If you're a new developer, getting ready for your first interview, you might start feeling something known as imposter syndrome.
You spent countless hours learning how to build applications. But the hours with your head in books, and your eyes on the screen don't seem good enough. Maybe you don't know this stuff as good as you should.
Welcome to imposter syndrome, something 58% of tech employees report experiencing.
It is a horrible feeling. Let's explore some ways to get over this dreaded feeling.
Your interview process is a learning process.
Technical interviews can be extremely difficult. You never know how they're going to be. Maybe a phone screen, and a take home project (we wish!). Or maybe it's going to be 4 phone calls with a recruiter, a technical interview, and then a meet with the team (the most dreaded).
Whichever interview you find yourself in, you must try to use it to your advantage. Take notes of everything you've been doing. Whether you succeed or not isn't the end of the world, and you're not going to be at a complete loss - you're going to learn how to interview. The more you do it, the better you will be at it, as with everything in life.
Stop worrying about what others think of you.
This is why we experience imposter syndrome. We're afraid that we're going to be exposed as fake developers. That the interviewer is going to tell the rest of the team how stupid we were.
Enough of this. We have no control over other people perceptions of us. What we do have control over, however, is our ability to present ourselves in a way that we can accept. To perform our best is what's important.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Most of us visualize our success. We never imagine our failures beforehand. The end result is us being devastated after we do horrible during an interview. It should have went smoothly!
Take time to visualize the negative events that may happen during your interview. You might forget a simple array method. You might start stuttering. There's an endless possibility of things that could go wrong.
Why do this? So that, if things do go wrong, you were prepared for them to go wrong. The effects on your mind will be less. If you never imagine things going wrong, you will be devastated when they do.
Conclusion
We hope these tips help prepare you for your next interview. If you have other tips, please add them to the comments.
Note: This is a shorter version of an article published, here: https://blog.javascripttoday.com/blog/overcoming-imposter-syndrome/
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