1. Introduction §

You certainly know about the Imposter Syndrome (I'll refer to it as IS), unfortunately it's a very common problem in IT.

Wikipedia: Imposter Syndrome

The picture above was downloaded from https://mrscliffnotes.com/2021/03/02/on-the-imposter-syndrome/

As I finally (almost) got rid of my own Imposter Syndrome, I wanted to share my experience and tips that helped me overcome it.

2. Keeping track of your work and knowledge §

It's hard to stay confident in your own skills when you feel you accomplished nothing in your life or career. I would recommend everyone to always keep a very detailed CV/Résumé up-to-date, with all the projects you worked on. When you feel in doubt about your own skills, just check this list, and you will certainly be surprised about what you achieve in the past.

If you are a developer, looking at your projects histories in git/mg/svn/whatever is also a nice way to review your own past work. There are dedicated git tools to write such nice reports, even across multiple repositories.

When I look back at my blog index, I realize how many things I learned. I forgot about most of the previous content and topics I wrote about! This is my own list, it's really helpful to me.

3. Meet other professionals §

It seems IS exists because it's hard to differentiate "low value general knowledge" and what we know and should know as a technician, knowledge that makes us a professional in our job. In IT it's really hard to evaluate a work/product/service, compared to let's say, a sculpted piece of wood. I'm not saying sculpting wood is easy, but at least it doesn't require an audit by a dedicated team to know if it was nicely done in the state of the art.

My confidence got better when I started spending time with the new colleagues when joining a new company. Being able to know how the other worked helped me to evaluate my own work, it was also the opportunity to ask them to review my work and methods. Honest feedback from a competent person is invaluable.

By spending more time with my colleagues, I was finally able to establish some kind of reference to auto-evaluate my work more accurately.

Moving to a new job is also the opportunity to meet real slackers with poor skills, and in most cases you will notice they don't even care. After all, if they got a job and their boss is happy, your work will just be better, so there is no reason to not stay confident in yourself.

4. Stay confident §

This seems boring and obvious, but you need to stay confident in yourself to start building some confidence. If you succeeded in a project in the past, there is no reason for you to fail in another project later.

Being able to overcome failures is an important part of the process. It's common for anyone to fail at something, but instead of lamenting about it, see it as the opportunity to improve yourself for the next time. There is a lot more to learn from failures than from successes.

5. Tip of the Iceberg §

When you see someone's work/article/video, you may be impressed by it and feel bad that you would never be able to achieve something similar because it's "too hard". But did you ever think that you only saw the tip of the iceberg, and that you dismissed all the hard work and researches done in order to succeed?

For instance, maybe that person spent hundreds of hours making a two minutes video: the result looks incredible to you, and it's only two minutes, so you immediately think "I would never be able to do this myself", but what if you had hundreds hours and the skills to do it? Could you?

6. Do they know? §

If you ever feel bad listening to someone's story that makes you feel incompetent and useless, you could think: "do they know how to do [this], and [this]?". ([this] being someone you know)

Yes, they are a programming compiler expert, but do they know like me how to cook? Do they know how to change a car wheel? Do they know how to grow vegetables?

7. Conclusion §

I'm not a psychologist, a personal coach or an imposter syndrome specialist. But I've been able to work around it, and I'm now gradually getting rid of it for good. It's really refreshing!

It's important to not feel over-confident in the process, there is a balance to keep, but don't think about it too early ;)

Have fun, you are awesome in your own way, like everyone else!