Imposter Syndrome In Programming

Key Takeaways

[Music] this video is sponsored by Ella node anyone can build on the node whether you need a development portfolio to land your next job or you're ready to put your app into production lonoa can get you there for $20 in free hosting credit click the link below or sign up at lynda.com / traversée hey guys I've talked about impostor syndrome here and there but I wanted to make a video dedicated to it just because I think it's something that like 95% of programmers go through at some point and it could be in different variations it might be very brief and not a big deal or it might continue to plague you for years throughout your career and even though I'm looking at this from a programmers perspective this video is relevant regardless of the profession so in this video I want to do four main things I want to talk about what impostor syndrome is look at some questions that you may have asked yourself that are related to it some reasons why it's so prevalent in this industry and then some things you can do to kind of change your way of thinking to stop it and it'll also give some of my personal experiences with impostor syndrome so let's first look at the definition of impostor syndrome and go from there so it's defined as the persistent inability to believe that one success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one's own efforts or skills so that's the the kind of dictionary definition so you essentially feel like an impostor in your industry like everyone around you such as your co-workers or students if you're still in school no more than you or just have a better capacity for learning than you do a better overall ability to learn whatever it is you're working with in our case programming and technology so to better define impostor syndrome and what it feels like let's look at some questions that you may have asked yourself at some point that are geared towards this and I didn't find these questions doing any research or anything like that I came up with them out of pure experience I've asked myself these questions and that many many points in my career so the first one is am i smart enough am i smart enough to be a programmer a lot of us growing up we looked at programmers as these nerdy geniuses like Bill Gates types people that made on a roll every year that were math whizzes did excellent in school people where everything just comes easy to them with a minimal amount of effort and that actually couldn't be further from the truth in most cases and I probably wouldn't believe that myself if I never started programming because I'm actually the opposite of all those things I had a shitty childhood I got into a lot of trouble I got into drugs when I was younger I did pretty bad in school mostly just because I didn't care I'm not that good at math and yet Here I am so I found a love for programming and web development around 13 years ago and just never stopped doing it and I'll talk more about this later but I think it's more ambition and drive over natural intellect so the second question is do I belong here if you're like me and you're not the the stereotypical nerd maybe you know you have tattoos all over your body or maybe you dress a certain way you listen to certain music maybe your ethnicity makes you think that you don't belong whatever it might be any of the only any reason to kind of veer away from this the stereotypical nerdy programmer type just know that that stereotype is [ __ ] and it doesn't really matter what you look like how you dress what race you are none of that really matters and you might think that you're going to be judged on that and you might be by just a very small group of people very ignorant people but by and large no one cares about that stuff what they care about is if you can actually do your job and you know what you're doing so the next one is did I make a mistake choosing this path so you might be in a boot camp or a college class or maybe your first job and this question might hit you like a ton of bricks maybe you get a programming assignment and everyone around you seems to know exactly what they're doing they know exactly how to execute their plan and so on and you just feel lost and this is usually when you feel like you might just want to walk out and walk out of the classroom walk out of the the job go do something else find something easier and some people do just that and they end up missing out on a career that they would have loved and really progressed at I mean we all feel this way at some point if this is truly what you want and you have the drive to do takes just ignore this notion and move on because I'm really glad that I did so next you might wonder is it even possible for me to learn what's required to do this job and we asked this because in software development there's so many options if you watch my 20/20 practical guide it's like 72 minutes of relevant web technologies and that's just one area of programming that's just web development so there's no way that you can learn everything but the good news is you don't have to you need to learn a specific realm of technologies or a specific stack and stick with it you know if you're learning web development you might learn HTML CSS JavaScript some framework maybe a back-end language and framework a database and get and that's very possible so I mean I know that's still a lot I'm not gonna say it's easy I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make you naive and think that it's easy it is very difficult but it's it's very very possible for just about anyone that wants it that has the drive to to learn what what's needed so just be sure to find the stack that you work well with and stick with it you don't have to learn everything so don't just get that out of your head that you have to learn everything that you see a video on or a course on or anything like that so the next one is is it just luck and this is more for people with imposter syndrome that have already made it in some way maybe you're already working or you're getting clients as a freelancer I'm gonna use myself as an example here because I've asked myself this question as a freelancer as a senior developer and now as an educator so out of all the great channels out there why is mine one of the ones at the top of this niche and I'm definitely not this best software developer on YouTube and sometimes I think I'm just here because I was lucky and maybe even some of you guys think that but when I really think about it I realized that I do have an ability to explain complex topics in a regular and understandable way and I think a lot that has to do with that is me growing up not as a you know a straight-a student a nerdy programmer I think that it allows me to speak in just a normal way to help people that more like me understand more complex topics I'm also very honest I don't have an online persona and I think that people respect that and I'm not just saying this - you know - to my own horn or anything but I'm just saying it so that you guys can maybe look at yourself in a different way to kind of get over this am I just lucky crap look at the the actual things that are valuable valuable about yourself and realize that and you can move past this am I just lucky there's a reason that you're where you are it's not luck and I'm sure there's many many other questions and thoughts that you guys have had that have kind of brought you down and put you into this impostor syndrome category but these are just some of the ones that I've dealt with quite a bit throughout my career so let's look at some of the reasons why impostor syndrome is is just so prevalent in software development so like I already said there's there's so much to choose from in terms of languages frameworks everything down to you know what operating system to use just figuring out what to learn is overwhelming never mind actually learning it you just want to take it step by step and figure out what you want to do if it's web development you know do you want to do front-end back-end full stack or do you want to do something like machine learning game development find your path and take a good amount of time to map it out and figure out what technologies you need to learn maybe you want to go to a boot camp or something like that talk to people in the industry get a feel for for the different avenues that you can take so another reason for I think why imposter syndrome is prevalent in programming is software development in general is evolving daily sometimes it seems like by the minute especially with web development there's updates to frameworks and libraries and even to the core languages all the time so it's really easy to fall behind if you are a programmer 20 years ago or even in some cases ten five years ago there's many areas where you'd be lost today and yes you you know the fundamentals so you could get caught up to speed pretty quickly but unlike many other fields you couldn't just jump back in without learning a ton of new stuff and this can be a huge reason for imposter syndrome you just learn something and it gets updated a month later and now you're behind again it's it's actually a constant source of aggravation in this field for many of us including myself however as time moves on you learn to kind of pick and choose what's really important for you to keep track of and stay updated with and what's not so unrealistic perceptions is another one I think that we have these superheroes of tech people like Bill Gates Steve Jobs Elon Musk Jeff Bezos startups are being created left and right this goes along with what I was saying where people think you have to be some kind of genius to to be successful in this business and you don't hear much about the developers that are keeping these million and billion dollar companies going but you just hear about the the one or two guys that created them or the CEOs and you might not start up a billion-dollar company but you sure as hell can be a developer at one if you put your maximum effort in and that's what you truly want to do so I think the media and unrealistic expectations really make us think that we're supposed to be these like business and tech masterminds in order to be successful in this industry all right so programmers can be very competitive I myself I'm not like that whatsoever I don't really care to try to prove that I'm the smartest guy in the room however many developers are competitive and I think that it can be a turn-off to a newcomer they kind of see see that and they start to think well maybe I should be that good and I don't belong here and I'm not saying people shouldn't be competitive it's not for me but I think it's absolutely fine as long as you're not an [ __ ] I just want new people to know that that's not a good reason to feel like you don't belong is by watching these these competitive type programmers that that attend hackathons and all that stuff and I think that's great I really do it like I said it's not for me but I'm definitely not [ __ ] on people that do that kind of stuff the people I will [ __ ] on though our arrogant programmers because there are a lot of them a lot of them are dicks and they really kind of get their rocks off by making other people feel stupid and I don't want to get too much into this because they'll just go on a rant but I just want people that are new to know that when you you run into someone like that just ignore them because the truth is they're not that smart and they have to make themselves feel like they're smart in order to feel better about themselves so they have to bring others down so ignore them don't let them bring you down there's there's plenty of great people out there great programmers that will help you out you know so if you run into one of these dicks just move on let's take a look at some kind of I guess different ways of thinking to help impostor syndrome because obviously there's no medication for it it's not an actual medical condition it's just I don't know I guess a mental phenomenon so my first suggestion is to be comfortable being uncomfortable and what I mean by that is you're always gonna have some level of discomfort and not knowing exactly what to do this is especially true when you start at school or you get a new job or you get a new project in that job I mean no two projects are the same and you're not always gonna know the answer in fact sometimes you might be expected to know the answer and you're not and you might feel like an idiot so you have to kind of get used to that feeling job interviews are probably the most uncomfortable things that I can think of I mean they give you these ridiculous whiteboard questions and usually you can't do any research or look anything up and sometimes you just blank out and I've gone through this a few times and just felt like a complete failure and this is actually one of the places where people decide to give up and you know they feel stupid and like they're not good enough and they just never go back to another interview so if this happens to you don't let it get to you it just know that it happens to everybody it happens to the best of us just remember kind of the questions and the problems that you were asked go home study up on those types of problems just your problem-solving skills in general and just keep going you know you might fail a couple times but eventually you're going to get it if you have that that drive to succeed so this brings us to the next one which is realize that everyone struggles just like you do well I mean 99% of people there are some naturally gifted people out there but most of us don't fall into that category so when you get a job or you meet other programmers you see what they want you to see which is the best of them most of us have a warped perception of reality we see another developer complete a task and we think it just comes easy to them we don't see them struggle to find a solution when it's yourself doing it when it's yourselves trying to solve some kind of problem you see and you go through that struggle so it's a false comparison to look at someone else and compare against yourself because you see your what your the struggles you go through but you don't see theirs in most cases and I like to use myself as an example for this because being a youtuber and a course creator people like to look up to me and think I'm the best web developer in the world and everything comes easy to me I don't have to do any research or anything but that's because you only see what I want you to you see the the courses and tutorials that are the end result of me smashing my head against my monitor trying to figure something out you don't see the behind-the-scenes crap you don't see me struggle to help my 8th grade daughter with our math homework and feel like an absolute [ __ ] I go through the same exact stuff that all you guys do my mind is no different from yours regardless of what you see in my videos so just think of that any time you feel any kind of imposter syndrome and you and you're comparing yourself to someone else so next I think that having a strong passion and drive for the stuff I think it Trump's some rare super intellect many people don't like the word passion because it's overused and it's kind of corny but if you have it whatever you want to call it it's vital to your success I think that I made it pretty clear that I don't have a super intellect my wife will tell you that in a second but I do have a drive that helps me find solutions my unwillingness to give up and is this to say that anyone can be a program or absolutely not but not for the reasons you might think it's not because you know people aren't intellectually capable it's because they don't have that drive if if you're someone that gets stuck and looks for an answer for five minutes and gives up because you couldn't find it easily then you probably shouldn't be a program you probably won't succeed if you don't enjoy building things and problem solving then you probably shouldn't be a programmer so I'm not one of these people that are saying anyone can be a programmer I just don't think it's because of some lack of intellect I think it's a lack of and drive that might be my own opinion but that's that's just what I think so it's more about personal drive than natural intellect so another way of thinking that can help impostor syndrome is realizing that you'll never be an expert in software development not just you but anyone and that reason is because it's always changing there's there's too much to learn to call yourself an expert at least in my opinion I mean I guess you could be an expert in a specific technology but I refrain from from even thinking in that way because technologies are always updating and evolving so realize you'll never be an expert and neither will anyone else this kind of puts my mind at ease and take some of the weight off having to be an expert one of the most important things to me is to have a growth mindset and realize that you'll always be learning you're always going to be a student and if you hate learning you're probably gonna hate programming period you can't become stagnant in this industry at least if you want to be successful so the last one is to give yourself the credit you deserve and this is something that I've personally struggled with I mean I freelanced I've worked for companies I've I've done consultation I've educated content creation and I still sometimes struggle with impostor syndrome and giving myself credit I mean thousands of people tell me that I help them and that feels great and that's my main motivation for doing this but it's sometimes it's still not enough to knock that feeling or that thought out of my head and you want to try not to do this if you're in school and you're getting good grades or you complete a big project realize that that's an accomplishment if you land a Deb job that's a huge accomplishment if you get if you get promoted if you freelance and you get a good client and you deliver and they're happy with your work these are all big accomplishments and you should really give yourself credit that the credit you deserve and reflect on that and that will help you see that you you're in the right place you're doing what you're supposed to do regardless of what your brain is telling you and when you're comparing yourself to other people and all that crap that you know brings you down that rabbit hole all right so that's it guys hopefully something I said clicked I mean my bottom line is that just about everyone has these thoughts and feelings and wonders if they're in the right place and what sets you apart from the people that don't succeed is that you don't give in to these thoughts and let them win I mean I get these thoughts all the time even to this day but I always pull myself out and I don't let it stop me from achieving my goals and that's exactly what I suggest you guys do and I think you'll be fine alright so that's it thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video