RailsConf 2014 - You are Not an Impostor by Nickolas Means

NICKOLAS MEANS: How's everybody doing?

AUDIENCE: Good! Yeah! Yeah!

N.M.: Nobody's saying tired? I would have
said tired

if somebody asked me that question. I'm so
exhausted.

It's been a great conference, but it's been
long

and I am privileged to have the last speaking

slot. Which is a really funny joke to play

on a guy with impostor syndrome. So whoever
set

the schedule, nice job.

My name is Nickolas Means, but we are about

to be really good friends, so please call
me

Nick. You can find me-

AUDIENCE: Hi Nick!

N.M.: Hi. You can find me as @nmeans on

Twitter if you're playing along on your laptop
or

your phone. I'm an engineer at WellMatch health.
I'm

lucky enough to get to remote pair nearly
100%

of the time from beautiful Austin, Texas with
a

lot of really smart people, fixing some of
the

hard problems that vex our health care system.

I want to start by asking you to think

a little bit. What is your biggest fear at

work? What's the worst thing that could possibly
happen

to you at your job?

AUDIENCE: Get fired!

N.M.: I can tell you mine. I've been a

software developer for over a decade now.
I did

some PHP spaghetti for awhile. Moved into
Ruby. Been

doing Ruby for, gosh, eight years now. I've
worked

as a solo developer. I've worked as a cylo

developer where I was the only guy working
on

a product and I brought our team. I've worked

in a really good team environment which is
what

I'm in now.

But I've had this persistent fear, the whole
time

I've been a software developer, that I was
about

to be fired. Now, how many times do you

think I've been fired in my ten plus years

of software development?

Brandon right. Three.

No, zero.

I've never been fired. But it might happen
any

day now, or at least, that's what my brain

persists in telling me all the time. It's
just

a matter of time until my boss figures out

that I really have no idea what I'm talking

about and I'm a terrible software developer
and all

my commits are crap. And then I'm gonna get

the pink slip.

Which is not true, right? Because I've convinced
a

bunch of people to give me a job, and

I've shipped good code, and I've been through
pull

requests processes. My code's been reviewed.
I pair now.

So, I'm, I'm an OK developer?

This is the, the gist of impostor syndrome.
It's

a set of beliefs and behaviors that was first

identified back in 1978 by Doctors Pauline
Rose Clance

and Suzanne Imes at Georgia State University.
Dr. Clance

was on the psychological staff at Georgia
State and

Dr. Imes was a research, a predoctoral researcher
under

her. And they did a lot of interviews with

graduate students. Female graduate students
specifically. Now, these women

had all gotten into very competitive graduate
programs. They

had all been published in very prestigious
psychological journals.

But they still didn't think very much of themselves.

There's actually a really great definition
of impostor syndrome

in this abstract. Despite outstanding academic
and professional accomplishments,

women who experience the impostor phenomenon
persist in believing

that they are really not bright and have fooled

anyone who thinks otherwise.

So these women were all very prestigious,
all very

successful, but still thought that they had
everybody around

them fooled. And all the stuff that people
told

them about themselves was not true. So if
you've

experienced these kind of feelings, where
you think that

people around you say nice things about you
that

aren't really true, let me tell you a little

bit about yourself.

A pretty good chance that you're an introvert.
Pretty

good chance you're a perfectionist. At times
you're a

workaholic. At other times you are a procrastinator.
You

probably have a deep-seated and abiding fear
of failure.

You probably get really uncomfortable when
people pay you

a compliment. You probably feel less competent
than your

peers. If that resonates any, there's good
news. You're

not alone.

As it turns out, impostor feelings are really
pretty

common. Dr. Clance's research indicates that
about 70% of

people experience impostor syndrome at some
point in their

careers. Now, that's not to say that everybody
experiences

impostor syndrome the same way.

There's people like me, who have experienced
it throughout

their entire career as a persistent feeling,
afraid that

they were gonna be fired at any moment, and

there's other people that maybe it only happens
when

they start a new job or they, they emerge

from college into the workforce.

But no matter where you are on the scale,

there's things that you can do to lessen this

reaction that you feel. So there's two things
I

want to do in this talk. The first thing

is I want to tell you how your brain

trolls you. Cause there's a lot of stuff that

goes on in your head that reinforces this
impostorism,

and this inability to accept your success.

And I want to tell you how to patch

your brain. As it turns out, impostor syndrome
in

your head is sort of this infinite loop that

goes around and around and around. And what
we

have to do is find places where we can

hook into that loop and get out of that

cycle. And if we can do that, then we

can start functioning a little bit better.

But, before I do that, I want to tell

you a story. It's about the first conference
talk

I ever gave. And you folks didn't know this

when you walked into the room, but you're
lucky

enough to be part of this grand experiment.
Somebody

decided it was a good idea to give me

a speaking slot at RailsConf.

I decided, on a whim, about an hour before

the CFP closed that I was gonna put in

this talk proposal. And it's one that had
already

been rejected by a couple of conferences.
So I

tweaked it a little bit. I cleaned it up.

I made it a little bit better. And submitted

it.

And the RailsConf submission process is, like,
custom-tailored for

someone with impostor syndrome. Because the
first round is

blind. So I don't have to worry about it

that I don't have this great reputation in
the

community and nobody knows my name. And during
this

process, there's the chance for people reviewing
your proposal

to give you feedback.

So, Sarah Mae, bless her heart, read my early

rough draft and gave me some great feedback.
I

tightened up my abstract quite a lot, and
apparently

it was enough to get me through the final

selected, and I got a talk accepted.

So I was hanging out with my wife and

my three-year-old son when I got the email
that

my talk was accepted at RailsConf. And I gasped,

and I was speechless, and my wife thought
somebody

important had died.

Finally, I got the words out to tell her

what was happening. And I was very excited.
So

when I put the proposal in, the whole time

I'm waiting to see whether I got in or

not, I'm envisioning. Our team has a Friday
happy

hour, and I'm envisioning getting to tell
my team

mates that I got a talk accepted at RailsConf.

And I got to do that, and it was

glorious.

But, then reality sets in. I don't know if

any of you have ever spoken at a user

group or something, but as it turns out, you

don't actually have to write the talk before
it

gets accepted. So once your talk is accepted,
you

have to start writing it. And it plunged me,

immediately, into this worry, fear, panic
and dread.

I sat down, I tried to make an initial

outline. Total creative block. I couldn't
come up with

anything. I couldn't organize my thoughts
to save my

life. The funniest thing was my brain played
this

great trick on me. It told me I didn't

even have impostor syndrome bad enough to
give a

talk on impostor syndrome.

So I, I pushed through it. And I, I,

I took an impostor syndrome test, on which
I

scored very highly. And I'll share that test
with

you guys later. So after that, I jumped into

full-on overwork. Now, normally I am a huge
procrastinator.

Normally, I sit and wait until the very last

minute to do something. But I guess my brain

thought this was important, because it jumped
into overwork

from day one. Like, three days after I found

out my talk was accepted, my family was heading

on vacation, and, you know, as you do, I

loaded my Kindle up with psychological journal
articles and

brought books, and I spent most of my vacation

reading about impostor syndrome. Which is
not what I'd

planned to do.

And then hopefully the next step in the cycle

is success. Now, clearly the jury is still
out

on this. But hopefully when you're done you
won't

feel like your time has been wasted in this

room. And after that, I'm gonna feel some
initial

relief.

A coworker asked me - I had this long

list of things that I hope would happen after

the talk. And a coworker asked me, OK, so

what do you really want to happen after this

talk? Really, all I want out of this talk

is to help somebody. If I accomplish that,
that's

all I want out of this.

So, if that happens, I'll feel some initial
relief.

But then, as we do, I will move into

this step where I am focusing on all the

little failures in this talk. I'm gonna focus
on

the jokes that I didn't get just right. I'm

gonna focus on the times I said uh, and

um and stumbled over my points and the content

areas that I wish I had covered better or

phrased differently.

And then I'm gonna move into sort of the

meat of impostor syndrome. I'm gonna start
denying my

success. I'm gonna start feeling like people
saying nice

things to me in the hallway are just doing

it because they know I have impostor syndrome
and

need compliments.

And that's, you know, that's what we do. We

write off our success, and it robs you of

your ability to enjoy your success. So then,
when

the next opportunity comes up, you cycle right
back

into this thing, because you've never been
successful in

your life. At least in your own mind.

This is the impostor cycle. Again, this was,
this

was identified in Dr. Clance's research, and
it's, it's

driven by the superstition that we have to
go

through this fear and doubt and overwork and
panic

to get anything done. So you go through it,

you look back on it. You did OK. The

reason you did OK is because you went through

this big process of being all panicky and
fearful

and procrastinating and overworking.

So you develop this superstition that if you
don't

do that, if you don't go through that hell,

you're not gonna be able to pull of whatever

it is you're trying to pull off. And so

it denies you the ability to ever absorb your

success and feel like you actually are a capable,

competent person.

There's a lot of stuff going on in your

brain that causes this to happen. I alluded
this

to some of these earlier. A, one of the

first ones is introversion. There's probably
a lot of

introverts in this room. And the thing about
introverts

is we all spend a lot of time inside

our own heads, right. We spend a lot of

time replaying social interactions, wishing
we hadn't been awkward,

wishing we were better at small talk. We meet

this hero of ours at a conference. We go

talk to him and we say something really stupid

and put our foot in our mouth and we

spend the next six hours thinking about that.
So

we spend a lot of time in self-criticism.

The next thing is perfectionism. And the,
the two

most highly-correlated personality attributes
to impostor syndrome are introversion

and perfectionism. So the thing about perfectionism
is we

have very high standards for ourselves, right.
We want

to get the gold standard. So what happens
when

we hit silver plus, plus, plus? We have failed.

So, you have this inability to ever do as

well as you think you ought to do. You

have this inability to ever pull anything
off to

your own perfect standard. And then it goes
into

something even more sinister than that. There's
this need

in perfectionism that emerges to always be
the best.

It's not enough to be good. You have to

be the shining star. And so you get into

this, it, it can create some really weird
things

in your job.

So, when a coworker, say, gets a lot of

praise for pulling something off, I feel threatened
by

that. Which is stupid, right? I know, intellectually,
that

I shouldn't. I know that there's more than
enough

credit to go around. It's not a zero-sum game.

But I still feel like, somehow, my coworker
getting

praise is taking something away from my shiny
gold

star. And so it sets you up to always

have to be perfect.

It's terrible.

And it feeds into workaholism, because it
takes a

lot of work to live up to that standard

that we all think we need to live up

to. A whole lot of work. Or, when we

get into a situation where we know we can't,

we procrastinate. Now, I've been a world-champion
procrastinator for

the bulk of my career.

And it wasn't until maybe a year ago that

I realized how intertwined it was with impostor
syndrome.

Because what procrastination does for you,
when you're a

perfectionist, is it gives you a forcing function.
It

lets you get something out the door that might

not be as perfect as you want it to

be. It gives you a time box. And what

you can produce in that time box has to

be good enough.

And it also gives you a way out of

failure. Because, like I mentioned earlier,
impostors often have

a strong fear of failure. So if you procrastinate,

if you wait until the very last minute to

do something, and then you fail, well. It's
just

cause you didn't spend enough time on it.
It's

not a reflection of you as a person.

Which is the perfect segue into the next thing

going on in your head, which is fear of

failure. As impostors, we are terrified for
others to

see us struggle. We are scared to death to,

for anybody else to see that we might not

be able to pull it off the first time

we try. Because we feel like we're walking
on

eggshells. We have this very thin facade,
that if

anybody can get through, anybody can see around,
they're

gonna realize what a complete and total failure
we

are.

So anytime there's a crack in that armor,
we're

afraid that it's all gonna come tumbling down.
So

we develop this deep-seated fear of failure
that makes

it very hard to go and try to do

new things. It makes it hard to do anything

you think you might look foolish doing. A
perfect

example of that is the dance floor. And one

thing you will not see on the dance floor

is this guy.

Much to the chagrin of my wife, by the

way. She would really prefer me to get out

on the dance floor with her. But, I'm so

afraid that I'm gonna get out there and make

a fool of myself that I just won't do

it. I won't risk that part of my personality

because somehow it's gonna make people think
less of

me. I know it's kind of a contrived, trivial

example, but it plays out on the rest of

your professional life.

It plays out when you're trying to learn something

new, or you're trying to fight through a hard

problem. You're kind of afraid to admit that
you

don't know.

This one is really the meat of impostor syndrome.

This idea of denial of success. One thing
we're

all really good at, as impostors, is deflecting
objective

evidence that we're actually competent and
successful. We're very

good at pushing those things away. We deflect
compliments,

we write off promotions. We got new jobs because

we're good interviewers, not because we're
good developers.

In fact, when I found out my talk was

accepted, the first thought that came into
my mind

is, man, that's gonna be such a let-down tomorrow

when I get the email that their CFP system

screwed up and emailed everybody a letter
of acceptance.

So stupid, right?

But that's, the, these are the things that
your

brain does that traps you in this cycle. It

gets into attribution theory in psychology.
And that's the

idea of where you attribute success and failure.
As

impostors, we tend to contribute success to
external factors.

So, it's luck. And timing. And knowing the
right

people.

Whereas we take failure and we internalize
it. It

speaks to who we are as a person. If

we fail, it's completely a reflection on us.
But

if we succeed, it's not a reflection on us

at all, it's a reflection of the situations
we

found ourselves in.

We also have a little bit of fear of

success going on. There's this fear that being
successful

might ostracize you from your peers. I know
I

felt this in school a lot. I was the

kid that knew the answer every time, and by

about third grade I had developed a defense
mechanism

where I hardly ever raised my hand. Cause
I

didn't want to be the kid that knew all

the answers, cause that kid didn't have any
friends.

This is part of why people from marginalized
groups

suffer disproportionately more from impostor
syndrome than the rest

of us. The only marginalized group I'm a part

of is guys without hair. So, but I still

have a very strong case of impostor syndrome.
When

you get into a marginalized group and you
might

be more successful than some of your peers,
you're

afraid it might cause you to be outcast from

that peer group that's one of the only safe

places you have. One of the only places you

belong.

It's a scary thing.

There's a couple things that make impostor
syndrome more

prevalent in technology than it is in other
industries.

One of those things is the vastness of the

knowledge involved in being a technology worker.
Most of

us have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It's this

idea that unskilled people may not really
be able

to gage their level of competence. They may
feel

like they're more competent than they are
because they

don't know their gaps.

We have the diametric opposite problem of
that. We

know every last one of our gaps. We know

all the things that we don't know. We know

all the things that we need to improve about

ourselves. And we know how much we don't know.

And, DHH alluded to this in his keynote, actually,

when he talked about the impostor plexus.

We spend a lot of time wondering if we're

doing it right in software. But the definition
of

right is always moving around. It's very hard
to

track. And so it sets us up for this

feeling where we're never doing it right.
We're always

two steps behind. There's always something
else we need

to know to be able to be accepted in

our field.

The other thing is peer scrutiny. Actors,
scientists, college

professors, musicians, artists, all have a
hard time with

impostor syndrome. And the thing all those
professions have

in common with us is this idea of peer

scrutiny. We are always one code review away
from

somebody telling us that our work is crap
and

we are crap.

And it's, it's a scary place to be. So,

to cope with that fear, your brain starts
dutifully

preparing you for someone telling you that
your work

is crap by telling you that you're crap ahead

of time. It's really helpful.

The other thing we do is we compare the

finished work of other people to our messy
thought

process. So you, you look at this library
that

you admire. You look at the code. You look

at the structure. You look at the way it's

organized. It's fantastic code.

Then you look at your own code. But when

you look at your own code, you have the

back story of that code. You know how it

came to be. You know what a struggle it

was. So you assume this guy wrote this entire

text file, beautiful library in one pass.
But you

know how the sausage was made on your code.

And you know it wasn't a pretty process. So

you're setting yourself up for failure in
that comparison.

You're never gonna come out ahead when you
compare

your thought process to somebody else's finished
code.

So how does this work out in practice? There

are a lot of things that impostors don't do,

because of impostor syndrome. We don't participate
in conversations.

We go to user groups. We tend to hide

in the wings, right. Because if we hide, then

we don't have to put ourselves out there.
We

don't have to let anybody see us and figure

out that we don't know what we're talking
about

and shouldn't be where we are.

We don't ask questions. It's hard for us to

admit that we don't know something. We pretend
like

we know it. Fake it till you make it.

And then we come back later and frantically
scramble

to try to learn the things that we don't

know. So we write crappy code. We blindly
adhere

to best practices. We don't ask questions
that would

allow us to become somebody with a trained
eye

for code that actually knows how to apply
those

best practices well.

And we all know that if you just blindly

apply best practices, you're gonna end up
with some

code that's really pretty rough. But if you
don't

ask those questions, if you don't put yourself
out

there to admit that, yeah, you know what,
I

could learn to do this a little better, you

don't grow.

Impostors don't teach others. We don't give
user group

talks. We don't give convention talks. We
don't help

out at workshops. And the community is worse
off

for this. Brandon Hayes, in his talk this
morning,

alluded to the fact that everybody sitting
in the

audience has a talk that they could give.
There

is something out there that you know an awful

lot about. Maybe more about than anybody else.
But

if you're afraid to get up in front of

people and share that knowledge, the community
is lacking

that knowledge. The community is lacking your
unique viewpoint.

So impostor syndrome robs our community of
some voices

that would otherwise be very helpful and very
insightful.

Another thing impostors don't do is contribute
to open

source. I remember when I was a PHP developer

in the first year of my software development
career.

I said something really stupid on the WordPress
mailing

list. It was something along the lines of
WordPress

isn't supported on Microsoft stack. Or something,
I don't

know, something dumb. And I got my rear end

handed to me for it.

And ever since that happened, I have been
very

hesitant to do anything of any significance
in the

open source world. And I have a feeling that

there's a lot of people in the audience that

that's true for, as well. Maybe you got bit

one time. Maybe you're just afraid of getting
bit

by trying to contribute to open source. But
it's,

it's something that impostors don't do, because
we're afraid

of that rejection. We're afraid of that failure.

The other thing impostors don't do is they
don't

change jobs. I mentioned I was a solo developer

for the first chunk of my career. I was

in that job for five years. And it was,

it was a bit of a cushy position. I'll

admit that. But by being a solo developer,
I

deprived myself of the chance of learning
from other

developers. And by the time I left that job,

I was not making anything close to a market

salary.

But, as impostors, we kind of feel lucky to

have the job we have and to have the

people that are around us fooled. It seems
like

an awful lot of work to go take a

new job and have to fool a new group

of people, right? So we just sit where we

are.

So, clearly, these are not things that we
want

to happen in our community. So how do we

patch our brains to get out of this cycle?

Like I mentioned earlier, impostor syndrome,
that cycle, it's

kind of an infinite loop in your head. And

you just have to find the places that you

can hook into it so that you can get

out of it.

The good news is, is that for starters, knowing

is half the battle. If you just understand
that

this thing that you feel, this pervasive sense
of

incompetence that you feel actually has a
name. It's

called impostor syndrome. You know how it's
affecting your

thoughts. You know how it's affecting your
head. That's

the first start of the road to recovery. I

mentioned earlier, I've got an impostor survey,
I'll give

you the link at the end of the talk.

It's derived from research from Dr. Clance.
And it'll

give you a numeric score. It'll help you sort

of sort through some of the thoughts in your

head and figure out if it's something that
you're

dealing with.

So once you know what impostor syndrome is,
the

next thing is mindfulness. You have to start
paying

attention. And, I apologize, cause I know
this is

super cheesy, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
I

want you to turn to somebody next to you

in the audience and pay them a compliment.
If

it's somebody you know well, make it as specific

a compliment as you can. I'll wait.

AUDIENCE: [chatter]

N.M.: All right. All right, come on. Reeling
it

back in here. I wondered if this would happen

on the last day of the conference, and it

did.

So, think back to when the person sitting
next

to you paid you that compliment. How did you

react? Was your initial instinct to accept
that compliment

and take it at face value as true? Or

was it to try to write it off. To

try to find some way deflect it. Cause that's

what we do as impostors, right? If somebody
comes

up and says hey, nice job.

Oh, man, I was really lucky. It was an

easy topic to talk about. That sort of thing.

We tend to write it off. So you have

to pay attention to how you accept compliments.
You

have to work to accept them gracefully. If
you

don't know how to do that, just say thank

you. All you have to say. It's very hard

work, and I am still terrible at it.

The other thing you have to do, that you

can do to help you find how this is

happening in your head is to listen to yourself

talk. See if you do a lot of self-deprecation.

When you make a mistake in the code, you

say, oh man, I'm an idiot. Or do you

do, oh, I forgot a semi-colon. Not that we

ever do that because we're Rubyists and we
don't

write JavaScript or anything.

The next thing you have to do is accept

your success. Accept your success. Trust reality,
not your

feelings. Brandon Hayes is a friend of mine
from

Austin, said this probably as eloquently as
I've heard

it said. He was talking about leaving a previous

job and coworkers paying him compliments and
saying nice

things about him.

And he said, you know, at some point, I

had to stop the thought process in my head.

And I had to try to find these things

that people were saying about me inside myself.
I

had to find them as true. And it's hard.

It's hard. You have to try to accept that

compliments are true. You have to accept that
nice

things that people say about you are true,
rather

than immediately writing them off. Another
way to practice

that is to give more compliments.

I mentioned sort of this idea of a zero-sum

game, where it's, you have to be the shining

star and you're worried about what happens
when people

on your team get compliments. Well, give more
compliments.

Notice the genuineness with which you deliver
a compliment.

If you notice how genuine you're being, start
assuming

other people are being that genuine as well.
And

they're not just deluded into thinking you're
something you're

not.

You have to own your success. And even if

your success involved a lot of luck and timing,

you still had to be smart enough to use

that luck and timing to your benefit. So even

if you try to write it off as luck

and timing, you still had something to do
with

it.

You also need to be kind to yourself. Forgive

your mistakes. If you notice yourself being
very self-critical,

interrupt yourself. Notice what you did well,
in addition

to what you feel like you need to improve

on.

My wife's a middle-school English teacher.
And in her

classroom, she practices something that she
calls the compliment

sandwich. When she has to deliver some bad
news

to a student or tell them how they need

to improve their writing or, or something
like that,

she tells them first something they did really
well.

Then she delivers the improvement, and then
she tells

them something else they did really well.

Well, if you start doing this inside your
own

head, what'll happen is you'll have to find
something

you did well. Then you can indulge in that

self-criticism that feels so good to us. And
then

you tell yourself something else you did well.
And

over time, you'll notice that you start to
notice

your success more than the things that you
wish

you'd done better.

Another technique you can use is to ratchet
your

freak-out. And I use this one a lot this,

giving this talk. I mentioned that I moved
into

that fear and doubt and, cycle, pretty early
on.

Well, I made an agreement with myself that
I

was not gonna freak out until a week before

the conference.

And it actually worked pretty well. So, normally
when

I do something like this, I would freak out

a long time in advance. I would start worrying

about it and feeling like I wasn't gonna pull

it off. But I made an agreement with myself

that I wasn't gonna do that. And I sat

on it for awhile. And a week before the

conference. It actually worked. When it would
come up,

I would push it back down and say, you

get to freak out a week before the conference.

You don't get to freak out now. And then

the week before the conference got here and,
boy

did I freak out.

I stayed up till two in the morning most

nights not doing much of anything, but feeling
better

because I was doing something. Like I was
making

progress on my talk. It was very much a

coping mechanism. I wasn't accomplishing anything.
But instead of

doing that for a whole month, I only did

it for a week.

And the magic of this, is it lets you

be successful without freaking out for a month.
And

so you start to break down that superstition
that

you have to do a lot of freaking out

before you can be successful. You start to
chink

away at that bit by bit, until finally you

become convinced that it's not as necessary,
maybe, as

you believe it is.

Another thing is embrace vulnerability. Allow
yourself to admit

you don't know things and ask questions. If
you

don't know who that is in the background of

that slide, it's Renee Brown. If you haven't
seen

her TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability,
put that

very high on your to-do list.

I saw it probably two years ago, and it

was the start of my journey out of impostor

syndrome. Because it was the first time I'd
really

ever embraced the message that it was OK if

I wasn't perfect. It was OK if I didn't

know everything all the time.

When you start embracing vulnerability, it
frees you up

to be yourself, and to be OK with that.

To be OK with not knowing everything. And
once

you're comfortable with who you are, it gives
you

a much more solid foundation to build upon
and

to improve. Like, instead of trying to build
on

top of this shaky facade, you're building
on who

you actually are and what you actually know.

In the process of embracing vulnerability,
something you absolutely

need to try is pair programming. I don't have

a lot of time, but I will be more

than happy to pair with any of you if

I can find the time. Just ping me on

Twitter.

I'm lucky enough to be on a team that

does pair programming 100% of the time. And
what

you find, a coworker said this to me right

as I was walking in to give this talk.

What you find, is that knowledge becomes collective.
Not

something that you have to bring to the table

individually. So it's OK if you don't know
everything.

Your pair probably does. And there's no penalty
for

them knowing things and you not.

But it also makes you be vulnerable enough
to

work with somebody. Because if you're pair
programming with

somebody, there is no hiding. And it's really
the

first dose of having an accurate basis of
comparison

for my work that I ever had. Working with

somebody, seeing how they worked, seeing how
I worked.

Seeing how we did a lot of the same

things and approached problems the same ways,
convinced me

that maybe I wasn't that bad a developer after

all.

But most importantly, you gotta keep going.
You have

to keep going. The hell of impostor syndrome
is

that you are never fully recovered from it.
This

pattern of thought is so deeply ingrained
in your

head that is very hard to escape from. So

what you're working towards is becoming what
I like

to call a high-functioning impostor.

I've alluded to the fact that I have been

my own walking case study in the development
of

this talk. So, clearly I am not out of

the woods. Clearly, I still experience most
of these

things on a very regular basis. The difference
is,

I can work through it enough to be able

to get up and give a talk, or to,

to ship code and know it's actually decent
code.

And everybody can do this. It's not that hard.

You just have to start working through it
and

continue working through it and not giving
up when

it's hard and continue pushing against it.

The last thing I want to leave you with

is this. I talked about Dunning-Kruger effect
earlier. The

thing that you need to remember about impostor
syndrome

is you have a lot of very smart people

around you saying very nice things about you.
If

you believe that these people are full of
crap,

then you're saying that they're not smart
enough to

see through you. They're not good enough at
reading

code to tell that your code is terrible. And

these are also the people that serve as your

basis of comparison. So you're looking around
at all

these people that are very smart, and these
are

the people that you feel like you might be

inferior to.

Well, you're saying these people that you,
that you

consider to be smarter than you are not smart

enough to see through this facade. They are.
And

they're not, because there's no facade there.
So the

fact that you experience impostor syndrome
pretty much means

that you have no reason to experience impostor
syndrome.

It means you know enough about your skill
and

your craft to see your shortcomings and you
just

need to focus more on the things that you

know and the value that you bring to the

table.

Give yourself credit for that and focus less
on

the things that you still have to learn. Because

you have a long career ahead of you. You

don't have to know it all now.

Thanks.