assume he/she is expecting. It’s similar to AI: You would never buy a machine for thousands of euros and then complain that it doesn’t know a thing at the beginning, would you?

You pay for it to learn and machine learning is based on human learning. One repeats and evaluates the step — good or bad, better or worse, fail or success.

And as I build my skills and knowledge in coding, I can’t wait for the day I feel like: “I know it all!”

But will this day ever come?

- Probably not -

When looking at my senior colleagues next to me, not a single day goes by without them having to google something, ask someone else or remain clueless about the next step to fixing a problem. On the way to becoming an experienced developer, I feel one of the biggest learnings is to accept that you don’t initially know the answer to every problem.

This reminds me of Plato’s “Socratic paradox”: “I know that I know nothing”.

Strangely, I take comfort in the fact that it’s okay not to know everything, and that it’s a journey we’re on — all of us.

So, what have I learned?

I am not alone in feeling like an imposter. The imposter syndrome accompanies each one of us, regardless of our skills or level of experience.

Do we really have to be a tech brain, code genius or prime developer to be a valuable part of a development team? Although in the eyes of many, developing is a task of the loner, in reality it is about teamwork and achieving a goal with the help of others. So, I choose to be brave and not hide my deficiencies, because “this is the way — of the developer”.