DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
Do You Feel Like an Imposter as an Aspiring Developer?
Imposter syndrome as a junior developer has been normalized WAY TO OFTEN. Imposter syndrome is a signal that there's a more deeply rooted issue that needs to be resolved. Sometimes, and a lot of people aren't going to like this, it's actually just a skill issue.
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Now, if you are trying to become a developer, you've probably heard all about imposter syndrome. And in this video, if you feel like you are experiencing imposter syndrome, I am here to tell you that you might be an imposter. So this is the third time recording this video, and I feel like I've held back too much in the previous two. So I'm just going to rant and I'm going to be blunt about how I feel about this. Not everyone needs to be a developer. Not everyone is going to become a developer. In fact, most of you will fail at becoming a developer. It is a very hard path going forward. A lot of people really don't have money for a CS degree, and the self-taught path is very, very difficult. Most people fail at it. So I want to talk about what I think about imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome has been normalized way too often. Oh, if you're trying to become a developer, almost everyone experiences imposter syndrome. And just because you feel that you are an imposter, that is normal. It's okay. That's common. In fact, that is a signal that you are on the right path. That is bullshit. That is complete bullshit. Imposter syndrome can indicate a lot of different things. A lot of times, it indicates a lack of confidence. Confidence in diving into the unknown. Unwilling to be uncomfortable for a very long period of time. Unwilling to feel dumb for a very long time. A lot of people don't have patience for it. A lot of people don't have grit for that. A lot of people just have been too fucking comfortable in their lives for a very long time. We've been afforded a lot of conveniences throughout the years as humanity continues to evolve and we've gotten really fucking lazy, and especially mentally. A lot of people don't want to be uncomfortable. A lot of people want to be happy. They want to be comfortable. Don't tell me that you want to achieve greatness if you aren't willing to be uncomfortable for a very long time. If you're going to challenge yourself, if you're going to challenge your life, your confidence, your mental, your fitness, your habits, if you aren't going to challenge all of that significantly, you're not willing to do that for a very long time. Stop bullshitting people, telling people that you want to be better because your actions say differently. Becoming a developer is really hard. It might sound like I'm being dramatic, but becoming a developer, especially in this market, means you have to significantly upgrade yourself. And it's not just learning the syntax. That is such a small piece of this. So many people that are competing with each other know the minimum syntax to be able to code and build stuff at a minimum level, right? There's a lot of other things that can make you stand out. And the reality, though, is a lot of people don't even achieve that. Like I think people truly underestimate how good developers are that you're competing with that have not even had a dev job yet. People don't want to talk about this. It's uncomfortable to talk about, right? Like you get so many people trying to become a developer, and they just like they say they want it, right? But when I dig into their individual situations, their effort says differently. A lot of you have no idea the amount of time and energy and effort and sacrifice going into being competitive in this market as a dev. The fact that when I even say you should consider a free internship if you should get, or if you can get one, because those can be competitive, you should at least consider that to replace your personal projects or the time that you're going to spend building personal projects. The amount of entitled people that say no, every developer deserves to be paid for what they're worth. Well, obviously you're not worth shit until you are. If you really think you're worth more, then go out and get that. But if you aren't getting any calls back, maybe you got to do something a little bit differently. A lot of people aren't willing to humble themselves. So there are many people who just suck at what they do. They built a website using abstractions, and they went through some foundations course or fundamentals course because they were told to learn the fundamentals as well. But in reality, a lot of interviews are going to completely wreck them and expose their lack of a foundation, their lack of fundamentals. There's a lot that gets exposed in the interview. And even just with DSA problems, people want to argue that DSA problems aren't practical. They're not a good rubric, and they very much are. It just depends on what you're testing for. Some niche algorithm outside of Fame companies probably isn't that relevant, but there are DSA, like a lot of what you're building is built on top of the foundational knowledge you need to be able to do DSA problems that can also apply to practical projects, to building things. But it's easy to just say employers don't know what the fuck they're doing with testing. Now, sometimes their tests are arbitrary because so many people are applying and they're just looking for a minimum knowledge to be able to scrap a bunch of resumes. But with foundational knowledge, you should be able to get through those interviews. If you are complaining about that stuff because you are not passing some of the basic, uh quick technical interviews that they're giving you, then that it's just a red flag. It's something you truly need to work on. You need to be able to identify the holes in your knowledge. But a lot of people have so many holes in their knowledge. And here lies the problem. When you start realizing how little you know, when you start realizing how bad you are, eventually you'll realize that. That's a good thing. Everyone realizes how little they know in their journey. This will happen many, many times. You have two choices. One, you get better. You get better. You get really fucking good at what you're trying to do. And that sounds simple. Sounds obvious, right? The problem is, a lot of people don't. They'll take weeks of a break in their learning to code journey. They will get exhausted, they'll get burned out, or they'll build some templated project, even though the creator that you're watching says that you need to focus on a capstone project to stand out, and it needs to be fucking good. It needs to be focused on a problem that you want to solve. You actually got to give a shit about solving problems in tech. And when you are just building a templated project that doesn't tell employers what the hell you want to solve, it doesn't align with what they're trying to solve. Of course you're not going to get calls back. Of course you're not. But yet a lot of you are still building templated projects for your portfolio projects. Again, it's okay for learning. But stop building templated projects for your portfolio projects. I'm not going to rant about this. I'm not going to vent about this. I want to stay focused. But a lot of people really aren't getting better. Not as much as you think you are. You're not tackling hard enough problems that really challenge you. Or you're leaning on referencing old code too much instead of writing it again, instead of writing a slightly different implementation that actually fits into this problem. You are leaning on AI way too hard to write any code for you. But here's the problem. A lot of people, they're not actually getting as good as they think they are. And then they decide to sell themselves like they are. This is where imposter syndrome gets instilled. This is where I really see it ramp up. Instead of owning how shitty they are and coming up with an action plan that is weeks, months, years long, you know, years that's gonna, you're gonna pivot. It's gonna change. But like if you don't have an action plan like three months into your journey of like where you want to be, what you want to have built, what you have want to learn, you're just going day to day, maybe just some random course, or what people are saying in Discord, like you don't really have a solid plan that also accounts for the holes that you've identified in your knowledge. Man, you are in for some trouble. So what I see is a lot of people, when they start getting to this point and they're realizing that it's harder than they thought, they're comparing themselves with other people, they are starting to misrepresent themselves. This is where I see it get instilled in so many people. By the way, if you are diving deep into Node and you've already built a few things with Express, it might be time to challenge yourself with a more scalable framework, NSJS. It's one of the most popular frameworks for Node, and I personally use it to build my projects. It's one of the reasons why I decided to build a course for it, to get people up to speed with the basics. Find that course at Scrimba.com. Oh, it's also free. If you use my link in the description to sign up for Scrimba, and you decide to upgrade to the Pro Plan, which unlocks a ton of different courses, you actually get a discount. Again, I partner with them because they are actually really good at building up junior developers. Check it out. What do you have to lose? Now let's get back to the video. There are a lot, a lot of very low integrity people trying to break into this industry that are fucking lying about what they've done, what experience they have, and employers have already started catching on to this. This is no longer a hack that works for 99% of people, and this is where you're getting a lot of arbitrary tests to just weed out so many resumes because there's so many people just trying to bullshit their way into the industry. You can't polish a turd and sell it as something that it isn't. It's a turd. Your projects, your templated projects, they're turds. Your experience is a turd. Your lack of a capstone project that has spanned months, maybe even over a year, because you don't have that capstone project, you're trying to sell a turd. No wonder you feel like an imposter. No wonder you feel like you're never going to get hired because you are an imposter, and your actions continue to reinforce that you don't belong here. A lot of people are sacrificing, they're making sacrifices, like full-time jobs. They are making sacrifices to be able to code minimum six hours every week, but it's not just the time investment. They aren't fooling themselves, they're very cautious with their time, they're very targeted in what they're learning and how they're learning it. They're not just spinning up a dopamine drip course to get them to go to the next lesson and give them little achievement points. No, they're realizing that a lot of this coursework needs to be consumed in a limited capacity and then it needs to be applied. You need to build stuff, you need to code, you need to get the fuck out of this curated platform, and you need purposeful growth, you need purposeful learning. And most of that is going to happen through building shit. It can happen partly from you know looking at larger code bases, open source projects, and breaking that down, getting it running locally, and just trying to build features on top of that, trying to fix bugs. That's another thing that can help. There are a lot of different things that can help, but one thing that will not help is you spending the limited time that you have where majority of that time is spent in coursework. A lot of your projects reflect someone who is not really growing. You can look at someone's projects on a timeline to see how they're progressing. And usually that comes from being able to solve or showcase that you can solve harder problems over time. When you have several templated projects that have the same shallowness as all the other projects, why the hell would an employer want to hire you? You're not showing any growth. Imposter syndrome is real in a lot of people. It's very real. And a lot of people truly are an imposter. They're not even close to being ready to be hired. A lot of content creators don't want to tell you this. A lot of developers don't want to tell you this. And there's also one re it just like completely it just bothers me. Sometimes I hear like a senior dev that kind of just reinforces this imposter syndrome. So they're like, oh yeah, when I was a dev a long time ago, very different market. Um, I had imposter syndrome. I thought I would never get hired. And what he's doing is he is reinforcing that imposter syndrome is okay. So he's reinforcing that his confidence issues, his insecurities, how much he has fucked up is okay, and that you will eventually get a job. A lot of senior devs that are saying shit like this have no fucking idea how hard the market is for entry-level devs right now. And you will be way better equipped to be able to deal with these confidence issues and continue learning for the long period of time that it's going to take you without burning out when you start addressing the imposter syndrome. And so I really want to emphasize going forward in this video, some of the ways that you should be addressing this imposter syndrome because it is a broken mindset that will hold you back. It'll cause you to make stupid decisions, it'll cause you to try to misrepresent yourself instead of getting really fucking good and getting really fucking good at accurately representing yourself. I have a lot of thoughts about this. I can grade a lot of videos about this, but people are just, I see so many people shooting themselves in the foot because instead of getting better, they just continue to lie and bullshit. And they're just fucking over the entire industry for junior developers, honestly. Like employers are tired of it, they're going to continue with arbitrary things to weed you out, and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse because you have low integrity. People try to enter this industry when they are truly the ones that don't belong. People that continue to just lie and they know they're lying. But I want you, I'm talking to the person that is going to listen to this, and they are going to just be self-critical of where they're at in their journey and are their actions actually moving them forward or not. Because if not, they need to figure out what to do, how to pivot, what type of mentorship they need, anything to kind of just get a confident path rolling forward with the understanding that maybe you have very little knowledge right now. It's okay to feel dumb. It's okay to feel ignorant, stupid, whatever word you want to use when you compare yourself to other developers, which is why you don't compare yourself. You're going to get that feeling, that feeling itself is natural. But what isn't natural is you feeling like you things are hopeless. Like you aren't going to be able to achieve landing a job. Like you can't learn what you need to in order to break into the industry. Given enough time. So I faced imposter syndrome. I am not talking down to you. I am not trying to shit on you because I am better than you. No, I still face imposter syndrome to this day, but it is not a high quality thing. It is a at this point, I'm just going to call it a mental illness that continues to need to be worked on. This is a mental issue. This is a confidence issue. This has to do with your psychology. It can be fixed. It can be worked on. Imposter syndrome should not have been normalized. Because so many people see that normalization as an acceptance that it belongs. Imposter syndrome is a waste of your fucking time and energy. Absolutely. I know. Trust me, I faced imposter syndrome. I know how self-defeating it can be. It never, ever in my entire life served me. Not once. It was that one thing that never really drove me. What usually drove me is just wanting to like holding myself to a high standard and wanting to get to that standard because I knew I belonged there. But I know imposter syndrome can just destroy people and destroy people's journeys. So the way that I've, like I said, I've not fully gotten over it, but like in most areas of my life, including coding, even if I'm ignorant with something, I don't really feel imposter syndrome anymore. And so here's the mindset that I have. Right? Um let's pick on Primogen. I say a lot of good things about him, so I think we can pick on him. And you guys know him. Most of my audience knows Primogen. Primogen is not one like a top-tier software engineer. Like not even close. Not even close. He's a good software engineer. He's well respected in the software engineering community, but it's not even just about his skill. But I'm just talking about in terms of his skill level. Um, you you can very well exceed Primogen's skill level. I can very well exceed Primogen's skill level. That isn't as tough of a challenge as you think it is, given enough time. It's where he's focused his energy and what he's trying to improve, and where you want to focus your energy and what you're trying to improve. People just get really good at something when they continue to focus their energy on something for a very long period of time. You can be better than the primogen. If I wanted to become a software engineer at NASA, I have full confidence that I am capable of that. There is not a doubt in my mind that I couldn't do that. Now again, I might need at least 10 years to do that. I might not be the fastest person at doing that. But I will achieve it. I absolutely will achieve that if that's what I really want to do. You know when I talk about kind of like passion or like high interest or like even just like just unfiltered curiosity in programming and just like in tech and just growing and growing and growing because you stay up at late at night and you you you just keep diving in, keep diving in, um, and you just don't stop. You're relentless with it. That is the kind of energy when you direct it in the right direction, no matter what you're trying to get good with, especially when we're talking about things that require thinking, right? I think there's limitations. You know, we can think of exceptions with like genetics and like becoming like a super athlete in certain activities. But like when we're talking about our mental, when we're talking about our brain, our intelligence, you are going to get really fucking good at anything that you are just dead set on getting better at because you will become obsessed with it. Do you need to have obsession to break into the industry as a software engineer? No. But I'm using this as an example of how powerful that obsession can be at making you a very highly respected person in that industry with a high skill level. People respect people with a high skill level because of what it takes to get there and the character that you need to build to be able to get there. But in order to not have that imposter syndrome, in order to have my confidence back where I own that confidence and nothing can shake it, I have to be able to achieve things in life. Right. And so if you haven't really achieved much in life, that's kind of hard to do at first. But I know what I'm capable of achieving because I've achieved things that are hard in my life. And I'm capable of a lot more than what I've achieved, but there, you know, I have a lot of bad habits I still have to continue to improve on. But I acknowledge that, and I acknowledge that I can get over those habits. But I use a lot of my history, a lot of my past, and analyze that to basically give me confidence that no matter what the problem is in front of me, I will achieve it. It that timeline might not match up what I'm hoping for. But I can learn anything that I want. You can learn anything that you want. There's no limit on your intelligence that is like causing you not to achieve becoming a developer. There's no limit on your intelligence causing you not to learn a language that feels really hard at the moment. It's not a limit on your intelligence. A lot of times it's habits. A lot of times it's a lack of vision for what you really want. A lot of times it's like bad sleep. It's a bad diet, no exercise. Maybe you need to meditate because your mind is anxious. Maybe you can't control your thoughts. There's so many other fucking factors that are affecting your ability to become a developer. And so many of you aren't willing to have that honest conversation to start improving a lot of this stuff. You have to be really self-critical, but you also have to be self-critical about the stuff that you can take action on. And then you have to take that action consistently and not take many breaks, like I see a lot of you doing. It's hard to build new habits. It really is. But that's what a lot of people need to be able to build. And over time, you will gain more confidence as your skill level goes up, as your trust for yourself for completing the task, the long-term tasks that you've given yourself, when you start gaining confidence, that you can finally trust yourself to follow through with the things that you say that you're going to do. When you have that conversation with yourself, because most people fail at this part. I failed at this part many times. It's a really hard thing. But you have to be able to fully trust yourself that you are capable of learning anything that you need to, that you are going to take the action to be able to properly retain that information to use it as a developer to build with it, continue to reinforce it, be careful about your dependencies that you create, especially around AI. And you are going to continue to get better at any cost. And you are going to follow through with that. You build that trust and confidence in yourself. Over time, that imposter syndrome goes away and it carries over into many other parts of your life. And that is the beautiful thing about that. When you start squashing imposter syndrome, it will carry over. You will accept that you might not know something, you might not have a skill, but that given enough time, you will achieve that. And that's all it is. I just there is just something broken, completely broken, about the mindset that I see junior developers adopting that imposter syndrome is normal and that they don't actually address the root cause of that. And I think that's what's holding a lot of you back.