What is Imposter Syndrome?

Every person, sooner or later, is going to suffer from this thing which we label imposter syndrome.

You might have this feeling now, but you dont know that it has a name attached.

Let me describe some situations where you might find imposter syndrome in the wild.

• You are a developer, have no Computer Science degree, and you feel people that have the CS degree know a lot more than you, and you should get one too in order to be called a developer
• You work on a project and you call it a little side project, not a real project, because - you know - its just a simple app
• You think other developers know a lot more than you do.

Now sometimes I think the solution is to tell yourself:

• everyones winging it
• no one really knows what they are doing
• people you look up to like to show themselves as overconfident publicly, but under the hood theyre not really like that
• things will always be like this

But this is still very self-deprecating.

The real response to all this thinking is to realize how far you went from when you started.

Look back.

There was a day when you could not even figure out how to start the computer. What code even was. You didnt know you could actually create programs and make the computer do what you want.

Look at you now.

You are the best version of yourself and yet you are perfectly sure that tomorrow youll be an even better version.

You are improving. Just like your code.

The only way to stop feeling like an impostor is to stop thinking like an impostor.

• Break the silence.
• Separate feelings from fact.
• Recognize when you should feel fraudulent.
• Accentuate the positive.
• Develop a healthy response to failure and mistake making.
• Right the rules.
• Develop a new script.
• Visualize success.

But you know you are not perfect at your craft, and I think that this is a feeling that might never go away. After all programming is such an enormous field.

And we all know that person that is very overconfident, and will deprecate others just because they dont know that specific thing they happen to know a lot about well, dont be that person.

Find your sweet spot.

Im sure youll even get better at your craft if you start believing more that you were made for it.

The hardest part of solving a bug is identifying that bug. The rest comes easier.