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Whenever I talk to fellow developers, the topic of impostor syndrome inevitably comes up. This ‘syndrome’ describes the collection of self-doubts surrounding one’s professional accomplishments, despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes it can go as far as truly believing you are a fake, a fraud, and it’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out and you lose your job and everything that comes with it.

There are a lot of things in our world that can cause us to feel fear, anxiety, trepidation, worry. Some of those things may show up in a professional setting. But that doesn’t mean it’s impostor syndrome; and some of these feelings may be stirred up by situations or people outside ourselves. For instance, if you have a marginalized identity, you’ll spend the better part of your career having to convince people that you actually do know what you’re talking about, to the point where you kind of do start to doubt yourself. I wouldn’t call that a syndrome. It’s not a personal psychological problem; it’s a sociological one.

This article was first published on dev.to on December 22nd, 2023.

In 2013 I attended my first developer conference, the Dutch PHP Conference. I had never been to any event like it and found it invigorating. I made connections with devs that I still have to this day, I went home feeling inspired and motivated to do more, do new things. And more importantly, I had now in-person seen just how few women showed up at such events. Whether that was an accurate representation of women in tech, or if it simply meant that women didn't have enough of a personal or professional budget to attend, I don't know. What I did know was I felt very strongly about increasing the visibility of and enfranchising women in tech.

I founded a DEI team for our company. About a year and a half ago, I felt so proud of this accomplishment — after campaigning for it and working together with my dev team lead, and making a case to the whole management team, we were approved for starting a DEI team with its own budget. I thought this was a great step for a relatively small company — a way to make diversity, equity & inclusion a part of our DNA, a part of our ‘normal’ rather than an afterthought. It would allow us to tackle diversity from the get-go, making sure that our employee demographics would match up with our worldwide clients and ambition. Diverse companies boost employee happiness, cooperation, and overall profitability. The statistics are pretty clear on that. Or, they were.

But in recent months, I became aware that ‘DEI’ is used as a slur in conservative circles, something to fear and hate, going the same route of appropriating progressive language to corrupt it into a symbol to bash and mock, like ‘woke’. Tale as old as time, but accelerated by social media. For a certain chunk of the population, DEI is now synonymous with something bad. And now a report has come out that ties DEI with negative outcomes for company culture, too.

I made a DEI team… but was it a mistake? Can I hold on to this accomplishment, or should I change course?

This article was originally posted on Medium.com on May 27th, 2020.

A friend of mine recently asked me to review a job posting for the company he works for; they are trying to attract a more diverse workforce. As a woman who works in technology, I’ve read my share of red-flag-raising job openings, and I’ve had to deal with plenty of situations that would send anyone who doesn’t fit the white straight cisgender middle-class dude stereotype of a developer running.

It wasn’t until I started to review this particular text I realised I had a lot of opinions about this. And what better to do with those but compile a list of what (not) to do?