"How did I get to this point in my career? I don't belong here."
"Oh, it was just pure luck landing this promotion."
"Eventually someone is going to call me out for the fraud that I am."
When is the last time a similar thought has crossed your mind? My guess would be at least once in the past year, maybe even the past 1-3 months. Why? Say hello to your new favorite inner enemy: impostor syndrome.
What is impostor syndrome?
It's the shadow living in the corner of your office, judging you. Except that shadow is yourself. It's that little feeling inside of you that says you're not good enough to do what you're doing. A persistent feeling of inadequacy and insecurity, like someone's going to call you out as a fraud.
Certainly not everyone feels this way, right? It's just me, right?
Wrong. Everyone feels like an impostor at times. Some may feel totally comfortable speaking with a group of junior devs but freeze up around their peers. Others are fine speaking with their peers, but feel they don't have the authority to speak to junior devs.
Regardless of how many years you are into your career, the feeling of inadequacy hits you out of nowhere. Nobody is immune to it. I've been coding for over 15 years now and it still strikes me, especially as I continue to grow my business. Impostor syndrome just pokes its head into new situations that I maybe didn't encounter before.
Okay, but what can I do about it?
Create a folder on your computer. Or if you're more of the "pen and paper" type, find a physical folder. Every time you do something cool - whether it's a project you're proud of, an achievement, an award, a nice email from your boss or a colleague, save it. Put it all in that folder.
Whenever you're feeling down on yourself, go through that folder. This is work YOU did, awards YOU received, kind words sent directly your way. This is all you.
Whether you're just getting started in your career or you're moving on up, just remember when you start feeling that bout of impostor syndrome creeping in:
- You are here for a reason.
- You are smarter than you think you are.
- You are more capable than you think you are.
- You earned this position in your career. You worked hard to be here. You deserve it.
Let's hear from you.
Impostor syndrome is an ongoing battle for many -- it's very common everyone regardless of career experience. When's the last time you felt like an impostor? What methods to do you take to overcome it when it shows up in your life?
Latest comments (14)
I think the main reason is because the stack is a stack. It is LIFO structure, and very tightly controlled by the CPU. It's for local variables only; when, say, a function goes out of scope, its variables are popped off and removed.
It is also designed to (hopefully) remain entirely in CPU cache, so the variables can be accessed very quickly. It's supposed to be efficient, with little risk of memory fragmentation.
Heap memory, on the other hand, it vastly larger. It is better suited for random access, and won't necessarily stay in the cache.
Thus, the stack should not be larger. It is best suited for temporary variables that will be used and destroyed, especially those that will be accessed frequently. The heap is for everything else. Large data structures should always, always, always be in heap space, not stack space! That's just how the two memory spaces were designed.
My imposter syndrome is so bad 2 days ago my boss told me if I need to pretend I’m paid half as much as I am in order to bill accurately, so be it (because I usually think no one in their right mind would pay me to spend as much time as I do on things)
No, it's just that a 1000x1000 integer array is really large.
Assuming the
intis 4 bytes (which it usually is), then a 1000-element array would be 4 B * 1000 = 4000 B = 4 KB. That would probably be fine. However, you actually have an array of arrays, 1000 of them to be exact. So, you have 4 KB * 1000 = 4000 KB = 4 MB. That's a bit excessive for the stack to begin with.I had actually forgotten to mention, however, the professor had actually declared TWO of those 1000x1000 arrays. So, 4 MB * 2 = 8 MB. That's quite a lot of data to be cramming into the stack at once, and it overflowed.
/shrug
I was brought up to believe that, when setting goals, your reach should always exceed your grasp. =)
I find that imposter syndrome always kicks when I write my blog posts despite having done my research and playing around with stuff related to the article.
Since when I was young, I was really bad in English to the point that I learnt to read at age of 7, thus writing was a challenge and frustration to me.
Luckily I just learnt from the school of hard knocks. By learning to get better as I went along to get use to being in uncomfortable situations by doing things that I dreaded so to challenge myself to do slightly better with each iteration instead of striving for perfection.
Impostor syndrome is a reflection of how you measure yourself. If you measure yourself by how far from zero your knowledge is (or even, how much more knowledge you have than those around you), you tend not to suffer imposter syndrome. If, on the other hand, you measure yourself against some nebulous "know everything about ", you're going to end up with the symptoms of imposter syndrome.
Personally, I prefer to err on the side of "there's more to know" than "I know all I need."
It never really goes away. 18 years experience here and it still comes up.
I wrote about it too here on Dev.
The advice you give is solid. I created my impostor flash card based on the same principle!
I got into Toastmasters (public speaking) to improve my communication skills and after a couple years an interesting side effect developed. I've mentally started turning my list of accomplishments into a "self" speech that I tell myself when impostor syndrome hits and I sell myself to myself. By the time I'm done, I'm thinking "darn straight I belong here!" - a variant on your suggestion.
I'm not an expert on combating impostor syndrome, but some things that have helped me
Thanks for this!
In software development, I think this is especially prevalent because most often you are working on things that you have never done before. It's also not like school or taking a test where things have a defined right answer. When there are so many options and technologies out there, figuring out the best way to do something is almost impossible.
For me it was learning to accept that some of my decisions will be sub-optimal, and that's okay. Coding experience doesn't give you the right answer, it just gives you a less bad answer quicker.