Impostor’s Syndrome Series
Hi, I’m an imposter.
My struggles with Imposter’s Syndrome and what I’ve learned from it.
A little earlier this year, I made the colossal decision to trade in the ivory tower for the server tower. During my tenure as a biomedical sciences Ph.D. student, I realized that I wanted to go back to my engineering roots and program for a living, so I went in search of non-traditional coding schools.
I ultimately decided to attend Lambda School because of their learn-now-pay-later paradigm (i.e., the income share agreement (ISA)). Little did I know that, when I was about two months into the curriculum, I would discover a second, more covert ISA at Lambda School — Imposter’s Syndrome Anonymous.
I imagine that if ISA’s members were an organized group — with meetings and the requisite stale donuts and burnt coffee — the introductions would go a little something like this:
Hi, I’m Alexis…
(Hi Alexis)
… and I am a bad developer.
The whole exchange would happen via video conferencing, of course — since Lambda is an online school — and my Internet would temporarily cut out after I say “bad.” However, the hundreds of other ISA members would nod in unison and (hopefully) accept me with open — albeit, virtual — arms.
All silliness aside, before discovering that I wasn’t the only “bad developer” at Lambda School, I had to go through something of a personal struggle.
The Before
I was feeling amazing coming out of the HTML/CSS/JS unit because I had taught myself some of these skills in my off time as I finished up grad school. Because of this, when we started the infamously difficult ReactJS unit, I was determined to use this unit as a litmus test, of sorts, to prove to others (and to myself) that I was an excellent all-around developer.
However, like many things in my life, I took this to the absolute extreme. I wanted to consistently be one of the (if not the) top developer(s) in my cohort. For me, this meant that I always had to receive high marks on the daily coding projects and the weekly coding challenges. I had to have the coolest side projects. I had to be just a little ahead of everyone else in the curriculum. I could never show any signs of weakness nor of not being able to figure out what we were learning. Hell, I even had a mantra: “ABCDEFG (Always Be Coding, Don’t Ever Forget, G!)”
This is the attitude that a lot of competitive Ph.D. students bring with them to their labs every day. In academia, we had to publish or perish; we had to continually publish relevant and exciting work to sustain or to improve our standing in our respective fields, or else we’d risk fading into obscurity or risk not graduating. At Lambda School — well, at least in my mind — I had to be the best or be outed as a lousy developer who would never get an awesome job afterward.
The During
I became obsessive about coding. I would code every. Single. Day. I would code on the weekends and even through a few unfortunate bouts of food poisoning. If I weren’t coding, I was reading Eloquent Javascript, You Don’t Know Javascript or any other of a litany of Medium or dev.to articles telling me how to up my game.
This hard work initially paid off. I was doing what I wanted to do after all…even as the first inklings of Imposter’s Syndrome started to wrap its tendrils slowly around my mind.
However, during the third week, after getting top marks on a coding assignment that I struggled with, I lost it. I can look back now and see that my being upset wasn’t even in the same neighborhood as logical. But during that time, my confidence plummeted. I felt like I was standing naked on stage for all of the world to see, and that everybody could see how much of a fraud I was.
In the back of my mind, I knew that I desperately needed a break, but to be the best developer, I couldn’t take breaks, even if it was for the sake of my health. My gut (literally) kept telling me to stop, but then my mind would play a slideshow of all the awesome projects that I should be building, and how I would fall behind everyone if I stopped.
Eventually, however, after about two weeks of this, my brain wasn’t working the way that I knew it should. Learning how to code wasn’t fun anymore. My mind was continually returning the same 503 status code when I tried to do things that should have come easily for me. I was burned out.
I missed sleep. Like really missed it. However, as I tried to soldier on like I knew a “good” developer would, it became increasingly more challenging to concentrate on my learning and to retain new information. I was a pure ball of quaking, sweating, crying anxiety. However, by the time I started seeing sounds, I knew it was time to close the computer and go take a weekend off. Delirious synesthesia isn’t something that you can ignore. I knew that I couldn’t continue like this. (Please know that I’m being intentionally hyperbolic about the whole seeing sounds thing. Please, don’t call my mom).
The After and Takeaways
While I was home that weekend and during the subsequent weeks, I made some time to step away from the keyboard and think. I know that I had picked up an all work/no play attitude as a Ph.D. student and that I was entering a career where people have been historically celebrated for sleeping under their desks. I also realized that I could be a good developer without sacrificing my mental health. Here’s what else I learned.
You are not alone.
When I started to open up to my fellow Lambda School students, I discovered that there were not only others who felt the same way that I did, but that even some of the people that I thought were were way better than I struggled with Imposter’s Syndrome. I started to realize that maybe my feelings of inferiority weren’t wholly valid.
Sleep is, most decidedly, not for the weak.
I hear engineers and other STEM professionals say this all the time.
Sleep is for the weak.
You snooze you lose.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
At one point in my life, I was able to function on very little sleep and be okay. I can’t do that anymore without risking my sanity and ability to learn. I still have to repeatedly tell myself that it’s okay to put down a problem and sleep on it. But my body and mind always thank me when I do.
If you’re anything like me, then you need to believe others when they compliment you.
I don’t think this warrants much further explanation. Most people don’t just compliment others just because they feel like being nice. I’m still working on prioritizing the good things that others say about me over the bad things that I sometimes say to myself. As a perfectionist, this will be an uphill battle, but on days where the climbing is easy, I definitely feel the difference.
And last, but not least, there is more than one way to be a good developer.
Did you know that the word imposter is, itself, an impostor? (This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since the English language steals words from other languages like developers steal code from StackOverflow). Impostor came to English from the French word imposteur sometime in the 1500s. The alternate imposter first appeared almost right after. And the cool thing is both are perfectly valid spellings of the word. Neither is more right than the other.
Maybe we can all learn something here. Perhaps just like both are correct spellings of the same word, there may also be multiple valid ways to be a good developer. You can sleep and take care of yourself and still be able to contribute cool things to the world.
