Goodbye impostor syndrome.

I have been living with imposter syndrome my entire professional career. Nowadays, I am a web developer with 6 years of experience. I lead a development team, write articles and give talks. But I still sometimes feel doubt and uncertainty.

What is impostor syndrome, and where does it come from?

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon or impostorism) is a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

wiki

I studied programming on my own. I never took any paid courses and did not receive a programmer’s education. All my knowledge and skills I got through books, video lessons, and practice. I have a bachelor’s degree in engineering, but the university only taught us the basics of C# in terms of programming.

Since my first job as a programmer, I’ve worked with many people with core degrees. And this difference made me feel that I was an impostor because I don’t have a programming education, and they have.

This is partly a fair comparison. After all, in university, a future programmer reads many subjects, which establishes basic knowledge. And this knowledge I can not get at the same level or the same speed with self-study.

That’s why I was reading books at night and watching video tutorials all my free time. I greedily studied JavaScript, popular frameworks, git, databases, and node.js. I spent all my time trying to equalize the difference between a self-taught programmer and an educated one.

Was there a difference?

I worked with the other junior developers on the same projects. We wrote new functionality, participated in task planning, and went through technical assessments. We successfully performed our duties and evolved. And we did it all equally well. There was no chasm between us. But I didn’t realize it at the time.

As the years went by, I became more and more experienced. My knowledge grew deeper and my skills broadened. Did I feel more confident? Of course! But the impostor syndrome wasn’t going anywhere.

I still felt that my colleagues had more experience in working with cloud infrastructure, backend development, and team planning. And I still continued to explore new areas to feel more confident.

What was the reason?

After 6 years, I finally understood why I felt like an impostor.

My colleagues actually knew better than I did about many things. DevOps knew better than I about cloud infrastructure, Architect in services architecture, and PM in planning and management. Do you see? THEY know more than I do. Each of them knows better than I do in their narrow specifics.

It’s the same with other fellow developers. One used to work with C++, the second used to be a Java developer, another learned python at university, and the fourth learned ruby on weekends. Do you see? THEY know C++, Java, Python, and Ruby! And I know javascript and used to work with C#.

That’s the first problem: I was comparing myself ONE to ALL at once. The collective knowledge (of which I am a part) I was comparing to myself alone. And obviously, I alone cannot know and be as knowledgeable as all my colleagues.

The second problem is?comparing yourself to those who are more successful than you.

I follow popular developers who record videos on YouTube, lead podcasts, write articles, organize conferences, etc.

And at some point, I realized that I was comparing myself to them. They have a lot of videos, articles, and public appearances, and I don’t.

But you know what? I realized that these people have been making videos and writing articles for years. They started their careers when I was still in middle school. So why am I comparing myself to them?

How did I cope?

It turns out that early in my career, because of my uncertainty, I began to compare myself to my co-workers and then to the popular developers who manage their blogs.

The solution is quite simple:?DO NOT COMPARE YOURSELF?with others.

Sure, it sounds simple, but how do you stop doing it? I have an answer.?Compare yourself to yourself. That’s it! It’s very simple!

The key to success is to always be the best version of yourself.

I know a lot more today than I did six months ago.

I’m blogging today, and I didn’t blog six months ago.

I’m working hard, and in six months I’ll be so much better than I am today again!

There’s no point in comparing yourself to someone successful because you can’t live “his” life and become like “him”. However, we can work on ourselves and become a better version of ourselves.

But is there a benefit to imposter syndrome?

Since I was not certain of myself, I always rechecked even my simplest decisions. If I structured a project in my way, I made sure to additionally read articles about how other developers were doing it. And so with all work issues.

Because of this, I learned to doubt. Even now, I question the obvious and read the documentation and articles to learn more about the question.

Critical thinking matters in our lives as well as in the software development profession. And thanks to imposter syndrome, I developed this skill very well. Trust me, there is nothing worse than a developer who confidently makes absolute nonsense. ??

Conclusions

There is no point in doubting yourself and comparing yourself to others. You need to evolve and enjoy your achievements.

I hope that my story will help someone cope with imposter syndrome and self-doubt.

Have you experienced something similar? I would be very interested in reading your thoughts on this in the comments.

Thank you for your time. See you in the next ones ??.