Impostor Syndrome

I wanted to talk about something that I have been dealing with for a while. As I have shifted from technology to technology or new philosophy, I always start off as someone who doesn’t feel like they belong. Like an impostor in that technologies environment. I’m getting that feeling right now as I try and break more into the developer space. There is a phrase called “Impostor Syndrome” that I felt was a perfect description of what I felt. I had to look it up and even though the Wikipedia didn’t define it the way I had it in my mind, I think the term can still be used as long as we clear up the definition.

I’m going to define Impostor Syndrome as the following:

• Feeling of inadequacy in your job even though you have worked very hard to learn the skills needed.

When I started out in IT, I managed Windows servers as a Jr. Admin for a company. Our group had a web based application that we would deploy to all our test, load test, and production servers. We used IBM WebSphere to handle our web packages and had a very manual process for deploying the proper files. After a few months of working this way, I sat down with one of our sr. engineers and we hashed out a whole bunch of batch scripts that automated our deployments. (I didn’t know it at the time, but we were working the beginning of DevOps.)

From there, I decided to dive into networking and Cisco. This is where the feelings of impostor syndrome for me started to creep up. Here I was, the new guy from the WinTel group trying to sort out problems that the sr. people had been working on for a while. The feeling wasn’t huge at this point, I was still new enough in IT that even though I felt a little out of place I worked through that.

After working in the network field for a while I started making the switch to storage networking and storage. This was really a company need at the time but I enjoyed the challenge. With this change, I did start to feel more like an impostor since I wasn’t really a “storage guy” and getting in and telling storage people what was wrong with their SAN and storage appliances.

This brings us to the last few years and I’ve really started putting a bunch of effort into learning to code. This started out with iOS and Swift code and expanded to add in DevOps based technologies and tools such as infrastructure as code platforms like Chef. For me, this has been the worst feeling of impostor syndrome as I defined it above. I’m having an issue in really breaking into the area of calling myself a “developer” for either the infrastructure as code platforms or my iOS learning.

At NetApp Insight there was a “mentor” station available to talk to people about career or life advice. I went to the booth with no expectations and just to see what was said. I spoke with a wonderful person who has made jumps from positions that had very little to do with each other. So, I asked this question “If your working on something, when do you feel comfortable enough to call yourself that?” The idea is, if I’m working on storage, when do I call myself a storage person? Or (in my case) if I’m working on development, when do I call myself a developer? The answer really made sense to me.

When your emotionally invested into this new thing, then call yourself that.

This is huge, but still not as easy as it sounds. I feel like an impostor, like I’m breaking into an amazing community and I don’t belong at all. I’ve felt this way before and only gotten over it through time and loads of hard work.

So, how do you fit into your community? When do you start to except that you are a ?