I am currently a systems engineer at Kenna Security, but wasn't hired into this role: I started four years ago as our first official support engine...
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Thank you for posting this. I totally agree. If someone is writing out code and making a computer do anything they are a programmer. Iβm sure this rings true for lots of people. I know as a self taught programmer trying to get into a developer role I suffer from imposter syndrome. But, it is important to remember that those feelings are a lot more common amongst developers than we think, especially among those with experience doing it for a living.
I don't know anyone except the Ivy League crowd that's never felt like an imposter. But I can remember the exact second that I realized I was a real programmer. I hid in my cubicle because I was scared I was going to cry.
When you become a real programmer there will be no doubt in your or anyone else's mind. It's not about skills or syntax or anything like that. It's about quality. It's when you realize that you can solve any problem. Sterilize any mess. Debug any bug. You know that anything you make will not only exemplify world-class workmanship, but you will know the second it is truly complete. All it takes is 10,000 or so hours of deliberate learning - just ask Malcolm Gladwell :)
Hey, Ivy Leaguers get imposter syndrome too.
Your case sounds particularly bad, but you fought your way out of it. Way to go! It's always encouraging for people still going through it to hear a story like yours.
What Evan said, Ivy Leaguers get it too!
I think a lot of people won't talk about it or brush it off instead of facing it head on. I would bet at in one way or another it happens to everyone! At some point we are all beginners. Even years into our career, if we decide to learn a new technology, we are back to being a beginner and having that feeling of flailing around aimlessly not knowing which way is up. But when you can push through that discomfort, thats when you learn the most. Coming out the other side is so rewarding.
I don't think your second paragraph is correct at all. I've been doing this for 10 years, I have an easy 10,000 hours under my belt and I still don't feel like some sort of untouchable god of programming. I'm pretty decent but still make dumb mistakes, still get into messes and still spend endless hours debugging bugs I've never seen before. I still feel like an imposter whenever I'm working with people of equal seniority until we've worked together for a while and I feel better about what I know. Insecurity and imposter syndrome don't just disappear.
I'm a bit confused, is the second paragraph an example of what the Ivy League crowd thinks?
Most powerful sentence: "I know a lot of people in tech who suffer from Imposter Syndrome"
I struggle with that. I didn't know this was a semi-widespread issue. It feels nice knowing someone else gets that. I graduated from a top CS school and the top of my class, and yet I feel that I'm quite unqualified for the majority of jobs. Any tips?
One of the best things I did to gain more confidence was start teaching! By teaching others you solidify your own knowledge and it forces you to focus on everything you know. I bet you know a lot more than you think! You can do anything from teaching a younger dev at work to participating in pairing sessions setup by groups like DevTogetherChicago which might exist in your area.
ALSO, I highly recommend Code Newbie's Twitter chats on Wednesday evenings at 9PM EST. Their recent one was actually about confidence! Lots of people shared great ways to gain confidence. HERE is the chat if you want to check it out.
I only see the assignment operator used instead of the equality operator, which tragically also yields the assigned value.
What are the other 2?
What mistakes are there in
I would suggest they never have the
kill()function. Just doesn't make sense to give a robot the ability to kill. :)What if a criminal, or even a non-human animal is posing a threat to the owner? Shouldn't they
kill(perpetrator)?They should
administerBearMace(animal)Why would an android assistant for grannies contain bear mace?
Sounds scary.
Lol well why would an android assistant for grannies kill animals? No one is innocent here
Because the granny is in imminent danger, and it's the best effort it can make with the general purpose mobility functions.
'humans' appears to be undefined, and it's either a missing closing } or poor indentation on the else clause.
So I'm surprised this compiled :)
Butt where? :o
Oops, my bad... I managed to insert braces around the clauses in my memory.
When I see 'I just glue stuff together' I take objection to 'just'... it trivializes things too much. It's not like a builder 'just' glues bricks together to build a wall, or a welder 'just' glues metal together, there's still the knowledge of how to do that in a way that doesn't immediately collapse and fits the purpose.
Totally agreed! And the work that goes along with learning how to "just" do these things is wildly non-trivial.
I love this article and the comment thread. For context, I'm 69 years old and enjoy both retirement and consulting these days. I have worked as a salesman, a photographer, a teacher, and a programmer. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.
I wish Donald Trump had at least a little Impostor Syndrome.
You are a photographer if you take a picture;
You are a professional photographer if you sell a picture;
You are a journeyman photographer if you can support your family selling your pictures;
You are a famous photographer if people look at your pictures and say, "That's gotta be worth a lot of money!"
You are a programmer if you write code;
You are a professional programmer if you get paid to write code;
You are a journeyman programmer if you can get a job writing code;
You are a famous programmer if you're Linus Torvalds or Taylor Otwell, etc.
Except for my years as a salesman, I know that my neighbor (a plumber) has always made more money than I have!
My best job ever was teacher, and teaching programming was so much fun -- you could light up a room with an "A-ha." Seeing the onset of insight in your students is the ultimate high.
Hey Andy, thanks for the shout out to my plumbing article!
I felt like I wasn't a real programmer for the first couple years I did this too, and I even still feel like it when someone brings up monads, pointers, or one of the other million things I don't fully understand about our profession.
Anyway, keep up the writing and the programming. It's great that you're using your talents to inspire others!
Wow, this is very cool of you to say!! Thank you!
After I wrote my first C-program for templating files for both MacOS and Windows I waited for days for my "real programmer"-certificate in the mail. it never arrived.
So I don't know, really. I always say "programmer" when it comes up in conversation (in germany it's one of the first topics when meeting anyone new).
Does it matter?
It's not like it carries special privileges if true. Like "I'm a veteran" or "I'm a policeman".
("I'm a programmer" - "Oh, thank you for your service, here's a free coffee")
It's like someone wondering whether they are a "real plumber" or "real project-manager".
Come on, there's chiropractors calling themselves doctors Β―_(γ)_/Β―
As somebody trojan-horsing into the field as design-student-intern I think about this a lot. I still get fundamentals-panic every few months, where I realize how much I don't know. Some call it impostor-syndrome.
But those are the first steps to improvement. It started to get better when I first got a faint idea how a computer works from logic-gates to clicking the "X" on newsletter-overlays.
I have no point, just a few thoughts. Don't worry, be happy.
Everybody who cares about his or her craft feels like an impostor (not "imposter" -- you don't post things, is that it?). For example:
When Sonny Rollins got to hear, and be scared by, the mature Coltrane, he was Sonny Rollins -- he owed nobody anything. Nevertheless, the experience made him tear down his entire approach to musicianship and build it back up again. Because his next-door neighbor had a baby in the house, he woodshedded out on the Williamsburg Bridge. It took him over two years of rebuilding before he felt ready to play in public again (the album aptly titled "The Bridge", 1962).
If you're any good, you're always suspecting you're a fraud -- that's what drives you to keep learning.
I had that exact same attitude. I was working as a "Data Entry Manager," where I managed a team of guys to input product info for eCommerce sites. I would write small scripts and programs to speed up the job for everyone.
At a conference I was able to talk to one of the developers of Identi.ca and mentioned I made the ZipWeather bot for identi.ca. Told him I'm not a programmer, I just write scripts.
He told me what I was doing was programming and if I enjoyed it to keep doing it. Later I applied for a position as a full time developer and been doing since.
You know, I've always been okay with calling myself a programmer; calling myself a 'software engineer', as my official role describes, is where I start to feel the familiar creep and anxiety of imposter syndrome. I might be creating something I'm really excited about but even then as I'm solving problems, I'll be struggling with the inner thoughts of, "This is a naive solution, it won't scale...how would a real engineer solve this problem".
The obsession with performance and scalability in this industry kind of a toxic thing to carry as you're just making things for your own personal enrichment and goals. It's in times like these that posts like this one remind you that 'good enough' is often more than good enough.
Thank you!
I used to worry about this badly (still do sometimes, but much less often); I gradually realized that the "realness" of a programmer is all really arbitrary, varying by person and by trend (you're not a "real programmer" if... you build for the web, or if you focus on HTML & CSS, or if you do front end, etc etc).
I do not want to base my self worth on such arbitrary measures and as such I won't bother worrying about that.
My name is Andy, and I am a real programmer. Thank you for saying what I had a hard time saying for a while. You and I have had very similar paths coming from Trustwave. I'm so happy to be programming a ton as a QA Engineer and continuing to grow as a programmer. I'm so happy you have received similar opportunities! Best of luck my dude.
Crazy how I've been going through this. Thanks for writing down my thoughts
I think the comic wanting to use as big a font as possible is exactly this case
I find that the formatting that is the most cohesive, keeping related ideas together is actually this:
Generally, multiline conditional operations are a bit of a code smell.
If there is only one long branch (or one branch at all), it should often be refactored into an early return.
If there are multiple, you totally lose sight of the condition by the time you get to the
else. This probably means both branches should be extracted as function calls with good summary names (and limited scope of variables, passed as arguments).The only case that has me really conflicted is
On one hand, it would be less noisy to do
But on the other hand, this means that we are potentially returning the return value of
voidReturningFunction, which might even in the future change its signature.Maybe the middle ground would be
Not sure. Perhaps having two lines here is optimal, especially if other returns in the function are not void (A case possible in some languages like JS but not others).
Seems like the same reasoning as why I would usually not use
for side effects, especially in the return position:
Another note on the static variable, the name "is(..)Robot" implies it's meant to describe the state of a single instance of a class, while in most languages static would make it the same for all instances.
IE in c# you may have
Which would be as safe as any other property, but when a single robot is meant to turn killer, all of them would
Presumably we are in the runtime of a single robot, not a manager handling an arbitrary number of them, but I see what you mean.
Fair point, seems I forgot programming is still limited by physical boundaries :-P
Yup, this is how you get hacks like this:
rust-embedded.github.io/book/perip...
or better
There were never two statements in a row, so the above couldn't happen.
True, there are better ways to do this like a config getter.
Who says it's bad code this time? Perhaps the default is at the top but this is something that should have been affected by feature/A-B testing flags.
@ben halp pls, I indented everything in point
1.by 3 spaces but it still escapes the numbered list. Your markdown is misbehaving.I think everyone has a chip on their shoulder but we don't really show it to people.
For me, while I was studying in university, I never dream of myself being a professional programmer since I was literally drowning in school work losing my passion to be a programmer.
So directly out of school, I choose to become a salesman for a tech startup. Thinking since I can't code, I could do well by just being in the tech industry.
Luckily after multiple twisted and turns, I stumbled across that you can get a job as python developer using Django. That was my aha moment which I'm grateful that I'm developing professionally by using python till this day.
I echo the others who have said this already, but thank you for posting this. I recently moved into a systems analyst role within an application development group, whereas prior to this role I've spent my entire career in the telecom network support world. I have had severe impostor syndrome for the last several months but I'm trying to learn as much as possible so that I can also become a real programmer. I was pretty proud the first time code that I modified/pasted together/wrote a small part of was pushed to production, and I look forward to more of those instances.
That's super awesome to hear, and I'm SURE you'll have plenty more of those to look forward to.
The obvious mistake is on
if(isCrazyMurderingRobot = true),We should use
==to check if the variable is setwhile using
=to assign the valueI'm not sure in other languages, but I think you should have nested curly brackets
{}for everyif(condition).The correct way to code is
For more details, please check these descriptions (they are for the C# language, but the operators behave similar in other languages like PHP, Java etc
Real programmers flip switches to insert raw machine code.
I think, if you're able to solve a problem by making a system solve it for you (or helping you), then you're a programmer.
The industry is booming hotly, and yes, you are a programmer by industry standard. If there is someone who is a more worthy programmer than you, you can call him a Guru. :D
This. Every single time: xkcd.com/1053/ :)
As a person that built a career in QA for a long time and finally made the jump to development last year - I can totally relate! Thank you for posting this! My name is Liz, and I am a real programmer.
Hi Liz, I am about to graduate in next 4 months. At the moment I do not feel comfortable to start my first job as a developer. This is because I started coding 6 months ago.I am not a computer science student. But my final project is completely related to software development. I took this because I wanted to become software developer. I take a lot of help from my senior colleagues. Even sometimes they write code for me. When the task is done by some other guy I feel very down and it hurts me. Right now I am thinking to start my first job as a Software tester and after working for 2 years I can switch to Development. I do not know will this work or not. As an experienced person what will you suggest me. ? Thanks a lot.
To be honest, if you want to work on product development, I would go for development jobs. With that being said, there are a lot of QA jobs that require coding skills (test automation, etc) and that can be a stepping stone into a product development role. What you are going through is totally normal. No one can know everything when starting off. It's a learning process.
thanks :)
Thanks for sharing this Andy. It really spoke to me and promoted me to write medium.com/@marklocklear/i-am-not-...
This is so awesome! It's so incredibly cool to see others sharing the same sorts of experiences.
Awesome.
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Most powerful sentence: "I know a lot of people in tech who suffer from Imposter Syndrome"
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