The cure for my imposter syndrome? A supportive team

When I started at Turo, I was definitely nervous about joining the engineering team. This was back in July of 2016. I had just graduated from college. I was 22 years old. I had not worked full time as an engineer before. I was very close to wearing a tie to the office. Maybe now you’re getting the picture. The way I saw it, if we chose teams using pickup basketball rules, I would be picked last. And that’s not a bad thing. I also would have picked me last. But what I want to outline is how a kid like me not only was able to feel comfortable joining a team of seasoned professionals, but how that team operated in an environment where I wasn’t just seen as a rookie, but a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal.

So, why did I feel nervous back in 2016 when I joined? There were two main reasons. I thought:

• maybe I’ll be bad at my job, and no one will trust me to do good work
• maybe I’ll go nuts talking to web-servers all day instead of people

Turns out neither of these fears came true, and I think our positive engineering culture had a lot to do with it.

Let’s examine this first fear — “maybe I’ll be bad at my job, and no one will trust me to do good work”

I think this is a common sentiment for people coming out of college. I had gotten pretty good at multiple choice tests, but this was a real business with real money and real customers, and I was just a kid! I mean, I was barely old enough to rent a car. When I was talking to the team about the job, they put me on a one hour phone call with the CTO at the time, Chris Eager. I couldn’t quite figure this out — “how am I supposed to talk to the CTO for a whole hour without him finding out that I don’t know anything?”. I was nervous, but what I didn’t know was that Chris taking this call told me everything I needed to know.

At Turo, I’ve found that selfless leadership trickles down the organization, and what Chris showed me that day was that this company was committed to my growth. And if they were committed to my growth, as the most junior of junior employees, then they were willing to put in the work to row forward as a unit, leaving no one behind. My fear was “maybe I won’t be good at my job” but it turns out it wasn’t completely up to me. Countless people have guided me along the way just because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Today I’m a more senior member of the team, but I still see the same positive signs. I’m consistently blown away by how willing our most busy, talented engineers are to help new hires get their computer set up or review my work. This is not something that you can teach, and being selfless isn’t in your contract. It’s something that is cultivated by everyone on the team without them being asked. That’s a positive culture.

Before joining, my other fear was “maybe I’ll go nuts talking to web-servers all day instead of people”

OK, introversion is a touchy subject for developers. Ask the average person to imagine what a software engineer does and you might have people picturing someone with headphones in a basement drinking Soylent. Don’t get me wrong, I think that probably goes down as a splendid day for at least a few of us on the team, but it’s nowhere near our daily reality.

What actually goes on behind the scenes is a mountain of communication about what is this feature, why do we need it, when do we need it, can we do it like this or like that, what if it doesn’t work in Canada or on your uncle’s really old iPhone? There’s a lot of collaboration and negotiation that needs to happen, and for me that’s the challenging and interesting part of our job. If it was obvious what we needed to do and how we needed to do it, you all would have replaced us by now.

So no, I didn’t go crazy looking at server logs all day, because so much of what we do is helping each other, face to face and on a dozen different collaboration tools. We work together, achieve together, bring down the website together and bring it back up together. This is a social endeavor.

Looking back on my initial fears of joining the team, they can seem a little silly. Everyone is so supportive, understanding, and down to earth at Turo. But I don’t think those fears are unwarranted. At so many companies, there are huge rifts in the organization and people work in an environment where it doesn’t pay to be selfless. You don’t get what you give, so no one gives. So let’s remember to look around and notice the times when transparency and honesty are the norm, kindness and generosity are expected, and learning and innovation is an encouraged team sport. Let’s remember that this could easily not be the case. Let’s remember that building this kind of positive environment is hard, often unseen work. We should embrace that, and accept nothing less.