Imposter Syndrome, the Bane of My Existence
By: Andrew Stein
Tags: Technology, Inspiration, Programming, Life Lessons, Personal Development

Well, you guessed it! Or maybe you didn’t, but either way, I decided to attend a meetup at a coding boot camp in Chicago called Actualize in hopes that maybe this might be the career move I’ve been waiting for.

I was blown away by a “simple” demonstration on how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make webpages. I thought it was so cool to have the ability to create things on your own and call them yours. There was so much freedom of expression that, as a terrible doodler in school, I felt that I could make anything! So I signed up.

This is the quote. While I was learning to code, this quote helped me not go insane (even though I did quite a few times, and still do). After three months of intense learning, I made it. I graduated from the boot camp thinking “Wow, we learned so much! But there is so much more out there.” I wasn’t wrong.

After job-searching for around three months and a lot of coding challenges, I finally got my first gig. I was going to be a QA automation engineer. I was so excited, but I could not help this feeling I had inside of me of Why me? Am I good enough? I had so many interviews before this and they didn’t want me. At this point, you might be thinking, Okay Andrew, so now it sunk in that you had imposter syndrome. Well, you’d be wrong. I didn’t know what imposter syndrome was yet, and I did not think I was good enough, despite the hours and hours of preparation I did to get the job. I researched everything about the company and its software and practiced, very uncomfortably I might add, in front of a mirror for what seemed like an eternity. But hey, why would they pick me, right?

I learned so much more than I ever could have imagined in this position, and despite my inexperience, I wanted to be the best that I could be and learn as much as I could. After I’d been in this position for around ten months, my manager, who is a model of what a manager should be, encouraged me to apply for a junior back-end position that the company was opening up and said that she had already recommended me for the position.

Just like that, I began to have these feelings again, and like an old friend, I welcomed them right in: Am I good enough? Why would she recommend me for the job? Funny how something so powerful can be overlooked so easily. I was interviewed for the position, and, would you look at that, they said yes! Well now, you might want to ask me, “That’s awesome, but did you ever wonder what these thoughts were or why they always appear at a milestone?” Nope. I remember telling myself that this was a part of the process and that I will learn not to be as hard on myself later on. Little did I know that this would ultimately hit me harder than I would ever know.

The time came for me to start this new role. This was historically the hardest team/codebase to wrap your head around out of every team in the company. There were so many new languages and frameworks I needed to learn in this role: AWS, NodeJS, the serverless framework, mocking AWS resources in unit tests, and PHP, just to name a few. I was overwhelmed, but I took it day by day.

After a week of being in this role, I could not stop thinking, Why me? I don’t have experience in a lot of these technologies. This time though, the thoughts did not stop. I would think about it constantly. So I finally did some research and learned, you guessed it, I was experiencing imposter syndrome.