Impostor Syndrome and Me

For the longest time (and I still think a bit this way), I thought this was the silliest thing in the world. I though that if someone thought they weren’t good at something it’s probably because they probably weren’t!

For me, Hack Reactor has been a great experience but it’s been a bit hard to admit that one of the reasons I came here is because of impostor syndrome. I’ve been thinking a lot about this during the last week. I knew enough programming to get a good job. I had experiences that told me this was true (like going through and conducting technical interviews, shipping quality production code, talking to other developers). Yet, I still felt the need to come to Hack Reactor and see if I was actually any good. I’m still 100% satisfied with my decision and I’m know why I made the decision to come here. But it would have been better If I had taken that decision from a perspective in which I didn’t devalue my own experience, expertise, and incredible amount of effort directed at learning more about programming.

One interesting part about this experience is that I’m slowly learning what type of programmer I am. I’m not the fastest programmer, but I’m pretty fast. I’m rather meticulous. I engineer things the right way (even if it means over-engineering). I pay a lot of attention to interaction and design. I’m good at explaining and I love it. I like TDD and can write testable code. There are all things I didn’t know 3 weeks ago and they’re very meaningful too me. Yet, these don’t really help with impostor syndrome.

The interesting part about all this is that I’m still unsure about how good I am and I think I’ll keep feeling this way for a very long time. Perhaps I need more experience to figure this out, but I think that part of the problem is that, in programming, there is virtually no limit to what you can do. You can always learn something new. You can always get better. You can always refactor and improve your code. That’s exhilarating; but that’s also a very stressful.