Jennifer Konikowski

Last week, my Virtual Coffee small group had a great conversation about imposter syndrome. I had wanted to talk about it because I had seen a request for an imposter syndrome channel in Slack and I didn’t think it would be a healthy choice. So I had some hot takes, which I am now bringing to my blog. First up, let’s define imposter syndrome. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

a false and sometimes crippling belief that one's successes are the product of luck or fraud rather than skill

Historically, this has been a phenomenon seen in high achieving women, which, as HBR noted, is likely due to the negative feedback that women regularly receive. So why does it seem like everyone in tech (particularly developers) have imposter syndrome now? Well, strap in, because I’ve got some hot takes coming your way!

1. People commonly use the term when referring to junior/early-career developers. This is pretty wild to me! If you are early in your career, you, by definition, have not really had any success as a developer! You are just getting started. I think Kim Crayton described this well in a talk she gave on mentoring at PyCaribbean in 2017 (quote is slightly paraphrased):

Learners do not have imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is people who have senior level skills and still don’t think they can do a job. Imposter syndrome is not learning. Learning is hard. Learning takes time. You don’t look at a baby who’s just been born and can’t flip over and tell them they’re suffering from imposter syndrome. No you’re not, you just don’t know how to flip over yet! That sounds absurd right?

With that in mind, maybe stop telling junior developers they have imposter syndrome. They are learning! They should not be expected to know everything.

2. Our job descriptions are absurd. I’m pretty happy with my current company (hey come work with us at Splice) because we don’t have 20 different technologies in our job description. HOWEVER: most job descriptions ask for multiple years of experience in both a backend language and frontend framework, Docker, AWS/Azure/Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GraphQL, etc. And you will see that on job descriptions that are not for senior developers. This is especially fraught for early-career devs, who regularly see non-senior posts that are still asking for all of those and 5+ years of experience which makes the job search seem hopeless. Let’s be more realistic with what we need versus what it’s more acceptable to learn on the job.

3. Interviews are an absolute nightmare. If you want to feel terrible about yourself, interview as a developer. At almost any level, you will be told by at least one company that you “aren’t senior enough” or “aren’t technical enough.” The way most companies do interviews also makes it feel way more like it is a personal failing on your part rather than just you and that job not being a great fit (which is actually the case). For example, I have had a broad swath of experience which has enabled me to jump into almost any codebase and be able to figure out (roughly) what’s going on and be able to make improvements. But I do not have experience building applications at scale. If we are being honest, very few people do. If you are at a large company that’s at that scale, you are likely part of a larger team and not making big architectural decisions. Or you might be at a smaller company and maybe have to scale from 100 to 1000, but not any further. Or, like me, you could have spent a decent portion of your career at B2B companies that do not have a ton of users. So why are we making people feel like they suck for just not being the right fit at your company? Maybe we should treat each other better.

4. To that point: talking about imposter syndrome makes it an individual problem. The problem is not with the individual! The problem is how we, as a community of developers, are treating each other. Instead of helping each other grow and lifting each other up, we are constantly putting others down to make sure it’s clear that we are the better developer. There are a ton of jobs! There is room for so many great developers. We do not have to compete in this way.

5. Is talking with others about imposter syndrome actually helping anyone? I think in some ways, it’s nice to feel like you aren’t alone! But when I see people with way more experience than me say that they are also struggling with imposter syndrome, it makes me feel hopeless. Like there is never going to be a point in my career where I can feel confident in my abilities. I can’t imagine what early-career devs are feeling when they see more accomplished developers also struggling. I think talking about it has made it way more of a thing than it should be. Everyone is sad sometimes, but not everyone suffers from depression. Everyone has times that they doubt their abilities, but not everyone has imposter syndrome. But we are at a point where, if you doubt your abilities, you have imposter syndrome. I think this is a bit absurd! It’s turning a normal human experience into a problem that you must solve.

Always happy to talk more about this and am also interested in any other hot takes!