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. | |
Wikipedia: Imposter Syndrome | |
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! |