Imposter syndrome Sink or Swim
Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. ‘Imposters’ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that override any feelings of success or external proof of their competence
No, it’s not a confidence thing,let’s get that out of the way — clear? — Cool.
Imposter syndrome is not something new to me, but the first time I actually talked about it was a week ago with some of my workmates. No name dropping, so let’s call them M and O.
Early morning Coffee with a sprinkle of imposter syndrome
So I headed into work early thinking I would be the first, only to find M and O having a cup of coffee (I need to beat them at being early for work.) So I joined them and grabbed a cup of coffee too then opened my laptop. We all had a busy week so I’m 100% sure we are all trying to catch up on what we missed — replying to emails and trying to make sense of what Trump tweeted this week (it’s a thing) before the real work starts.
“Do you guys ever feel the impostor syndrome and how do you get over it?”
So M asks us a question “Do you guys ever feel the impostor syndrome and how do you get over it?” O goes first and tells us when he meets an expert or someone who does more advanced stuff with their code, he goes back to the drawing board and works harder to add to his knowledge and aspire to be better than the expert. O then adds that this helps him kick out the imposter syndrome — I thought that was pretty cool!
So then M shares his story on how he was learning React from O. He managed to build a weather app in React and put it up on Github then someone contributed to his code and added tests using the Jest Test Framework, which M didnt know about. Instead of closing up, M got in touch with the lady who contributed his project and asked her what she did. She explained that, she wrote tests to see if everything was right. Feeling inspired M, set out to learn how to write tests using what the lady had added to his project as reference and now he uses them a lot.
What was interesting was listening to all this coming from two guys that I look up to. For me, these are the guys you call to help debug code when something goes wrong, so it was new to hear this conversation from them.
“Don’t close up or stay safe in your corner, be open and share, you never know what you may learn”
Hey I’m a newbie so of course I always get the imposter syndrome every time I start a project! I need to learn a bunch of new stuff in a go and always feel like I am playing catch-up so to hear all this from people I consider experts made me think I had to write it down to help other developers who feel like this.
Don’t close up or stay safe in your corner, be open and share, you never know what you may learn. I always make it a point to ask when I’m lost on anything.
In closing, I hope this helps people having a case of imposter syndrome. Always remember, no one knows it all.
Thanks for reading.
