If you're a developer, you've probably experienced moments when you lack confidence in making decisions or feel like you don't deserve to be where you are.
This feeling has a name: Impostor Syndrome. In this post, we'll explore some ways to deal with it.
Have a mentor
First of all, it would be really cool if you had a mentor, someone with more experience than you, probably some senior developer or tech lead from your company.
A mentor can guide you with the best practices, technically and non-technically (like communication or leadership).
With their experience, they can help you identify where you're doing well, where you're struggling, and where to focus your efforts. And this is awesome for you, if you know it, it's much easier to take the right steps to grow your skills and become a better developer.
Understand what they expect from you
You have a mentor, right? Now, you need to understand what is expected from you. To do this, my best advice is a little bit obvious but efficient: ask it.
- "What do you expect from me?"
- "In 6 months, what do I need to achieve for you to be sure that hiring me was worth it?"
- "What are the characteristics you expect me to demonstrate in my daily work?"
You can schedule a call with your mentor/leader and ask some questions like that. You'll demonstrate interest, and you'll have the details of expectations.
Come up with a plan
You already know what they want from you, it's time to create a plan to achieve it.
There are a lot of ways to create this plan, you can select some books to read or even define some goals for your week.
But my main advice is: be practical. Create some tasks based on what they literally expected from you.
- A communicative developer? Create reports every month to your leader with your best tasks.
- A programmer addicted to learning/curious? Write some posts about your learning and share them with your coworkers.
In a nutshell, create practical tasks to achieve what they expect from you.
You'll not achieve all these skills overnight, relax and enjoy the process.
Ask for feedback, A LOT
How will you know if you are getting better or not? Feedback!
Seriously, feedback will be your best friend in dealing with imposter syndrome and being more confident. With it, you'll receive some compliments (it'll increase your confidence) and some negative reviews, which are ok, nobody is perfect.
"But how regularly should I ask for feedback?"
In my humble opinion: the more, the better. If you can ask it every single day, ask it.
Create something new
Sometimes, when you work on the same project/product for a long time, you'll feel that you are not learning or improving.
You'll say to yourself: "I'm doing the same thing every single day, it is not making me better.".
To keep learning and FEEL that you are learning, my advice is to create some personal projects. You can test that tool that you thought was nice, but your company does not use it.
Share this knowledge with the community, You can create a post on LinkedIn about your project and describe what you learned.
Be careful with AI
The AI is here to help our lives, Cursor is a good example. But be careful about it, tools like these can affect your confidence.
Have you ever felt indestructible when you finished a very hard task? Or when you finally discovered the solution to that problem, for example. Actions like these increase our confidence because they show that we can solve problems and create nice things.
You MUST practice your code skills, whether formatting some complex data, creating a more reusable component for FE, or learning what you should do to reduce the API response time. You must know how to solve these problems, not just how to create the best prompt to get the solution.
Summing up, use AI for productivity and automation, but not as a crutch.
Conclusion
To cut a long story short, this article described 6 topics that can help you to feel more confidence and improve your skills.
Moreover, the text makes it clear that you are not alone, you are not the first, and you'll not be the last who feels like a fraud.
Finally, feel free to share more ways to deal with this feeling.
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