How I dealt with Impostor Syndrome
Majority of the advises I came across in articles didn’t work for me, so I won’t give advice, but rather just share my own experience..
For some background, here’s a short description of my student developer journey. I started teaching myself Android a couple of months before I joined my grad school. As time progressed I started to venture into open source projects and started hanging out on various chat rooms. At the end of my first year I landed my first freelance gig through a senior. About six months later I landed a remote internship with a start-up which was going to launch its product in a few months, Hasura. I picked up a lot of skills over there, like Python and web development. I also came across React and React Native. In the meantime, at college I picked up some experience with Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards. Next thing I knew was that I was hosting a hackathon and applying for GSOC. The hackathon went pretty well but my GSOC proposals got rejected.
When I look back at this I fell really happy about the skills I picked up and about the speed at which I did it, but then something didn’t feel right. I had burnt out myself while working the way I did. During the summer break of 2018, I took a stock of my skills as well as my health.
For my first freelance gig I mentioned, I was working nights as well, that too in holidays when I didn’t have to attend college. I used to spend time on irrelevant optimizations even when I knew that this was a one off gig and only one person was ever going to use it. I unnecessarily complicated things where a few shortcuts would have done no harm. And as they say “No harm, no foul”.
And why on god’s green earth did I pick up web development in the first place? I knew I was good at creating fairly pretty user interfaces, but I didn’t want to pursue a career creating web pages. Not that I have anything against web devs, they are amazing engineers, just that I didn’t have the patience or perseverance required for being a web dev. Not only did I pick it up but I made it a mission to master it somehow, along with learning how to develop a back-end service.
I am definitely not complaining about picking up Python and it had its own benefits, but still it felt very pointless at that time.
So what led me to do all this? The answer was simple, the very famous and very old Imposter Syndrome. You might know it by any other name, but the effect remains the same. A lack of self-confidence, anxiety, doubts about your thoughts, abilities, achievements and accomplishments, negative self-talk, feelings of inadequacy, dwelling on past mistakes and not feeling good enough — these are all signs and symptoms of imposter syndrome. And this is exactly what I felt back then. It kicked in at the end of my first year at college.
Some professionals with whom I was in contact with, used to tell me that there’s no scope in learning how to develop apps for Android. I was looked down upon by many of my fellow students at that time as a front-end developer. This pushed me to work harder and get deeper into the ecosystem to learn how to develop production grade apps, but at the same time effectively burning out myself.
I skipped on many outings and spent days at length locked up in my room working harder and harder, only coming out of my cave for meals. Then I spent the next 6 months balancing a MOOC and my regular studies while everyone else was enjoying.
Then came the internship at Hasura. I wasn’t very confident of my skills and hence convinced them to let me work on a native android app, while every other frontend intern was working exclusively on React and React Native. I still remember Shahid’s reaction when he saw the outcome of the first challenge they had given us. He refused to believe that I had developed that app on my own, in less than a week’s time without anyone’s help, until I shared the source code with him. Though I haven’t updated it in a long time, it shouldn’t take anyone more than a couple of hours for any beginner to set it up and get it running.
But being good at Android didn’t feel enough. I felt a lack of confidence when I discussed any bugs or features with anyone. I felt ashamed when I didn’t know about some library.
I picked up Python, in January of 2018, as a way to complement my Android skills, and this is a decision which turned out to be turning point in my journey. After spending 1 ½ years on android development I suddenly realised I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life. But that’s for a different post.
I switched tracks now. I learnt more of Python and Flask as I liked it very much, and struggled with React and React Native as a few people I knew in the industry told me that the future lies in cross platform and web apps. Now when I know that many companies are switching back to native apps, I now realize how mistaken they were to think so. But having worked with both, now I can say that I have a better judgement of when to go for a native app and when not to.
Still I struggled hard with JavaScript because I was stubborn and fearful, of being outdated, of not knowing everything, of being called a fake engineer.
So in the summer of 2018, I decided that this wasn’t working, I was burning out myself too much. I was working like anything for a couple of weeks and then had to spend a couple more recovering from it, at the same time missing out on a lot of fun.
So I did 2 things:
1. I joined a few meetup groups in my city and started networking.
2. I cut back on my learning time and started applying my knowledge to the issues I came across.
So I spent the summer attending meetups, pursuing my hobbies and hanging out with friends. That was the easy part, the 2nd thing was the tougher part. By now I knew Python, Android, React and HTML/CSS pretty well. So I had a lot of options to choose from when I started sifting through the issues. But I found it very difficult to move on when I couldn’t fix something even after spending days reading about it. I just used to get stuck on them. But gradually I learnt that I wasn’t the right fit for some things. It isn’t necessary for me to know and understand everything.
I started reading more and more about various topics on the internet and one day came across this article, realized that I all the 5 types rolled into one, and thought that I had to do something about it.
I actively started working on it. Took it easy while developing, allotted fixed time slots for it, started putting more and more of my work on GitHub. This got me some recognition, some respect and a whole lot more of confidence. I started becoming more and more confident of my skills and accomplishments. After almost a year, I still cannot say for sure that I have overcome the Imposter Syndrome completely, at times I still feel a bit anxious about not knowing a few things, but then I remind myself of how I exhausted myself both physically and mentally while chasing that elusive state of knowing everything.
As I recovered, I became more and more productive and started investing the recovered time into some extracurricular activities like teaching, networking, organizing events and so on.
PS: A shout out to my favorite meetup group in the city, PyData Ahmedabad, you guys are awesome!
You can check out my first task as an intern at Hasura at sdabhi23/HPDF-Task1-Twitter-Clone!
