I’ve been a software engineer for nearly 3 years at Remix (now owned by Via) and I often ask myself do I know what I’m doing? Yep, I’m talking about imposter syndrome. It’s that sneaky little beast that causes you anxiety and makes you feel like an outsider even though you are perfectly qualified to do your job. I wish I could say that imposter syndrome doesn’t last very long but alas that would be a lie, especially if you are underrepresented in tech like I am. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. While imposter syndrome may never fully go away, I have found that over time it gets easier to shove that voice back into the creepy cave it came from.
By now, you have either completely empathized with this experience or are asking yourself “why would you feel like an imposter?”. While I wish I could tell you what causes people to ever doubt themselves I simply don’t have the answer for that. But I can tell you about what I have experienced throughout these 3 years.
I want you to put yourself in my shoes. To this day, my parents don’t fully understand what I do and often think that I am sitting by a phone waiting to say “Did you try turning it off and on again?” like in the IT Crowd. So clearly I didn’t come from a family that even knows what programming means. Now I want you to at least try to empathize with the fact that I am a Latinx woman (assuming you are neither Latinx nor a woman). For a majority of my time as an engineer, I have been one of very few women on the engineering team and even more so, a woman of color on the team. Every little cultural difference in these kinds of tech spaces easily makes you feel like an Other. Even at the first work party I went to, the music choices were absolutely baffling to me. I was used to hearing hip hop or latinx music at parties but was instead hearing Africa by Toto (or other songs like this). I asked myself how do you dance to this kind of music and more importantly why are they playing this at a party?
Now imagine being in an office setting where people are comparing favorite flavors of La Croix, talking about the sourdough they made last weekend and which pizza oven they want to buy soon. Every aspect of these conversations was unfamiliar territory and before the pandemic started in 2020, I was finding myself eating alone at my desk more and more. I would love to say that I feel completely included now but honestly there’s a lot to tech company culture (and white culture in general) that I simply don’t understand and probably will never relate to. Yet, one thing that has changed is how much I have learned about the tools I use.
When I first started pair programming as a junior engineer, the dread of writing incorrect code consumed me. Typing out every line of code felt like it took ages because with every keystroke was a mountain of uncertainty. It also didn’t help that I didn’t know any keyboard shortcuts aside from the trusty ol’ CTRL + C and CTRL + V. What helped me despite this anxiety is that I was a feedback machine. I made gathering feedback my job as if I couldn’t possibly get better without it. I knew that getting feedback would allow me to more easily determine the next things to work on. What I didn’t realize until later is that some skills were hard for my peers too and not just me.
Over time I have come to be much more autonomous and now I unfortunately don’t pair program very often unless I’m “blocked”. Yet, there is still a shift that has happened and it’s about my listening skills. Well sort of. When I was a junior engineer, if folks threw around a few words I was unfamiliar with, my brain went into shut down because that conversation must be for people more senior than I was. The thing is that over time two things happen: (1) you gain new skills and knowledge and (2) you find yourself in situations where you have some context/information but one of your peers doesn’t.
That second part is really what’s important here. The more you notice when you have information you can teach your peers, the more easily you can accept that everyone has their own set of skills that imperfectly overlap with your skill set.
No two engineers have exactly the same knowledge regardless of how long they both have been in the field.
So hopefully with this fact you can now accept that engineering skill doesn’t exactly depend on time and that not all engineers know everything that you know. This fact alone won’t completely save you but it can get you pretty far with overcoming imposter syndrome. If you ask me how I feel when I pair with someone these days, I would say that I still get sweaty, I still feel my brain slowing going through potato-ification, but I have a better sense that there will be parts where I will be confused and maybe parts where my pair will be confused, and that’s normal!
