Why Do So Many Software Developers Have Imposter Syndrome?

Key Takeaways

today I'd like to talk about impostor syndrome what it is why so many software developers have it including me and how I've learned to deal with it but let me start with a story I got my first full-time teaching job at the University in 2006 the very first course that I taught was a course called game programming in C++ like not the easiest topic I didn't realize it at the time but my first lecture was going to teach me one of the most important lessons in my life I was extremely nervous before my first lecture I was afraid that students were not going to take me seriously after all I never done teaching before I even remember being all stressed out about the not being enough chalk for the chalk board as if that mattered I was afraid of failing I was afraid that people would single me out and say hey you're not a real teacher in short I suffered from impostor syndrome imposter syndrome is when you feel like you're a fraud that you're going to be exposed as being fake and the weird thing is that imposter syndrome seems to happen more often as you acquire more skills you'd expect it to become less but in my experience that's actually not true at all the problem is that you need to deal with it because otherwise it's going to block you from making progress ultimately you're sabotaging yourself and that's a pity you deserve better now especially for software developers impostor syndrome is very common I think I know why but before I talk about that let me first finish my story so on the day of my very first lecture I walked into the classroom this had a pretty classical setup lots of tables with chairs they were all directed at the front of the room where it was a Blackboard without shell and the table with a VGA cable yep it was a while ago about 60 students were waiting there looking at me setting on my laptop basically being a total nervous wreck I looked at the clock it was 1:15 p.m. the time my lecture was supposed to start do you know what happened next nothing nothing happened I started my lecture I mean it wasn't perfect it was my first lecture right but it was possible I survived the students they sat there they took notes they asked some questions and then at the end of the lecture they left nobody cared that this was my first lecture nobody pointed me out as a fraud and that was it then one week later I did my next lecture and then the week after that I did another one and then another one the lesson that I Learned was that people honestly don't care imposter syndrome is purely based on your own irrational fear learning this has helped me be more at ease with getting out of my comfort zone but there are some other things you can do that have also helped me a lot and I'll cover those in a minute but first I want to talk about why impostor syndrome is so common among software developers well the first thing is that there's such a breath of knowledge to be had there's like so many different programming languages and Concepts to learn about different programming paradigms such as objectoriented programming or functional algorithms data structure software design architecture Cloud devop software testing the list goes on and on and that list just keeps growing now because of that complexity it's really hard to be precise and to be correct one thing that might help you tackle some of that complexity by the way is to check out my free architecture checklist if you want to build complex software systems host them in the cloud that's a lot you need to think about the checklist helps you take off the important things and contains a ton of practical tips and mistakes to avoid get for free at iron. c/ checklist so that complexity is the first problem that makes you feel very insecure second problem is that people with very technical mindset they're also quick to point out mistakes social media and Tech forums are only amplifying these feelings of inadequacy it's really easy to feel like you're not good enough that you need to read a ton of books do lots of courses Etc before you can actually produce anything that's worthy or perhaps you see that really senior developer come up with a great piece of code and then you think to yourself I will never be able to do that furthermore the rapid industry changes don't help at all it's constantly evolving landscape with new libraries Frameworks and languages coming out seemingly every week especially now with the flood of AI tools no San person can keep up with all these changes and you may even think to yourself oh well you know what AI is just G replace me anyway I'm never going to be as good so why bother at all if you don't address these thoughts they're going to sabotage you you'll stop being motivated because you think you're not good enough you stop learning it's not going to be fun anymore you might even give up being a software developer all together but that's not going to solve anything because even if you switch to another career you risk developing the same thoughts how do you get out of this well here are three things that have really helped me the first is to use yourself as your arti not other people don't compare yourself with other people and let that say anything about you I mean some people are going to be better than you others are going to be worse it doesn't matter now I have an academic background Academia this is particularly bad because your whole career is built up around you proving that you're really important are you a top tier researcher in your domain how often are you invited to give a talk how many papers that you publish and how often are they cited by other people it's very toxic actually when you think about it if you compare yourself to someone who's 10 times better than you it's going to feel bad it's useless and if you compare yourself to someone who's way behind you you may feel good about yourself for a while but it doesn't bring you any value either also progress isn't linear there's no one true path when it comes to programming we all learn different topics at different Paces you are on your own Journey the only thing that makes sense is to look at yourself from a few months ago that's the yard stick did you make progress if you did you became better that's all that matters if I look at some of my first videos I published on this YouTube channel they actually look like crap I look like an alien and in my academic career the first course that I thought was horrible even more recently I learned so much from doing video content like this and from building startup companies if I were to go back to the university now it would be a completely different teacher but even though it's your journey you don't have to do it completely alone there are people on a similar Journey as you meet them talk with them learn from them my Discord server is great way to do that it's a nice Community with people helping each other in different ways I think you'll like it join VI the link below the second thing you can do to battle imposter syndrome is to view everything you do as a learning process whenever you do something look at it as an experiment and the outcome is going to be interesting either way so you're going to learn something from it and what going through this journey we're all learning and if you view everything that you do as an experiment as a learning process then it's also okay to ask questions many people are afraid to ask questions and don't feel like you're stupid or something when I think back to my lecturing days and student asked me a question I never once thought oh that's a really stupid question I always like that student ask me questions because that means they were involved and sometimes you get a question that was not so easy to answer and that helped me learn how to explain things better another thing that's important here is that Perfection doesn't exist so don't aim for Perfection adopt a growth mindset every mistake you make is learning opportunity is not a proof of incompetence every time you learn something you get a little bit better than before the third thing you can do you can practice with is to remove emotion from it both negative and positive I noticed this myself when I post YouTube videos when I make mistakes in videos which I regularly do I'm a human like everybody else people can be really brutal you really don't want to know the kind of comments people post people can also be overly positive like I'm the greatest person ever or something it's nice to hear but I try not to be too emotionally attached to that in the end it's about your journey not about what other people think of your journey so having a mindset where you look at what you do objectively is much better like here's my work this is what I've done and if people criticize you remove yourself as a person from that think how can you use that criticism to improve your work next time it's about the work what about you and sometimes it also helps to just get away from everything take a walk outside now unfortunately it's always raining here in the Netherlands but if it's not raining on the rare day that it's not raining then I typically go outside and take a walk in terms of emotions my experience of teaching that very first lecture helped me realize that even though you may feel fear when you're doing something something that you haven't done before in most cases you're going to be okay so does that mean that I never have imposter syndrome anymore no I still have that in my case teaching at the University for lots of students having a YouTube channel failing at several startup companies that does help put everything into perspective but it did take me like 20 years to get to a place where I feel like I can sort of deal with it so I hope this video gave you some food for thought do you have imposter syndrome how do you deal with it any tips you'd like to share let me know in the comments properly dealing with imposter syndrome is going to help you be more confident make better progress and perform better in job interviews if you want to learn more about what's involved in doing a job interview for a senior developer position watch this video next thanks for watching and see you next time