"I think I suck at my job"
I think some of us thought the same at least once. Me, I've thought this hundreds of times. And today, instead of a usual strict technical format, I want to talk a bit and share my thoughts on feeling like an impostor.
I've been an engineer my whole career -- 12 years and counting. I take pride in this calling. I love the vocation. But it was a rough path, and often I doubted myself, my skills, my abilities, and my professionalism. It was very easy to find any reason, and I mean any, to undermine all the effort and achievements I got along the way.
Starting from the very beginning of my career.
I got my first job as a datacenter engineer by chance. A friend of mine, who happened to order a beer in a bar at the same time I was doing so, loudly declared that he was looking for an engineer. And I, freshly out of university, was looking for a job! Stars aligned and shined with luck upon me. I told him that I'm interested and would love to work in a major IT company in our town, and we agreed to schedule an interview in a few months. These months were intensive in learning about basic Linux operations, structure, architecture, and the like. And I got the job! My probation period started.
An impostor in me often reminds me about this moment as an excuse that I got my job by chance. Of course it was a chance! But also there were months of preparation that helped me eventually pass the interview and move on to the next step.
The probation period was intensive in learning as well -- and a competition. Me and one other dude were both tutoring, and there was only one position open in the end. So you can be sure I ripped my ass off to be the one that's left. And once again, I succeeded.
An impostor in me likes to omit this period because it's hard to involve external forces into the equation when the result is obviously achieved by hard work and dedication.
So why do these thoughts continue to come back? Why do I keep doubting my skills, even though everything around me (professionally) confirms the opposite?
One of the reasons I noticed recently may be the inability to finish the task I'm working on. Whether it's too complicated, or the time to complete it is too short, or the result is subpar by my standards, it feels inherently like my own personal failure. I'm not as experienced as I thought I was.
Another reason why self-doubt can whack freely its way into my mood is comparing myself to other people in the same positions as myself. Seeing someone at the same level as myself getting promoted to the next grade while having less experience is a massive hook to my self-esteem. Reading countless bragging posts on LinkedIn hits just as hard. Some dude writing about top-10 bash commands and receiving hundreds of likes and comments? It's my fault I wasn't able to do the same and receive the same reception.
Sometimes even the overall mood impacts my self-perception. I wake up in a bad mood and the work just isn't going. Everything falls out of hand. Of course that's because I'm a terrible engineer and professional!
These are just a few of the most obvious examples. There are so many more poisonous thoughts that easily undermine self-confidence and impact the overall equilibrium.
Struggling with feeling like an impostor made me undercut my own success for long years. The first time I was able to successfully overcome this feeling was actually because of a meme-like (horrible, actually) story about a guy who conned people out of their money. The moral of this story was simple enough: "Everything is possible if you're audacious enough[1]"
So I thought to myself: if some dude can scam people for millions of money, why can't I demand a raise? Instead of waiting for appreciation from my management, why don't I just ask them directly for a 10-15% salary increase?
And it worked!
At that moment I felt a pinch of doubt: perhaps I was wrong about the evaluation of my skills all along? Perhaps I am actually a good specialist, and my management agrees with that? The impostor inside me commented on that: “Oh, of course you are! Or perhaps you’re just very good at faking your skills.”
I felt that there may be a grain of truth in this comment. And to prove it wrong, I intentionally continued to improve my skills and to ask for appropriate compensation several more times -- and it also worked.[2] At this point, the possibility that I successfully fooled my management several times in a row seemed very unlikely. Ha, I tricked myself into believing in my strengths and skills!
I noticed that the impostor inside me likes to skip all the details about my past and only highlight the situations from a point of view that serves the undermining narrative. However, if I look at the situations as a whole, there is a lot of actual effort that resulted in success, not just plain luck.
Another interesting method to actually remind myself that I'm not that bad of an engineer is to try to explain something from my line of work to someone -- be that my wife, a coworker, or grateful listeners at a meetup. Going through all the elements in a complicated system such as the Internet to explain how it works can't be done by sheer luck or chance -- one has to actually know the shit inside and out.
I want to end this abrupt piece with a TLDR for all of you who still sometimes doubt themselves.
You think you know nothing and you don't deserve your position? Try to remember all the steps (in detail!) that led you to this moment. Most likely you deserve so much more praise than you give yourself.
Or perhaps you doubt that you know your craft? Try to explain some complicated topic to a friend, a relative, or even to a sheet of paper -- and I'm sure you will be pleasantly surprised how much you actually know.