[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Impostor Syndrome, or Just an Impostor?
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Ask HN: Impostor Syndrome, or Just an Impostor?
It's been a significant year for me career-wise. Through a few job
switches and word of mouth, I moved up from a small software
company to a massive firm you've probably heard of which has
doubled my salary. My first month has been quite a struggle and I
constantly feel like I don't belong here. I'm getting paid more
money than I could have imagined making but my output is a fraction
of what it was at my old job. I usually make a conscious effort
when I start at a new job to carve out some work that needs to be
done for myself and get cracking but I'm having trouble
understanding the project. Everybody is much more experienced and
older than me. I'm in my early 20s so I'm used to people seeing me
as green. I had a chat with my 'boss' (not my boss per se, I don't
really have one) and he seemed OK with my performance. I asked for
what I could do better and he had something pretty minor for me. I
just feel like dead weight and like I should be fired.
Author : c7DJTLrn
Score : 10 points
Date : 2022-12-19 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The most important question is, do you like the work? Are you
| passionate about it?
|
| If Yes: then you'll get better because that's what passion does.
|
| If No: then meh, I think if your work is good enough for your
| boss, it's good enough. Save the money you make there and then
| look for something else. If you're really making a lot, use the
| money wisely to do something in life that is truly self-
| enriching.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The conventional wisdom is that it takes most people a year to be
| fully productive at a new job.
|
| If you are coding on a complex system with a lot of legacy it
| takes a long time to understand it, in a perfect world people
| could draw a line around some part of it and give you just the
| right guidance to get started but mostly people can't be bothered
| to do that. A company able to do that would be able to use
| workers a lot more effectively but the difficulty of doing that
| is one reason why 'big tech' is frequently perceived as
| unproductive and bloated.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Very normal to feel a bit lost and out of your depth in the first
| few months or year at a new company - especially a larger one.
|
| Your "carve out some work that needs to be done for myself" quote
| made me wonder though - what is your team setup? Do you have a
| project manager or anyone guiding you on what you need to work
| on? Or team members to ask questions?
|
| Usually it's best to focus on the tasks that they expect you to
| do and provide them with regular feedback to keep them in the
| loop of your progress. If anyone else thought you need to be
| fired, you would've known by now.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| It takes a while to find your stride when starting somewhere new.
| Doubly (if not more) so if it's a big organization. Bureaucracy
| on top of bureaucracy.
|
| I went through the exact same thing, fortunately I had close
| teammates that followed me between employers. They understood my
| life path pretty well. They helped me navigate it.
|
| They helped me understand that I wasn't an impostor, at least not
| any more than anyone else. Doing the thing makes you part of it,
| and you're there for a reason; someone saw something.
|
| Now hundreds of people know me by name; with all of the help I've
| been able to give, I've made a really good reputation inside our
| org.
|
| It just takes time to build, stay with it.
|
| Remember that sometimes it is valuable to learn the skills to
| navigate the business too. Being a tech wizard only goes _so_ far
| rolfeb wrote:
| Oh yeah. My rule of thumb is that the first couple of months in a
| new job can feel miserable just as you describe above. Don't
| worry about it, you'll get through it and suddenly you'll find
| yourself being productive and happier.
|
| I've been working for decades in multiple jobs, and it's always
| the same. Sure as you progress you know more, but you also lift
| your personal standards as well to compensate.
|
| Stick to it and you'll get there!
| ravenstine wrote:
| I'm gonna go against the grain and say it's a combination of
| both, but that it's nothing unique to you or something you should
| feel bad about.
|
| Imposter syndrome is real, and it's rampant, but I believe it's
| because most of us are imposters. That's how the software
| industry has organized itself.
|
| It's surprising to friends and family in other industries when I
| tell them that interviewing for a software dev role is always
| like starting over from scratch. Even as a senior developer with
| nearly 10 years of experience, every interview process is an
| exercise in convincing the other person that you're not a junior,
| and is more often a losing battle. Doesn't matter if you were
| recommended from within. Doesn't matter if you've got stars on
| your GitHub projects. Every time interview will be like Groundhog
| Day and you'll feel like you're interviewing for your first job.
| Every coding challenge will make you feel stupid, even if you
| complete it in time because you _know_ you could have done better
| if you were given another hour and didn 't have someone staring
| over your shoulder.
|
| But sometimes we make it lucky and get that shiny new job. The
| paycheck is bigger than the last, and the benefits are better,
| but you quickly realize the reason your paycheck is bigger is
| because the work will be at least twice as difficult as what you
| were working on before, and probably more so. We applied for
| senior and even lead roles to find ourselves questioning whether
| those titles make any sense. How senior can we be if we still
| need help from others because nothing is adequately documented,
| or because the code is too confusing to us? For all we know, the
| person whose position we're replacing understood everything and
| was a "genius" within the company. How does one at least feel
| adequate when one's mental ass gets kicked at least a few times a
| week by astonishing problems and never having a complete enough
| picture of the problem domain?
|
| We tell each other wonderful things about code quality and best
| practices, but the reality is that we don't work our way up from
| shitty problems to interesting and enjoyable ones. Far from it, I
| believe, most of the time. We get more monies and prestigious
| titles not to write better code or do the real exciting work, but
| to be the ones who manage to make the code do what the owners
| want within an expected period of time, and have a willingness to
| frequently be wrong and be able to fix at last as many wrongs as
| are created. It feels like being an imposter when a decade went
| by and the work difficulty seems more related to the passage of
| time than your ability to code. In a way, it is a form of
| imposterdom.
|
| What disorients us is the sheer amount of opinion and _theology_
| in the field of software that we disguise as fact. Everyone is
| constantly wrong about everything. Take any given "best
| practice" or "way of the future", wait a few years, and those
| best practices will now be "considered harmful" and the way of
| the future will be "yesterday's software." How is anyone supposed
| to feel like an expert at anything when the inner reality of the
| software industry is frequently flipped on its head? How many of
| us are able to actually be experts at anything? How do we know
| what's right and what's wrong? If we can't answer those
| questions, how are we supposed to believe in ourselves and know
| what we're doing?
|
| The only option left is to power through the slog, fool yourself
| and others into thinking that you belong, and focus on the better
| things in life that don't directly involve software.
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