Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.
On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?
Some acceptance of this and realization that you’re part of that team will come in time. When I first started working I felt like I should quit before they figured out I didn’t know anything. I felt like I always had to go ask other people questions. At a certain point, that dynamic flipped and I was spending all day answering questions from other people. These days, it’s more balanced. There are things I go to others for, and I think they’re brilliant at what they do. Those people also come to me for help on things I have more experience in. It’s a give and take. When you start, it will be more take than give, but that’s how everyone starts.
Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.
For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.
The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.
People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.
To solve for imposter syndrome the following steps must occur:
1. Apply introspection. Know exactly why you are not qualified and try to figure out how you got there.
2. Talk to your supervisor about this. See if they can work with you or help you with training options.
3. Stop being afraid, because it’s time to man up. Realize you have some work to do to catch up outside the office. If you are so unqualified that you can never catch up then it’s time to start exploring other options much sooner than later. Don’t put this off hoping it will fix itself, like a coward.
I spent 15 years as a JavaScript developer. That is the land of perpetual imposters. Nobody knows what they doing in JavaScript as your regular corporate employee and will lie through their teeth about it while putting on a face saving show and simultaneously crying on the inside. The constant insecurity was so toxic.