The Insecure Developer
Tags: programming, life, developer, lifelessons
Published: 2017-05-26 12:52:20

---
title: The Insecure Developer
published: true
description: Make your insecurity one of your advantages
tags: Programming, Life, Developer, LifeLessons
---


I couldn’t decide how to start this story. I’m thinking about to share my story about feeling insecure and how I try to overcome this feeling.

## Feeling insecure

If you need to know something about me is that I’m super insecure in many areas in my life and of course as a developer. I feel that I’m not good enough or I don’t know enough of my craftsmanship. Insecure or maybe well known as imposter syndrome hits me hard many times from when I started as an iOS developer.

## Storytime

As a University student, I was searching for an internship for this summer. I applied to a couple of companies but I got rejected from almost all of them. That feeling struck me hard, made me feel more insecure and stupid. I failed a lot of the coding challenges.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The last couple of months were quite stressful for me. /1</p>&mdash; Agis ðŸ‘¨”ðŸ’» (@agisilaosts) <a href="https://twitter.com/agisilaosts/status/829758210475249664">February 9, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

A couple of tweets I wrote about the experience I had with the coding challenges.

I was super stressed out and in many of them and didn’t have the chance to even complete the solution to the given problem. I wasn’t fast enough and this feeling along with all the others made me question myself even more.

## Coding challenges in a whiteboard (Quizzes, and puzzle questions) are WRONG

I intentionally mentioned coding challenges for an internship or a full-time job because I found that many people after “fail them they’re becoming sad or more insecure about themselves.

## The feeling of rejection

Being rejected one time for an internship or a full-time job position can be so hard to swallow, but what about 9–10 rejections one after the other? That was exactly my position, imagine how I felt.
Reading emails like: “Thank you for your application but we decided to not continue with you in the next phase or “thank you for your interest in our X company but you’re not diverse enough for us”, made me feel sad and useless.
I know that is kind of hard to reply to every single one of the applicants about why they got rejected but I think the recruiters need to add that to the process. For example: What the heck means, “You aren’t diverse enough”?

## Overcome the feeling of being insecure

### 1. Talk to your friends & coâ€Š–â€Šworkers

I can’t and stress this advice enough. Talking to them will help you relax and get motivated for your work.

Getting advice from friends will help you understand that, for example in the situation, I explained above with the coding challenges the problem is not related to you but the problem is related to this useless process that many companies have to make other developers anxious and sad.

I want to relate this advice to my situation: When I felt weird & sad I talked to Cat Noone and she really helped me with her advice like how this is a normal feeling & that I have to overcome it by continue working on stuff that I really love.

Also, I talked with Viktor Wu from Gitlab recently because of the Out of office hours initiative and I understood that it’s ok to not be good in this kind of challenges. It doesn’t mean that you’re not good enough.
This kind of puzzles & quizzes will not help in your career or in what you will do in your everyday job in any way. Our conversation helped me be more confident about my skills.

### 2. Keep trying, until you achieve your goal

I’m maybe one of the most insecure people that you may know but at the same time I’m super dedicated, motivated & I work hard. I’m the kind of guy that I will fail a lot but I will keep pushing & move forward until I achieve my goal. I think that you should try and do the same. That’s a weird combination, right? Hah!

It’s kind of hard to do that but I want to share my thoughts & story behind it.

After I got rejected so many times I was sad but after that, I kept pushing and I sent more applications about internships positions. I was confident in my skills aside from the fact that many people/companies didn’t have the same idea. At the same time I was working on a weird bug on Iris’s iOS application and after fixing it made me feel more confident.

> If you want something so badly like I did, you need to work hard and at the end, you will achieve it, no matter what other people think.

Last but not least I want to mention that is good to feel insecure & at the same time work on improving your skills. In my perspective and like Cat Noone mentioned is better to feel that way than feeling over confident about yourself and your skills. I want to see “insecurity as an advantage of a human being than a vulnerability.

I hope that this post will help people to overcome their fears and improve their skills!

â¤ï¸ Agis

_This was first published on my [Medium page](https://medium.com/the-adventures-of-an-ios-developer/https-medium-com-agisilaostsaras-the-insecure-developer-122007ebed5c)_