Imposter Syndrome: From Bootcamp to Developer

6 months ago I jumped a developer bootcamp at my local university. Yesterday, I had my first day as a "full-stack software developer"—a fancy way of describing a developer that deals with both the backend (what happens on the server) and frontend (what y'all see in your browser) code. A colleague of mine from class, who also just started a development job mentioned the other day that it's kind of ridiculous that companies want to pay us (pretty healthily) for something that we only started learning a few months back.

And it kind of is. But also, it's totally not. I spend my time thinking: I mean, am I even really a developer? Sure, I have a development job, but am I a real developer?

That is imposter syndrome, friends.

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments, and has a persistent  internalized  fear of being exposed as a "fraud".

My coding class scratched the surface of a lot of different topics from HTML/CSS and Bootstrap, to client-side JS, NodeJS, PHP, Python, unit-testing, SQL and NoSQL databases, MVC architecture, computer science fundamentals, agile methodology, HandlebarsJS and ReactJS. But sometimes I load up some open-source code and I'm over here like -_- (i.e. staring blankly at the screen, like wtf is this? This is the JavaScript I learned...must be some strange dialect).

And then I get to thinking if my boss might figure it out... or maybe my colleagues already found me out, but are just keeping quiet.

But listen, the nature of software development is fast-paced with multiple moving parts. There are always new technologies and skillsets that you need to keep up with, and far too many "Learn X in 5 minutes" tutorials that teach you maybe 1% of an entire topic. But development is also fun, challenging, and exciting—it pushes you to learn and to improve. So, in the end, nobody knows it all. We're all still learning, and there will be new things to learn in the next 2 years, 5 years, 10 years and beyond.

So the next time you wonder if you're just an imposter faking your way through a career in development, just remember that we're all just at different points in our careers and we specialize in different areas. Nobody expects you to know it all, and nobody expects you to write perfect code from memory. Just keep reading that documentation and keep writing code...one line after another.

Citations

Langford, Joe; Clance, Pauline Rose (Fall 1993). "The imposter phenomenon: recent research findings regarding dynamics, personality and family patterns and their implications for treatment" (PDF). Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training. 30 (3): 495–501.