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Impostor Syndrome - It's real and it's all our faults

Spiro Floropoulos on April 15, 2018

Maybe it's just me but there seems to be a rise in the developer community surrounding impostor syndrome. This feeling seems to affect the full ra...
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Kristian R.

I loved reading through this. Lots of interesting points to argue about. In general, indeed I think the "imposter syndrome" is no stranger to a lot of us these days, especially people working in something I'd consider "creative professions". However, there is one thing in here:

Companies are less willing to invest in their developers long term. That
means companies tend to push stricter timelines to accomplish business
goals. That means developers have less time to learn. So they depend a
hell of a lot more on others having sorted something specific out for
them. Then the developer has to pick a bunch of specifically pre
developed stuff, smack it together, hope it works. More experience at
that means you get better at smacking it together.

This has two implications. First off, indeed it leaves a load of us feeling like imposters while most of the time, like sleepwalkers, dancing on a thin wire right above an immensely deep ocean of complexity in which we would immediately drown. It's difficult to be in this situation from a personal point of view. But it's also difficult from an enterprise and quality point of view: What will happen if you end up continuously building software just like that? You end up with software built out of third-party bricks, in most cases glued together by people who have just a very vague idea of what pieces they are using, how they work and what they do. This is a nightmare in terms of virtually every non-functional requirement you possibly could imagine (reliability, stability, quality, ...). And this is the point where, then and now, I recommend people to, at least a bit, take that "imposter syndrome" seriously - and not by accepting that it is there but by trying to get rid of it, by trying do actually do dive into that complexity, trying to understand how most of the tools work and eventually trying to get rid of things they don't feel reasonably safe using. This will of course slow you down a bit, but it will reduce imposter syndrome and improve overall software quality, which definitely seems a win-win to me. ;)

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alcovegan

Thank you.