Dealing With Imposter Syndrome As A Younger Tech Lead

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all right it's Monday I'm headed to work it's uh the 16th 16th of December I'm still getting over this this chest stuff it's like only bad when I'm sleeping which is perfect timing right just when I want to recover um we got a topic for today um I have two uh one that's submitted I'm going to do that on the drive home and uh this one is from Reddit and it's going man I got to fix the sensor thing as soon as it started getting cold it's like terrible um the topic from Reddit is going to be about um being being younger I guess and finding yourself in a position where you're younger uh potentially less time in industry and in a position where you Tech technically have a little bit more seniority or that sensor is turned off no more beeping potentially in a

situation where you have more seniority over people that might be older than you so uh I think this is a really interesting one because my career kind of started off this way uh I'm I'm older now I guess I'm in my mid-30s so I don't know I guess I'm an adult that happened at some point um but especially earlier on you know uh kind of new industry I became a manager quite early so kind of a a weird thing to navigate so I think this will be an interesting one to talk through uh a friendly reminder that if you want stuff answered uh definitely just leave a comment below happy to go through it if you uh want to have something that's a little bit more uh private you don't want to like you know you don't want to disclose too much information in public

uh when you ask the question just look for Dev leader on social media uh send me a DM Happy to go through uh whatever your questions are the more context you provide the more information I have to go by so uh I I provide less generic advice if you can be more specific my goodness I'm hoping this candy helps I noticed over the weekend instead of getting a tickle in my throat just with one of these candies or whatever I totally made it go away but it it meant that I had to constantly have a candy in my mouth okay so the other thing that's really important about this topic that we'll get into is around impostor syndrome because I think that the dynamic where you have people that are older than you and have people that have been not only older than you but

like have technically more years of exper experience in the industry that can really start to you know mess with your mind like oh wait like something's off here right like I shouldn't be in this position but there's a lot of reasons why this stuff can happen okay so um I'm trying to think of a good starting point for this because there's a few different angles I want to look at like I want to share some of my story because that's real experience real lived examples I can go through I want to talk about this from the software engineering perspective as well um because that's where this person's coming from and of course like I said I'm a little bit older now but this is something I've I've lived through so um I want to be able to kind of reflect back on some of that

so maybe let's kind of think about the circumstance that this person's in right so they find themselves um say like basically get like a tech lead role okay and this kind of thing can happen for sure uh doesn't like when we're thinking about like types of companies like I think some people when they're thinking about software development software engineering a lot of what they think in terms of expectations of what stuff's going to look like is modeled around like traditional big tech companies and a lot of hierarchy and stuff like that and I'm not saying everyone thinks this way I just I suspect that a lot of people if they're envisioning scenarios like this they're they're going okay there's a company there's lots of people it's probably pretty typical that if you're a tech lead you have more years of experience you're whatever you are

a more senior engineer you might have a senior title um but like it doesn't necessarily have to be that you worked at some place for eight years you have 15 years of experience in the industry um because a lot of places just aren't a big structured big tech company in fact most places are not so it's a little bit misleading if if our mental models of these things are always kind of like H what does it look like at Big Tech um so um in this case if this person's been sort of given this opportunity I think the first thing that we want to think about here is like if if a manager was able to put someone into this position where they they believe they should have this responsibility they should have this type of influence over a particular project or area it's because

the manager believes that that's in the best interest of the team right so it might be a good growth opportunity for the employee it might be um I mean it it most likely is the you know the right move for the business we would hope um of course we could always say maybe the manager has no idea what they're doing sure um but it's really difficult to navigate these types of situations if you're just assuming that everyone's like an idiot or making mistakes I think we want to kind of navigate this with like the manager is doing you know acting with best intentions doing what they think is best and we should be able to try and trust that they're making a good decision here so if we stop doing that then everything falls apart and we might as well just sit here and and

question every part of life and say what are we even doing so if the manager believes that this is in the best interest of the team it's because this individual has demonstrated the characteristics that the manager has confidence in them to be able to take some technical leadership here um and when we think about impostor syndrome oh man come on what are you doing what are you doing a crappy turn um it's one left turn lane that turns into like to two left turn Lanes so I just turned left to go sit in two more left turn Lanes um but the one lane was really backed up um so with respect to people feeling imposter syndrome one of the things that's very common is like we um we second guess ourselves a lot right and it's very easy to do most people will experience impostor

syndrome in fact uh it's I would say for many software Engineers it's something you'll experience you'll sort of get over it get through it but it's going to come back later in different situations and it's something that is a recurring pattern right so a lot of people will say in fact the more successful you are the more that you will experience imposter syndrome so one of the things that we should keep in mind is like um I I kind of like to look at the self sorry look at this stuff like a self-esteem exercise I know they're not the exact same thing but for my experience with imposter syndrome and for my experience even trying to like have better self-esteem because for a lot uh like a large majority can I say majority still yeah probably for a large majority of my life even including

up to this point right I suffered from a lot of self-esteem issues and I think that something that goes hand inand is like when we don't have a lot of self-esteem we're looking for validation like we need to find ways to to demonstrate our value and often we turn to external validation so if someone can say hey like you did good or you know have if you're for self-esteem like you're whether it's like you're attractive you do this well whatever like any type of external validation coming in like that's like a oh that feels good that feels good but the problem is it's called self esteem right it's like your selfworth so if you're constantly relying on external factors it's going to perpetuate the problem it could be helpful to get a bit of uh bit of momentum but like you can't rely on it

so you have to find ways to remind yourself hey look like no like you know what like I should be more confident myself because uh whatever let's pick like if you have body image issues right like I do go to the gym regularly I am you know I have been improving in my strength my diet is improving like I have lost weight whatever it happens to be finding ways to remind yourself like I I am a value and I think that when we think about impostor syndrome it's a similar exercise if you rely constantly on other people like you have to hear your manager say no no no like I I believe you can do this you are a good fit um that might help in sort of like the immediate term like it's kind of reassuring but you need to remind yourself like you

need to be the reminder hey look I was put here for a reason right I was hired into this role people believed in me my manager put me into this specific position they believe in me um I have good feedback from my peers they believe in me right I've been able to work on these other projects successfully historically like reminding yourself of these things I I generally think is a huge help with trying to navigate imposter syndrome so for an individual who is they're younger and they're put into something like this I get it it's really difficult to just like avoid impostor syndrome because you're thinking hey wait a second like this other person on the team they've been here for twice as long they have a couple more years of experience on me and fact this is their their second job and this is

my first job so don't don't they have more experience aren't they a better fit like why was I picked and it's really easy to start being like oh crap like was this just an accident am I even qualified for this so I totally get it but this is why I'm saying and I'm trying to remind you like if especially if you're early in your career try to start practicing this stuff earlier right it's it's not it's not being self-centered to be able to remind yourself that you have had success okay especially if you're in a position where you're starting to second guess yourself with imposter syndrome use this as a reminder you have been successful it's not an accident that you are where you are now I think one of the big challenges that comes up here is that we do this comparison thing and

the comparison thing is really difficult to to avoid because I think as humans we're just really good at comparing ourselves to other comparing other people we just constantly do this oh man undercover police pickup truck totally totally stealthy except for the flashing lights for pulling someone over my goodness so given that we do this comparison thing a lot I think that that is also going to set ourselves up for something like impostor syndrome in this type of situation so I think we need to remind ourselves that we we have this bias when we're doing this comparison and I think a lot of the time what ends up happening and it's not just in these situations by the way I mean in general when we start comparing ourselves to others what we end up doing is we we look at all the best qualities that we

see in someone else and we say well they do that better than me and then we go look at someone else and compare ourselves to them and we go oh well they do this stuff better than me and it's almost like we're only picking the good stuff that other people do and as a result we're like and therefore there's nothing left for me I must be bad it's just simply not the case it's just this bias that we have when we start doing this comparison so I think again it's just like kind of setting yourself up for for diving head first into impostor syndrome so these are some thoughts around imposter syndrome in this type of situation I want to shift gears a little bit just to not make the whole talk about imposter syndrome but is I want to talk a little bit more

about like okay here in this position I think there's discussion around navigating imposer syndrome that's a big part about this but like okay now that you're in this position and you're acknowledging your impostor syndrome you're trying to work through that you got older people on the team that are technically in some capacity depending on the role and stuff and the expectations I'm going to use like air quotes here like subordinate in some capacity right if you are the tech lead you might have the final say on some of the design for example um there's this expectation that you are helping lead and make final decisions on things it's not that you do it in isolation and you ignore everyone else on the team but the idea would be that you're you're able to sort of like moderate and mediate and veto decisions as necessary so

that you can drive progress in the right direction obviously I would highly recommend you work with your team right you got experts on the team you should lean into their expertise their knowledge their experience these are just like good leadership things to do but um as needed you'll you'll find yourself needing to make hard decisions sometimes so how do we do that when there's people that are older than us right we start to go oh man like I have to go tell this person that I disagree with their idea but they're older than me they have more experience than me I might I might just be a kid right I in this example from Reddit I think the person said they were like 22 um and they might maybe the person they're working with is my age and they're 35 and they're like man this

person's like like 50% older than me that's scary holy crap um so like you know what am I going to say to them and the reality is it doesn't matter right it's not the Age part isn't actually a factor we're making this up in our heads if we're having a discussion about something about the right design what's most optimal it's we're kind of like self-sabotaging when we start to factor in like oh someone else is older therefore I'm going to have a problem doing this but like okay pretend they're not older pretend they're your age now have the conversation with them because the points that you want to bring up up in that conversation should be the exact same ones you don't want your your conversation to be hey I know I'm only half your age but like like what where are we going with

that so it's not it's a nonissue right the reality is that person may have more years of experience and they have different insights and that's great but you're in this position because someone values that you're going to be able to navigate this properly and most effectively right so if you're trying to come up with design decisions weighing things out if someone's proposing something and there's a disagreement and you need to navigate that you're just focused on the data right they might say I'm just going to make something up random off the top of my head we want to go with um a post grass database because post grass is going to be the most performant and it's open source you're not coming in here buddy not if you're going slower than me um so you know they're coming up with their reasons why I just

spat everywhere and you might say well okay like those are great points but for example um our infrastructure everywhere else we're already using uh MySQL we're going to be more heavily reusing parts of a data layer that are MySQL based it would actually be a lot of rework for us and additional work if we had to go switch um database providers I'm again I'm just I'm just making all of this stuff up it's not really important so when you're coming up with these these points it has like I'm not talking about how much experience or age someone has you're trying to say like in this particular case um unless the performance gains that you were getting out of postgress were so dramatic and that was such a big value ad for the project that was at hand it's just more work and if that's the

argument that's the argument so my point here is that we we we just want to stick to like what the values are right we we want to focus on like these are you know the goals of the project this is um sort of the charter of the team and and get alignment to that at no point does it matter the experience level so I I know as I'm saying this you're like well no Nick obviously but I think when people go to have these conversations they start worrying like isn't this person going to school me because they have more experience but I mean let's put it this way if you're having a conversation with them and you explain your points right so you end up saying to them all the things I just said right it's going to be a lot of rework maybe they

come back to you and they say hey you know what I actually do have some prior experience in this exact situation and I totally hear what you're saying about the rework but in fact we actually did this other approach before that worked really successfully so um we can actually cut down on the migration time so that it's almost negligible and we still get those performance benefits that I was talking about so we're going to get a 50% performance boost and instead of it being like 3 months of extra rework time it's actually only going to take about two weeks and here's you know an example of the pattern here's how it works here's why so now you're sitting there and you're like oh crap I I've been schooled by the person with more experience oh no um but like what was the goal was the

goal to go tell this person that they're wrong or was the goal to go have a conversation with this person to go discuss what the best path forward is right so you just want to be able to have conversations in a way where you're standing by the values that you think are or that have the assigned weight to them that makes sense for your team the project right the goals of what that project is and and you have a discussion about it if someone is presenting other ideas because they have more experience doing it that's awesome and a lot of my career so I've been an engineering manager for 12 years I find myself in situations like this all the time right like I am the leader of the team several like feature crews in this case in my current situation I understand what the

goals of those feature crews are supposed to be given the product and service areas so in my head I'm trying to make the I'm trying to make sure the decisions we're making are aligned to those so if I hear something and I'm like ah that doesn't really feel aligned that doesn't mean that I'm 100% right and the other person's 100% wrong it means I end up having a conversation with them and I'm trying to call it out like hey based on what I'm hearing that doesn't seem like it's the optimal thing or it doesn't seem like it's aligned and then we just have a conversation about it and it's been really cool for me because my um my experiences doing this have completely flipped around I was the younger person being like hey um I think that you know this is not the right direction

or this is a suboptimal Direction here's a different one and now I'm the older person listening to like to more Junior people doing the same thing and it's not about who's right and who's wrong it's about aligning so you may find with some older people and this is the same thing with younger some younger people too there are some older people that are kind of stuck in their ways and that might be worth kind of calling out here that it's not it has nothing to do necessarily with the fact that you're young it's just that they're older and they've seen a million different things a million different times and they have opinions about the best ways to do things those experiences are valuable but those exper Es are don't make their decision making law so I think that's important that we listen to them we

try to learn from past mistakes and experiences but we have to acknowledge that just because something looks similar does not necessarily mean that it is the same situation so it's worth navigating those things and keeping an open mind right someone's like hey yeah that database migration attempt like actually that is a really risk thing to do okay well maybe that is the direction we want to go though so what were the risks right why was it risky what did you try to do to navigate that or if you attempted it and it failed why did it fail what can we learn about that can we can we still go down this direction without totally messing up like that that experience that you might have had in the past right or is it truly so risky that we should avoid it at all cost but these

are conversations that have to happen okay I only got a few minutes left before I'm off the highway here um I hope I hope some of that's helpful from like a thought I keep spitting man from a um I don't know just like the thought process that goes into it is it's really not it should not be a conversation about age shouldn't be a conversation about age and it's not a conversation about who's right and who's wrong we have conversations about being aligned and trying to make the best decisions with the information that we have and that has nothing to do with age if people have different experiences these are great things to feed into the conversation but they do not become law so for a little bit of my own experience like when I was made a a manager pretty early on um I

remember there was a person on the team like it was it was a lot of really really young people like fresh out of school and um there was a guy on the team that was older not not like I'm not trying to say it was like an old guy but he was not fresh at at school like the rest of us and you know we we looked up to him a lot like a lot of uh really insightful things but just like any human being like I'm certainly not perfect in everything I do I'm not optimal in everything I do it would be completely ridiculous for me to make that claim and it's the same thing for this individual right so there were sometimes situations where he would be doing things believing that it was in the best interest of the team right he's not

being malicious but like based on his experience I'm going to do things in a particular way because I think that this is the best thing for the team and there were times I had to have conversations with him and be like this is not true and I had to make sure that it was like oh my God what someone just hit like big piece of plastic and it hit my car H anyway um we're not dead so you need to be ready to have conversations like this I'm totally acknowledging that when I was younger yeah I was afraid to do this so it's so much easier for me to say in high in sight to be like oh like don't factor in the age but this is the advice that I would want to give myself I get that it seems scary because someone's older

they have more experience but like my role and this is why it's a little bit unique in this situation like my role was as a manager so I'm approaching things from a slightly different angle so to give you an example if I had a more senior engineer being like I'm just going to go do this work I might be like hey like maybe that's actually not a priority for the team right now and they might say well I really want to do it and I think it's important and I have to be ready to say Well it's not and here's why and here's the direction we're going right and kind of like make sure that I can have some type of I don't want to say I guess it is kind of like Authority but I'm not trying to use Authority asn't like a controlling

thing but I need to be able to Stand My Ground on stuff it's not about trying to like order people around and like boss them around and command them to do stuff but if someone's saying I think this is a priority I need to be able to articulate if it's not why it's not and why something else is a higher priority and this is stuff that comes up all the time this has never gone away in my career regardless of whether or not I was the younger person or now if I'm the older person I always need to be able to articulate priorities I do this with my previous manager and with my current manager I will sometimes and this is not like this is a not a a complaint or anything I will get messages from my manager and he'll say hey do you

think some and so can help with this and I say I absolutely think they could but here's the tradeoff if they do like here is what you are missing out on from a priority perspective if I go to realign them so I'm happy to go make priority adjustments right because my manager is in a more you know better position to be able to to make judgment calls like that obviously he trusts and empowers me but if he knows something I don't right and he's like actually we need to shift gears and focus in this other area like he should be able to come talk to me and say hey like we should REI on this so when he does that I just have to be ready to explain like we can do it or not if it's not possible and then explain the tradeoff so

I would have my opinion like basically I've set myself up with the team this way because these are the prior ities as I understand them right so if you want to reprioritize this other thing here's the trade that we're making and I've always had to have conversations like this regardless of whether or not it was to my manager or to an engineer on the team that wanted to go dabble in some other area of the code could be anything but it doesn't matter like my manager is older than me if he was younger than me it wouldn't change the fact that I still have to have this conversation because I have to have that conversation with younger Engineers on the team with older people on the team so it's not the Age part doesn't matter but I think we have to we have to learn

this right experience is valuable to bring knowledge to the table but it doesn't mean that it's the Beall and end all we have to look at the current situation the priorities we have and focus on being aligned going forward so I hope that helps I am sorry if you're experiencing imposter syndrome I understand that that's a very difficult thing to navigate I like believe me I get it um but we have to we have to be the ones to remind ourselves right I am worth being in this position I was put here for a reason I've been successful in the past and I will be successful at this as well so I hope that helps and stay tuned for the episode on the way home take care