Imposter Syndrome. What is it? And How to Overcome it.

This week I want to take a right turn into an avenue that we are all in, or have gone down before…Imposter Syndrome. Do these words make you cringe? Or do they make you feel like challenging yourself? Or do you not even know what this is yet?

For me, as a new developer, I face this syndrome almost every day. While I am constantly searching for solutions, or trying to come up with new ones I struggle with the fact that someone has already solved this problem. Is this common? Yes. Do other programmers overcome it? Yes. Is it easy to do? No.

At a glance what is Imposter Syndrome? In a nutshell, it is the feeling that your code, or you as a developer aren’t good enough. And I’m here to tell you(as well as remind myself), you are! We are in an industry that is ever changing and ever evolving, as well as, expanding. The need for Developers and Engineers is at an all time high, and it isn’t going anywhere soon. You may be saying to yourself, “But Ben how do I fix this?”. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were software languages. Today we are going to focus on challenges, or more specifically code challenges. How to approach them, and hopefully how to complete them.

In my day job, I work with Software Engineering students at a bootcamp. Day to day I see them coming in with labs, or concepts that they do not understand. Heck, I was one of those students and all I can say is THIS. IS. NOT. EASY. Think about it. If this profession were easy everyone would do it! So take a moment and realize that you were chosen or are pursuing a profession that is difficult. We are the problem solvers or the world, and we should take pride in that fact. I’m proud of you and you should be too. But the most common trip up or snafu that I see students dealing with(as well as myself) is how do we get from A to C. Yes…A to C. Where is B? I’m glad you asked!

In my humble opinion I believe we can slightly nip Imposter Syndrome in the bud by starting with these three steps:

A. What is the information that we are dealing with?

Is it an array? Is it an array of objects? Is it just an object? Is it a string? Who knows! My first step always is our good old friend console.log(). From here we can see what sort of information we are dealing with. This is important for the next step in determining how we approach this data.

B. How do we access this information? What are we going to do with it?

Well from here depending on what our deliverable is what are we going to do with this information? Do we have to iterate over every element in the data structure? Do we have to manipulate the data structure and return a new value? Do we have to find a specific instance in our data structure? To be honest, this is where I stumble too. There are so many ways to go about this part. It’s almost impossible to track down a cookie cutter method to find what we need. And that’s ok. This is what makes our jobs fascinating. This is what makes us unique in our field. My answer may be completely different from yours. But we are achieving the same goal.

C. How are we going to get that information from B back to the user at the end of the day?

We have the info we need. Great! Now, how are we going to deliver this info we found from our function to the user? 9 times out of 10 we also forget that ‘return’ does so much for us. But that’s not to say don’t assume that it will always be that. Maybe they want two values instead of one? Or three? Or FOUR?! How do we manage this? Curiosity. My curiosity definitely drives me at the end of the day. Why does this solution work and not this one? And therein lies the problem, “this solution is way better than mine, why doesn’t mine work?” And here we are back at the beginning. Try and be kind to yourself when you reach this point. You may not realize it but you are closer to the finish line now than when you started, you just have to go a little bit further!

So the takeaway is this: Find the information that you are dealing with. What are we going to do with that information once we have it? And how are going to get it back to the user at the end of the day? You can do this, now go out and make it happen!