dsuurlant

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.

And let’s say you’re dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma from your past; perhaps because of bullying, your childhood home, or relationships later in life that were damaging. Perhaps you went through some serious illness, lost your home or safety net, or even worse. These terrible events leave us with long-term scars, lingering negative feelings, and whilst you can process a lot in therapy I have also learned there is only so much you can do to heal. A part of healing is also accepting that life has bruised you up in some way. And these feelings then might affect you at work; you become more sensitive to rejection, for example, or you struggle relating to your colleagues, or you can’t deal with heated discussions. As a result you might start to think you are bad at your job. Does that mean you have impostor syndrome?

Developers are generally very smart people, who are typically aware of how much they don’t know, and in comparison, they might start to think they are ignorant or unskilled. Added to that, developers are often opinionated, with strong ideas about what’s right or wrong, and most of them continuously search for what is the ‘right’ way to do things in order to solve the complex software problems they face daily. Finally, when excellent developers do their job well, it’s less noticeable. Much like the common misconception of there being no big Y2K software crash on January 1st in the year 2000, so it must have all been overblown, right? No, the reason nothing big happened, is because a lot of people worked hard to prevent it. When systems run well, with little problems, the efforts of those making that possible are not as visible. All of this often makes developers think that everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, and they themselves are clueless. It’s the reverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and so perhaps is the ‘real’ impostor syndrome, at least in our field.

But the reason I’d like to caution against naming any anxiety or insecurity around your job as ‘impostor syndrome’ is because it makes it harder to tackle. You can just say, well, I have a syndrome and leave it at that, not digging deeper into the cause of these feelings, and challenging them. If you are constantly gaslit into thinking you couldn’t possibly understand code as well as men do because your brain isn’t wired for math and logic (some A-grade nonsense that I actually believed when I was younger), then you don’t have a syndrome — you’re just surrounded by jerks. If you are constantly stressed out because you are dealing with unresolved trauma, you might have a syndrome, but it’s the ‘post-traumatic stress’ one, not the ‘impostor’ one.

Now that you’re slowly beginning to question whether you are an impostor of having impostor syndrome…

(a two-toned illustration in washed-out brown and green-beige colors, with on the left a lightbulb with a line-art brain inside it on a dark brown background, and on the right a woman’s silhouette, thinking with a hand under her chin, with a line-art brain inside her head, on a light background)

Did you know that the impostor syndrome was first named as a phenomenon amongst high-achieving women?

Did you know it was found to be more common amongst BIPOC students in the US?

Did you know it affects marginalized employees much more strongly?

The truth is that many of us do struggle with the self-doubts surrounding our profession that are typically described as the impostor syndrome. But I think we need to re-examine what this means for us, consider why we are framing it as a personal problem, and start addressing the real causes.

This isn’t a syndrome. It’s just the same thing it always was, repackaged into a more insidious form: the people around you and/or society at large is telling you you are not good enough, and that you are lesser than others. Because of your gender, your skin color, your sexual orientation, your mental and/or physical health, your religion, your ethnicity, even your appearance. Sadly, many of us are still treated as second-class citizens because of these aspects of our identities, too; and it’s not improving any time soon.

So please, keep this in mind, for now and the years to come:

You are not an impostor. You are just living in a world where a lot of people are benefitting from you second-guessing yourself at everything that you do. And it’s easy to say, “don’t let them”, but that’s still putting the burden on the person. We should be addressing this as a group, in a broader scope, because it’s affecting so many people in a bad way.

How? Well, you’ll never guess. It’s an acronym with three letters and one ampersand.

As a final consideration, it is also normal to experience some stress, some anxiety, some self-doubt. This is part of the process of growth and challenging yourself. It turns out that you only obtain the confidence you need to do a thing after you did the thing — so unless you are a perfect being who never does anything new for themselves, chances are you’ll always feel a bit uncomfortable. This dissatisfaction with yourself, or your environment, doesn’t mean there is something fundamentally wrong with you. It just means you see room for improvement and you are working on it. But it is markedly different from the long-term thinking pattern of self-sabotage that impostor syndrome entails. Knowing that you can still improve doesn’t mean the current you is a fraud, after all.