The Insecure Developer
Make your insecurity one of your advantages
I couldn’t decide how to start this story. I’m thinking about to share my story about feeling insecure and how I try to overcome this feeling.
Feeling insecure
If you need to know something about me is that I’m super insecure in many areas in my life and of course as a developer. I feel that I’m not good enough or I don’t know enough of my craftsmanship. Insecure or maybe well known as imposter syndrome hits me hard many times from when I started as an iOS developer.
Storytime
As a University student I was searching for an internship for this summer. I applied to a couple of companies but I got rejected from almost all of them. That feeling struck me hard, made me feel more insecure and stupid. I failed a lot of the coding challenges.
I was super stressed out and in many of them and didn’t have the chance to even complete the solution to the given problem. I wasn’t fast enough and this feeling along with all the others made me question myself even more.
Coding challenges in a whiteboard (Quizzes, and puzzle questions) are WRONG
I intentionally mentioned coding challenges for an internship or a full time job because I found that many people after “fail” them they’re becoming sad or more insecure about themselves.
The feeling of rejection
Being rejected one time for an internship or a full time job position can be so hard to swallow it but what about 9–10 rejections one after the other? That was exactly my position, imagine how I felt.
Reading emails like: “Thank you for your application but we decided to not continue with you in the next phase” or “thank you for your interest in our X company but you’re not diverse enough for us”, made me feel sad and useless.
I know that is kind of hard to reply to every single one of the applicants about why they got rejected but I think the recruiters need to add that to the process. For example: What the heck means, “You aren’t diverse enough”?
Overcome the feeling about being insecure
1. Talk to your friends & co — workers
I can’t and stress this advice enough. Talking to them will help you relax and get motivated for your work.
Getting advices from friends will help you understand that, for example in the situation I explained above with the coding challenges the problem is not related to you but the problem is related to this useless process that many companies have to make other developers anxious and sad.
I want to relate this advice to my situation: When I felt weird & sad I talked to Cat Noone and she really helped me with her advices like how, this is a normal feeling & that I have to overcome it by continue working on stuff that I really love.
Also I talked with Viktor Wu from Gitlab recently because of the Out of office hours initiative and I understood that it’s ok to not be good in this kind of challenges. It doesn’t mean that you’re not good enough.
This kind of puzzles & quizzes will not help in your career or in what you will do in your every day job in any way. Our conversation helped me be more confident about my skills.
2. Keep trying, until you achieve your goal
I’m maybe one of the most insecure people that you may know but at the same time I’m super dedicated, motivated & I work hard. I’m the kind of guy that I will fail a lot but I will keep pushing & move forward until I achieve my goal. I think that you should try and do the same. That’s a weird combination right? Hah!
It’s kind of hard to do that but I want to share my thoughts & story behind it.
After I got rejected so many times I was sad but after that I was keep pushing and I sent more applications about internships positions. I was confident for my skills aside from the fact that many people/companies didn’t have the same idea. At the same time I was working on a weird bug on Iris’s iOS application and after fixing it made me feel more confident.
If you want something so badly like I did, you need to work hard and at the end you will achieve it, no matter what other people think.
Last but not least I want to mention that is good to feel insecure & at the same time work on improving your skills. In my perspective and like Cat Noone mentioned is better to feel that way than feeling over confident about yourself and your skills. I want to see “insecurity” as an advantage of a human being than a vulnerability.
I hope that this post will help a lot of people to overcome their fears and improve their skills!
❤️ Agis
Agisilaos Tsaraboulidis is a University Student based in Greece, an iOS Developer at Iris & the maker of SoundMemory Rush.
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