Have you ever been in a room full of people, giving a presentation, and had no idea what you were really talking about?
If you said "yes" to yourself, then consider yourself human.
"No.", you said? Well, you'll soon realized what imposter syndrome feels like.
Imposter syndrome to me feels like when you try to impress your friends at a cookout and you want to show off some cool trick you've learned about 5 mins ago on YouTube. Though you feel like you could pull it off, because it looked so easy, you're more pressure to stay committed to the group because they're all staring at you now.
The regret is so strong, it almost drowns your soul.
However, you're just that one friend in the group who keeps the morale high.
And you're going to fail, hard.
What Imposter syndrome teaches us is no one in the universe harbors all knowledge. Hell, there are still debates in the scientific community about what Albert Einstein dreamt up during a ride on a train. Even he threw his own work in the trash(he later went back to retrieve it after realizing what he discovered).
This is a major issue as some theoretical physicists today also think Max Planck smallest unit of measurement is not actually the smallest.
Even the greatest minds are always questioned.
I emphasis this one bit because in the software community, debates are the reason why we have so many different types of tech stacks just waiting to be picked apart and sewn together to create a monstrosity of communication between its backend and frontend.
cough "C++".
I think it's safe to say you're quite insane to believe you could pull off a trick to explain each and every detail about your own tech stack as a junior software engineer.
This field of work is designed to help you fail; so you can dust yourself off and give it another try.
And this is okay. This is how we grow and learn from those mistakes. Failure is the product of great theories and design.
Even the brightest individuals have their moments of despair.
Top comments (1)
Santos, this was a great read! Having one of those days where I feel like a huge imposter/failure/"what have I gotten myself into" and this made me feel better. Thank you for an awesome post!