My experience with imposter syndrome as a beginner / junior developer.
Tags: mentalhealth, career, beginners, codenewbie
Published: 2021-03-21 13:53:49

##### I wanted to share my experience and talk about this huge emotional phase that we all as beginners and junior developers go through at the start of our dev careers.

Let me first briefly tell you about my path towards being a developer.

I finished my CSE degree in September 2019 and after that I didn’t know what to do there were many career paths that I was trying to consider but first I thought I would take a break and “Chill” for a while, this “Chill” phase lasted till December 27th 2019 when I decided to so something with my life and take a path either as a developer or may be something else. So I decided that I was going to teach myself web development, I browsed through **Udemy** and found a course taught by London App Brewery named as **The Complete 2020 Web Development Bootcamp**, that taught about **MERN** stack, I purchased the course and made a study plan which I would execute everyday till the bootcamp was completed. After completing the bootcamp I started practicing Javascript on codewars and studied more about ReactJs which I had come across in the bootcamp. I felt confident with my skills and started applying for jobs, gave a couple of interviews and got rejected until finally in August 2020 I got my first job as a web developer at a startup. 
At this point I thought that  I had clear concepts and could work with ease but when I started working I quickly noticed how less I know and how much is still there to learn. I went from “I can do it” to “I don’t know if I’m fit for coding” in about a month and a half, I felt like I don't know anything and I don't think i'll make it, I was taking time to finish tasks and understanding new concepts and then I realised that I’m just a fresher, just a beginner with not even a month of real experience and that I was expecting too much from myself, I used to see senior developers and other developers finishing a task in lesser time than me and that drove me crazy. So I started searching on google about **Imposter Syndrome** and how to deal with it. I have read a fair share of blogs written over this topic and finally came to a conclusion that hey, it happens to all of us, even the senior developers feel it sometimes and that helped me a lot.
I know we all feel it and for the beginners who are reading this, you are gonna get this feeling sometime, everybody does, what you can do is to just take a day at a time, focus on getting better at your concepts and practice, you see, your company that hired you already knows that you are a beginner and they don't expect you to finish tasks or solve complex problems in a small period of time, what you can do is to just try your best and never give up on yourself. Don't ever think that you won’t be able to make it or you should quit cause you are not alone there’s a million other developers who feel the same way, just focus on getting better, take micro steps and with time you will overcome this huge fear of not being a “good developer”. 
You just need to believe in yourself and never give up.

I would love to hear your experiences in the discussions below.

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