Embracing the imposter syndrome
When sharing and accessing information can be achieved in just a few seconds from almost anywhere in the world, learning and collaboration are as easy as it’s ever been. Leaders talk about their work and ideas in podcasts, engineers tweet about best practices and programming languages, products and services are released, tools and frameworks created. It’s almost impossible not to get inspired by this non-stop stream of knowledge and ideas, but it can also be very difficult to keep up with it. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and imposter syndrome especially affect people working in technology. I want to share three personal experiences that helped me understand how to deal with it.
Disclaimer
I struggled a bit while I was writing this article because I didn’t want to trivialize this topic. Imposter syndrome happens sometimes due to us getting into unchartered territory and comparing ourselves with others, and I wanted to acknowledge this as something that happens and has happened to most of us during our careers. But there is also a dark side to this when the cause is a toxic environment. I’m not talking about this last case here, I think this is a complex situation and, in that case, I would probably recommend trying to get help and ultimately getting away from it as soon as you can.
My first story
Right after I got my degree in Computer Science, I started working in one of the IT departments in my university. We worked in geographic information systems, we were about 20 people working on map servers, search engines, and gazetteers. I was in charge of the search engine and I must have been doing pretty well because after a year and a half they put me in charge of the most important project we had as a project manager.
To be honest, I had no clue what I was supposed to do. This was the early 2000’s, we were all mostly engineers, there were no product managers or designers, and none of us had ever heard about Agile. We didn’t have any clear requirements and there was no clear model we could follow, so we were basically learning by doing. I had built the search engine, but I didn’t know much about any of the other systems, so I started talking to my colleagues to try to understand the big picture and I did as much research as I could (again, early 2000’s… not everything was on the internet yet) and, during the next months, I tried my best not to sink the project.
It was probably one of the most stressful and miserable years of my professional life. I didn’t feel in control of anything, I didn’t know how to estimate, I tried to do everything on my own and, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to deliver, I couldn’t prepare any roadmap, so I was basically on reacting mode the whole time. In the end, I burned out so badly that I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in IT. I left the job and I spent the next 4 years figuring out what to do with my life.
On my last day at work, when I went to talk with my boss to say goodbye, the conversation went a bit more personal than I had anticipated, and I told him that I had been overwhelmed for a long time and I felt like I was not good enough for the job. He was really surprised. He told me that he thought I was doing a great job, that I was super efficient, and that he was really sorry I had felt like that. He told me that if in a few months I decided I wanted back, the doors would be open for me.
There was so much I didn’t know back then. I was so used to performing on my own that when I found myself in that situation I couldn’t admit that I was struggling. There was no structure around me to support me and prevent that situation, but maybe if I had opened up to my boss much earlier the outcome would have been different.
When dealing with imposter syndrome, it’s important to talk about it. Your manager, your team, whoever is there to support you, needs to understand how you are feeling and that you might need help to succeed.
My second story
Fast forward 4 years, and I’m back in an IT company again. This is around 2008, iPhone had just been released, Google was about to launch the Nexus, and Android was not what it is today. After so many years away from IT, I was hired by a consultancy company to manage a project rebuilding an existing website for mobile devices. There was already a project manager, but he was handling different projects apart from this one, so I would be supporting him and acting as a bridge between the client and the developers.
To my surprise, the first day at my new job I discovered that I was a team of one person. I was expected to architect, implement, test, and manage the project. I was gutted. I didn’t have the skills to do this. I had not lied during my interview, so I talked to my manager. He told me that I had some time before the project officially started and I could use it to get back on track. That helped, and I put myself to it but, after a few weeks, I was again feeling very insecure. The more I learned, the more I understood how behind I was. I finally decided to quit, and so I was talking to a friend explaining about it and he told me: “Listen, you have been honest with them from the beginning, so you have nothing to worry about. If you blow it, it’s on them. But… I’m sure you won’t”. So I stayed. I pushed myself. I studied and practiced at home and, slowly but surely, the project moved forward.
Only 6 months later, the project was on track, I was handling a team of 4 people and leading the project on my own.
Sometimes there is a reason why you feel like an imposter. Sometimes you don’t have the technical skills, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn them and succeed in the end, you just need effort and time.
My third story
In 2017 I joined Alpha Health (now Koa Health) as a senior engineer. By then I had already worked in a few different companies, in consultancy and corporate, but this was my first real experience in a startup environment, and I was impressed about how they did things. The level of transparency and communication, how they applied agile practices, and how smart and efficient everybody acted was something I had not anticipated. During the first days there I wondered why they had hired me. I didn’t have any important company or product experience in my profile.
Of course, I was not a 20 year old anymore, so I gave it some time, and shortly after it was clear why they needed me. We were creating mobile apps in a fast-paced environment, so it was logical to use a hybrid technology like Ionic, something I had very good knowledge of.
When stepping into a new job environment you can easily feel intimidated by people around you that seem smarter or more capable, sometimes to the point that you can only see your weaknesses and not your strengths. Think about talking to someone, or just give it some time so that the rush dissipates and you are able to assess the situation from a more objective perspective.
Epilogue
There is another lesson that can be learned from those 3 stories. From the first one when I was a young graduate, to the last one when I was an already experienced engineer, more than 15 years passed. The imposter syndrome is not something you can get rid of, it will come back to you many times during your life and you need to learn how to deal with it.
With years of accumulated experience, I don’t think about it as something bad, but as a reminder that I’m stressing myself out by walking out of my comfort zone, and that’s a good thing if I want to get better at what I do. It keeps me humble, it tells me I need to improve, that the people around me know more than I do, that I need to learn more, that I need to get better.
