Overcoming inadequacy

In my first post, I was telling you about my imposter syndrome. For those of you who do not have the privilege of knowing what I am talking about, I will put here the answer that ChatGPT gave me (only the first sentence, the answer was richer as you may guess):

imposter syndrome refers to a psychological pattern where individuals doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as fraud, despite evidence of their competence and success.

Sounds familiar? For me, it sounds quite familiar. See, I spent a few years studying why countries went to war, why certain economies are more developed by others, why culture and society have a huge role in shaping the economy of a certain country, and how crucial and useless can be sociology when philosophy is relevant (always), and a little bit of statistics.

Nowhere in my education was there enough logic, low-level machine language, systems architecture, networking, programming, concepts like microservices or monolithic apps, high availability or elasticity, or cloud computing. When I was younger, I was messing around with motherboards and CPUs, Windows and Linux, and PC videogames… but that talent never translated into some engineering due to a lack of proper mentoring, or at least that’s my take.

When it was about time, to pick the university and path, I went through a crisis. I spent 6 months attempting electronic Engineering and another 6 months dealing with the basics of computer science, but lacking a proper study method and guidance didn’t help make the trick. I left for a short journey through Eastern Europe by train to clear my mind. I will elaborate more about this later, what matters is that when I got back, I enrolled in political sciences. I had great years, and I met wonderful people (my lovely friends) but my first job experience as an intern, put me back in front of a computer to fulfill tasks, managing an institutional blog, a lot of spreadsheets, and, most importantly, a staggering amount of problem-solving (IT and non-IT related). And I was good at that.

Fast forward to my first corporate job and that effort helped: I learned how to navigate the treacherous waters of office politics, how to streamline and automate pre-existing processes and, get promoted. But things were getting more and more technical and that’s where the imposter syndrome kicked in: I was not a computer engineer; I was not a programmer, but I was given tasks that could be fulfilled easily by a proper IT figure.

Good for me, bad for the company you could say. In that context, I had to step out of my comfort zone and learn SQL and learn Python. I am pretty sure it should have gone differently but that’s how it happened. In my second career change my job was entirely about SQL but I had the amazing opportunity of dealing with Apache Spark! but not enough Python, but the imposter syndrome kicked in again: nobody told me about Scala, or how complex and beautiful and crazy fast could be a well-written SQL query.

Most likely there was somebody else out there that could do that better and faster. But no, I did not freeze, and I faced the challenge. I created a cute little pipeline that was moving around a considerable amount of data (the business was asking for that so…) and was not crushing and burning. My last career change took me entirely elsewhere: the aviation industry.

The game is different, the imposter syndrome kicked in since the beginning: nobody taught me how an airline company works, how the crews are managed, or how the airplanes are managed! And no, I did not study for that. I am facing another challenge but, let me tell you this, by now I consider my “imposter syndrome” a source of wisdom even if, every now and then, I forget about it.

And this was yet another post about imposter syndrome, if you are tired of this stuff let me know in the comments below. See you next week!