Am I Even Good Enough For Imposter Syndrome?

The tl;dr of this post is the thing you're agonizing over probably doesn't matter, and you should just make a decision and commit to it. (See The OODA loop).

This statement is funny because you are reading the fourth total rewrite of this post. The post was originally going to be ruminations on topics adjacent to The DataOps Manifesto, but just go read that instead honestly. What follows is a few thoughts on self-confidence in the trade.

Hermit Tech is a collection of exceptionally talented and multi-disciplinary freaks of nature, many of whom are great writers as well.

I, however, have only my dreams which I have spread beneath your feet and pray you tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

In the parlance of table-top roleplaying games I am what is known as a "glass cannon" - something heavily optimized to hit hard, hopefully with finality, but at the expense of shattering to a million pieces when hit themselves.

I am speaking about my ability to data engineer at the expense of being able to talk to other humans, but it also captures my feelings of fragility when stepping outside of my Zone of Extreme Confidence.

I share this with you, gentle reader, because the thing I find in my day-to-day that makes the most difference, and seems to be the most unsaid sentiment, is bolstering confidence and assuaging the impostor syndrome of the people you work with.

I've been in tech since Macromedia owned Flash (please don't google that) and in all that time, I've met exactly one good engineer who wasn't trapped in a self-doubt hall-of-mirrors. I correlate impostor syndrome with engineering ability at this point.

I don't know if this holds true for non-engineers and/or people who are fun at parties, but I suspect it's universal.

Regardless, my point is if you're struggling with something, be it choosing the right technology to implement, naming a variable the right thing, or figuring out what looks good on your resume, and you're at the stage of questioning yourself over and over - just pick whatever. Flip a coin. Trust that you'll be able to dig your way out of anything you do wrong. Inaction is a passive decision.

If that seems flippant and reductive well... yeah, it is. The completion of that circle is to pay attention to what happens afterwards. It's important to set your ego aside, take ownership of your mistakes, and then fix them. The ideal environment to do this in is one that doesn't penalize mistakes but focuses on improving the future. This is hardly anything new, but keeping a social dynamic safe and mistake-tolerant is a maintance task, not a destination you can reach once.

These are strong opinions, vaguely expressed. They're hard to tie linguistic fences around and package for consumption. Others have done so far better than I ever will.

At Hermit Tech, I call this the "Human Layer" (referring to software architecture layers, not the AI thing), and this is often where the most insidious anti-patterns can be found and remediated.

So much of building tech stuff is a figurative conversation - between you and the machine, you and the abstraction, you and the people who will use what you build, you and the people who will maintain it, you and those who came before you. To understand such a varied audience you need to anchor on your understanding of yourself. Improve the one tool you can never replace - you.

And if you are already able to give someone an impromptu tour of your own code without compulsively apologizing for not being good enough, my genuine congratulations, and now set your sights on sharing that around with the people you work with. Uplift others. It will make you a better engineer.

If the thought of showing others your little corner of git fills you with terror, ask yourself are you proud of the work you have done? Crucially, not is it good enough for xyz-standard, but are you proud of what it took from you to create? If not, go fix it now and give your best. If so, then don't ever apologise for it. I've written some low-key cosmic horror in my time, but I'm proud that it's still running a decade later.

That's all I've got. I'm used to just saying spooky stuff and letting my rows and columns speak for themselves, so to finish I will leave you with the words of Kyoriku Morikawa, a seventeenth century Japanese poet with a penchant for boastfulness. This is a death poem written shortly before he died, and I like to read it in the spirit of "Am I even good enough to have impostor syndrome?!":

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