I wanted to share my experience and talk about this huge emotional phase that we all as beginners and junior developers go through at the start of our dev careers.
Let me first briefly tell you about my path towards being a developer.
I finished my CSE degree in September 2019 and after that I didn’t know what to do there were many career paths that I was trying to consider but first I thought I would take a break and “Chill” for a while, this “Chill” phase lasted till December 27th 2019 when I decided to so something with my life and take a path either as a developer or may be something else. So I decided that I was going to teach myself web development, I browsed through Udemy and found a course taught by London App Brewery named as The Complete 2020 Web Development Bootcamp, that taught about MERN stack, I purchased the course and made a study plan which I would execute everyday till the bootcamp was completed. After completing the bootcamp I started practicing Javascript on codewars and studied more about ReactJs which I had come across in the bootcamp. I felt confident with my skills and started applying for jobs, gave a couple of interviews and got rejected until finally in August 2020 I got my first job as a web developer at a startup.
At this point I thought that I had clear concepts and could work with ease but when I started working I quickly noticed how less I know and how much is still there to learn. I went from “I can do it” to “I don’t know if I’m fit for coding” in about a month and a half, I felt like I don't know anything and I don't think i'll make it, I was taking time to finish tasks and understanding new concepts and then I realised that I’m just a fresher, just a beginner with not even a month of real experience and that I was expecting too much from myself, I used to see senior developers and other developers finishing a task in lesser time than me and that drove me crazy. So I started searching on google about Imposter Syndrome and how to deal with it. I have read a fair share of blogs written over this topic and finally came to a conclusion that hey, it happens to all of us, even the senior developers feel it sometimes and that helped me a lot.
I know we all feel it and for the beginners who are reading this, you are gonna get this feeling sometime, everybody does, what you can do is to just take a day at a time, focus on getting better at your concepts and practice, you see, your company that hired you already knows that you are a beginner and they don't expect you to finish tasks or solve complex problems in a small period of time, what you can do is to just try your best and never give up on yourself. Don't ever think that you won’t be able to make it or you should quit cause you are not alone there’s a million other developers who feel the same way, just focus on getting better, take micro steps and with time you will overcome this huge fear of not being a “good developer”.
You just need to believe in yourself and never give up.
I would love to hear your experiences in the discussions below.
Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash
Discussion (10)
This career is more mental resilience than something else. For me the biggest problem that I face every day is comparing myself with others. We just need to know who we are to respect our time and keep going 🙂
Couldn't have worded it better myself. Too true for words 👌🏻
Thank you
yep that is true.
I think many factors contribute to the impostor syndrome. I personally try not to spent too much time on social media platforms. The reason? It only makes the impostor in me grow stronger. I start comparing myself to others and so on. Down the slippery slope I go. I also believe that as humans we tend to set unattainably high expectations for ourselves, even if we are just getting started.
One way I try to combat the blues is by simply approaching setbacks and bad days like learning experiences (nothing deep there, that's exactly what they are. Lessons). Learn from struggles and GROW. That's the only way around it. There's no need to boot the impostor per se. Your inner impostor can help you identify what needs to be worked on and what opportunities for growth there are available. Or so I see it.
P.S.: Nice post, thank you for shining a light on this topic! 👏🏻
Totally agree.
Yep I mean comparing ourselves with others is the worst thing we could do to ourselves, I have gone through it and it felt like hell, but once we realise that we are going at our own pace and that we should not compare ourselves, it feels so good after that. I think it is all in our heads cause whenever I think low of myself it affects my performance even if the task is easy. I think some of the best ways to deal with it are to work on one's confidence, self acceptance and not to set expectations that are too high for the moment.
proud of ur self awareness. There'll be times further in the career when it feels like we're really "less" as well but it's always all in our head
you're welcome bro , here for you.
if you feel that you're less competent than others perceive you to be, then just think of this... some so-called expert developers are actually less competent than others think they are. There are real good developers and then there are good pretenders (more self-marketing experts than technical experts), so never feel inferior about yourself, just get better and better through learning and experience.