Imposter Syndrome Is My Superpower As An Engineer, Seriously
It’s just me
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was fresh out of university and applying for my first job as an Intern in an enormous fortune 500 IT company.
“Why would they hire me. I know nothing about what that company does?”
“They will ask me about x, and I will fail because I don’t know the answer.”
These and many more like them were the thoughts going through my head.
I almost didn’t go, and when I went, I certainly thought I messed it up when I spoke to the manager who interviewed me. Looking back, not going would have been the biggest mistake in my life.
These feelings and thoughts would never go away for me and still come up occasionally.
The difference between then and now is that I have learned to use them to my advantage — here’s how:
It has a name
Feelings like this are more common than people think. It is likely that most of you reading this had them at some point or are still having them continuously.
I thought that it was normal to feel like that at your first job interview and that it would go away soon after I started working. But to my surprise, I had even worse thoughts on each subsequent interview in my career. It’s not only that they didn’t go away. It’s that they had gotten stronger.
Whenever I would get a task with something new or big, I would immediately think, “Ok, this is it. They will figure out I don’t know what I am talking about and fire me”. And to my big surprise, that day never came, and over the years, I even got promoted and switched to better jobs at better companies.
So, why was I feeling and thinking all of these negative thoughts even though I was objectively performing well? I am sure most of you know that I am talking about Imposter Syndrome (IS).
And It can be a nasty thing.
When I first heard the name and explanation by watching a YouTube video of an Oxford Ph.D. candidate talking about it, I thought, “This is it. That’s what I am suffering from. Now that I know its name, I can find a solution or medicine for it”.
I would search the internet, trying to find a miracle cure.
Sadly, it wasn’t so easy.
But I started noticing some patterns and learning more about the topic.
Wait, It’s Not Just Me?
Soon after I started investigating Imposter Syndrome, I realized that I was far from a minority. The more I read, the more it seemed that everybody had it. It was just not discussed as much.
I started asking my friends and colleagues about it, and the vast majority said that they had experienced it or are still experiencing it.
For me, this was a revelation. Since everybody had it, it wouldn’t be an unfair disadvantage anymore. It meant that the playing field was levelled and that I could still chase my dreams.
These examples are just from glancing at my Twitter feed today:
Having these thoughts made me very careful and nervous. In meetings, I would mainly listen and be afraid to ask questions. When performing the most straightforward tasks, I would go overboard and overkill it with my effort to compensate. I would ask a ridiculous number of questions and check every step in fear of not knowing how to do them. My manager even commented on how many questions I would ask after we had agreed to do some tasks and that I didn’t need to be such a perfectionist because I was using too much time that could be used on other tasks.
But as I learned that everybody had IS, I thought to myself, “Screw it, what do I have to lose? What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
So I started asking more questions, even those I knew the answers to. Because I was afraid the answer I had was wrong or didn’t understand something correctly.
Questions like: “Are we sure this is the right way to do this?”, “Can you walk me through the (straightforward and easy) process just to make sure I understand?” even though we discussed them at length already.
The Realization
On my second yearly review, my manager told me that I was a great Listener and asked questions that everybody else was too afraid to ask.
That he could rely on my work to be top-notch because I left nothing to chance and that he handed me things he wanted to be done perfectly. Additionally, he said that I always questioned the assignment and didn’t take things at face value but dug deeper.
These outcomes directly resulted from my lack of self-confidence in my skill and my desire not to fail.
That was the point I realized that my Imposter Syndrome was helping me do my work in a better and more complete way.
All I needed to do was bite the bullet and go for it despite the initial desire to give up and not engage in the first place.
And that is where the secret sauce is. If you just jump over the first hurdle, the rest doesn’t seem that impossible anymore. You chip away at a mountain pebble by pebble.
The Science Behind My Superpower
Humans are creatures of habit, and our brain constantly works to minimize the amount of effort it needs to perform specific tasks. That’s why it wants to automate as much as possible. That can have good and bad consequences.
For example, when you learn how to drive, in the beginning, you spend most of your focus on just the mechanics of driving. It becomes second nature after a couple of years, and you don’t even think about it anymore.
The same thing is true with work-related issues. You want to be in your comfort zone and perform your tasks with minimum amounts of effort. Then when something new or significant comes along, your first instinct is to try and get out of doing it. And one mechanism that the brain uses is giving you thoughts of inadequacy and self-doubt in the hopes that it will dissuade you from using all that energy.
When I first joined Photomath I was intimidated by the level of expertise people had and the technology that was being worked on. I had no experience in testing machine learning systems or automating tests for mobile apps. I was constantly doubting myself, and questioning if I made the right decision in joining this company.
Fast forward a few months and I couldn’t be happier. The challenges I was dreading helped me learn new skills and acquire new knowledge that I might never have gotten otherwise, by just working on things that I was already familiar with.
I met amazing new people and had conversations that I never had before.
Of course, what made all this possible was the atmosphere of cooperation and support from the people working here and the company itself. In an environment like that, I haven’t had to think about Imposter Syndrome in weeks.
People crave stability and security. Anything that changes the status quo is an invading organism that your body wants to eliminate. Naturally, you avoid the unknown because the unknown is the most significant generator of fear. And fear is the mind-killer.
Nobody is good at something straight off the bat. It takes years of study and practice to get consistent results and confidence.
However, there are two important notes here.
- First, you need to be in a nontoxic environment where everyone’s goal is to improve and grow. You need to be polite and understanding. I didn’t go around pestering people with my million questions. I sought them out when they were available and always considered their time and possible frustration with me. Being considerate and reasonable is the key to turning Imposter Syndrome around to serve you.
- Second, be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes the progression of knowledge versus confidence (expertise) over time. When you just start with something new and invest some time, you feel accomplished and have a sense of significant progress. You think that you have mastered all there is to know about it. This is a false sense of confidence coming from a lack of understanding of the field’s size. Once you push a bit farther, you realize that you have just started, and your confidence level plummets dramatically. Only after a significant amount of time does your confidence come back up, and you feel that you are an expert in the field.
An excellent example of this is multiplayer video games. After spending some time playing a game, you feel pretty good about it and think that you are at the top. Suddenly, anybody that is better than you must be cheating or using some exploit because they can’t be better than you. You are at the top.
Reference: https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect
Image source: https://dev.to/theiyd/the-dunning-kruger-effect-3cj2
What’s in it for me?
So, what is the main takeaway?
Everybody has Imposter Syndrome. You don’t have to feel isolated or misunderstood because you have self-doubt or a feeling of being found out. There is a reason “Faking it till you are making it” is a saying. You should embrace the new and unknown and invest energy into overcoming the challenge. You will have to “fake” it sometimes, but you will progress if you keep it reasonable. Break things down into bite-sized chunks and just keep going.
Understanding that everyone has Imposter Syndrome can also make you a better leader or mentor. I am constantly reminded of this fact from the feedback of my peers and mentees. They tell me how understanding I am and that they feel safe and encouraged to try out new things without the fear of catastrophic consequences. It’s because I know how they feel and understand that they might be scared or unsure of their abilities and that just saying to them that it’s all okay and that there is nothing to worry about helps them feel more confident and be more productive.
Next time you walk into an interview or a meeting and feel like you will “be found out,” just remember that everybody in that room has the same feeling about what they are doing.
Years after my first job interview from the beginning of this article, I became friends with the manager who interviewed me. He told me that he was terrified at the time. He just got promoted to a manager position, and it was his first time hiring people. He thought he didn’t know what he was doing and that he would certainly be found out and fired.
It seems to have turned out alright after all :).
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