Title: Overcoming imposter syndrome in IT
Author: Solène
Date: 10 January 2024
Tags: life
Description: In this article, I share my own experience fighting
imposter syndrome as an IT professional
# Introduction
You certainly know about the Imposter Syndrome (I'll refer to it as
IS), unfortunately it's a very common problem in IT.
(HTM) Wikipedia: Imposter Syndrome
(IMG) Imposter Syndrome explained in picture
The picture above was downloaded from
https://mrscliffnotes.com/2021/03/02/on-the-imposter-syndrome/
As I finally (almost) got rid of my own Imposter Syndrome, I wanted to
share my experience and tips that helped me overcome it.
# Keeping track of your work and knowledge
It's hard to stay confident in your own skills when you feel you
accomplished nothing in your life or career. I would recommend
everyone to always keep a very detailed CV/Résumé up-to-date, with
all the projects you worked on. When you feel in doubt about your own
skills, just check this list, and you will certainly be surprised about
what you achieve in the past.
If you are a developer, looking at your projects histories in
git/mg/svn/whatever is also a nice way to review your own past work.
There are dedicated git tools to write such nice reports, even across
multiple repositories.
When I look back at my blog index, I realize how many things I learned.
I forgot about most of the previous content and topics I wrote about!
This is my own list, it's really helpful to me.
# Meet other professionals
It seems IS exists because it's hard to differentiate "low value
general knowledge" and what we know and should know as a technician,
knowledge that makes us a professional in our job. In IT it's really
hard to evaluate a work/product/service, compared to let's say, a
sculpted piece of wood. I'm not saying sculpting wood is easy, but at
least it doesn't require an audit by a dedicated team to know if it was
nicely done in the state of the art.
My confidence got better when I started spending time with the new
colleagues when joining a new company. Being able to know how the
other worked helped me to evaluate my own work, it was also the
opportunity to ask them to review my work and methods. Honest feedback
from a competent person is invaluable.
By spending more time with my colleagues, I was finally able to
establish some kind of reference to auto-evaluate my work more
accurately.
Moving to a new job is also the opportunity to meet real slackers with
poor skills, and in most cases you will notice they don't even care.
After all, if they got a job and their boss is happy, your work will
just be better, so there is no reason to not stay confident in
yourself.
# Stay confident
This seems boring and obvious, but you need to stay confident in
yourself to start building some confidence. If you succeeded in a
project in the past, there is no reason for you to fail in another
project later.
Being able to overcome failures is an important part of the process.
It's common for anyone to fail at something, but instead of lamenting
about it, see it as the opportunity to improve yourself for the next
time. There is a lot more to learn from failures than from successes.
# Tip of the Iceberg
When you see someone's work/article/video, you may be impressed by it
and feel bad that you would never be able to achieve something similar
because it's "too hard". But did you ever think that you only saw the
tip of the iceberg, and that you dismissed all the hard work and
researches done in order to succeed?
For instance, maybe that person spent hundreds of hours making a two
minutes video: the result looks incredible to you, and it's only two
minutes, so you immediately think "I would never be able to do this
myself", but what if you had hundreds hours and the skills to do it?
Could you?
# Do they know?
If you ever feel bad listening to someone's story that makes you feel
incompetent and useless, you could think: "do they know how to do
[this], and [this]?". ([this] being someone you know)
> Yes, they are a programming compiler expert, but do they know like me
how to cook? Do they know how to change a car wheel? Do they know how
to grow vegetables?
# Conclusion
I'm not a psychologist, a personal coach or an imposter syndrome
specialist. But I've been able to work around it, and I'm now
gradually getting rid of it for good. It's really refreshing!
It's important to not feel over-confident in the process, there is a
balance to keep, but don't think about it too early ;)
Have fun, you are awesome in your own way, like everyone else!