It Takes Me Longer Than Other Devs... Am I An Imposter?

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Hey folks, I got a question from the comments and this one's about imposttor syndrome working through ambiguity and I think it's a it's just kind of a little bit more generic open-ended. So I figured it'd talk about this. So this person was saying you know takes them say few hours longer in general than their peers to you know understand more complex things um more ambiguous things and work through them and then of course you know we start doing this thing where we're comparing ourselves to others you know second guessing ourselves and imposter syndrome right that really kicks in because you start to wonder like hey if it's taking me longer than other people uh at least you know that's the perspective then like am I am I even cut out for this right and imposter syndrome is a huge thing with I think uh with

many people even outside of software engineering I don't have like data to back this up or anything but I feel like especially like an intellectual field like software engineering you'll see a lot more of this uh very competitive right you'll have uh you know places that are that are hiring top talent so you have a lot of people working at you know really high levels to to get into places in an intellectual field. Um, and I I just think that, you know, it's a more more and more of a recipe for something like imposter syndrome. So, I figured this would be good to talk about. Um, I have a bunch of videos on my channel, uh, on code commute and on dev leader, my main channel for imposter syndrome. I write about it a bunch across, you know, different, uh, whether it's just on social media post or my newsletter.

So, um I think this kind of thing is super important to talk about because this is the kind of thing that is uh like basically going to affect everyone to some degree and it's something that's like not it like imposter syndrome is not just you know specifically part of software engineering. So part of getting better at being a software engineer is understanding these types of things that happen in our careers. Right? I know all of us want to be better technically. We're working with AI, right? We're trying to design better systems, make more performant code. We're trying to do all these things, but there's so much stuff like impostor syndrome that can come up in your career that will affect how you operate as a software engineer. And so, I think it's really important to understand these other things so that when you're going through them, you have a better idea like what's going on.

And my goal with talking about this stuff is not to say like, hey, look, here's here's how you solve imposttor syndrome. In fact, um I don't think imposter syndrome is like is a solve solve it kind of thing. I think it's an understand it kind of thing. Acknowledge it. um you know be aware of it because uh there's people I've been you know on presentation panels where there's like VPs of engineering departments talking and they're like I still have imposttor syndrome like you know way later into their career. It's a it's a normal thing and so I want to talk about this. So um when it comes to like I don't know like this this feeling of okay well seems like my peers are able to do this faster than me and uh we start doing this comparison kind of thing. I think uh comparison in general is a bit of a dangerous tool.

Okay. I think it can be really helpful and I think it can be uh pretty harmful depending on how it's used. And so I encourage you that if you're finding that you're trying to do a comparison of yourself to others to um to use it as a motivator, not as a um an identifier of problems, which might sound kind of weird, but I'm going to try to give you an example. If you compare yourself to other people, right? Um a lot of the time the way that we end up doing this is that we we take a a trait that we have. Okay? So we have many traits, many characteristics, right? Some of us are really good at some things, maybe not as good at other things. And what we end up doing when we compare is that we take some trait we have, right? And then we compare it to someone else generally who is really really good with that trait.

So you're comparing like not your best of something to someone who is like uh really good at it, right? We do this a lot with social media. One second. Um where you know people who post on social media are posting the best parts of their lives, right? And so then we compare ourselves any part of our life which is you know on a regular basis. We're not every moment is the best part of our life. And so we compare not the best part of our life always to these like highlights, these snapshots of like these seemingly perfect things. And we do this even in the workplace. We do this with with friends, with peers. It's like a I feel like it's a normal thing that we do as humans, but it's it can be dangerous because we're always taking some characteristic and going, "Well, Bobby is so good at this.

Why aren't I good at this?" and like as good and like Sally's so good at this other thing like she's amazing at it and like I'm just not as good and if you keep doing this it's like you kind of suck it seems like you suck at everything because there's always someone who is better at that thing right if you got to go one by one through all the things there's always someone better so if this is always your framing it's like well then you're not it makes you feel like you're not actually good at anything because there's always someone better. And so I think that this can be kind of dangerous because it frames things in a negative way. I think what can be beneficial is if you um you can still do the comparison, but don't do it as a matter of like, well, this person's better than me and therefore I'm not good.

It's this person does something so well, right? I want to aspire to be like that. what are the things that they're doing because I admire that because I want to model that and are there things that I can learn and try applying. Right? It's the same concept. There's a comparison, but the framing is very different. It's not I'm not as good as someone. It's here is something I can learn and model. And that, by the way, hopefully it's obvious, but that's not to say that you have to go learn and model everything that everyone else is doing, but there are opportunities to do that. Okay, so that's my number one thing here is I would start by inverting that framing, right? I think that's a it's a key thing. I think that that's something that just doesn't happen overnight. But challenge yourself next time, right? So and so is so much better than me.

Oh, like I must suck. Okay, so and so is really good at this thing. Stop doing the better than me thing. So and so is really good at this thing. Like what are the things that they're doing? Hm. Like are there things like that that I could try doing? Could I model some of that? Could I try? Okay. Next thing is that uh I think when it comes to complex tasks and ambiguity, I think some people are more comfortable with asking questions. And again, you may not see that people are doing this, right? So, for example, this person was saying, "It takes me, you know, 3 to 4 hours longer to get clarity on complex things." Okay. Is that is that just because what they perceive is true? Like, as in everyone else must just be smarter and better at getting to the answer than this person, or is it that those people were more comfortable asking for clarity?

Right? They they know what they don't know. They they're willing to go say, "Cool. Okay, like I know X. I know Y, but I don't know Z. Let me go get clarity on Z right away." And they do it earlier. They do it often. Um they're well practiced at it. Maybe this person is like, you know, uh nervous to ask for help. Maybe they don't have maybe they're working remotely and they don't have a good like uh I don't know rapport with people on their team where they feel comfortable asking that kind of stuff for getting clarity. Um I think sometimes people self-sabotage this way a lot of the time, right? They don't want to they don't want to come across as stupid. This is the imposttor syndrome thing kicking in again, right? I don't want to ask for clarity. I don't want to ask because I'm going to look dumb, right?

people are expecting. I know. So, I don't want to ask. I don't want to look dumb. And then they kind of perpetuate the cycle. And so, uh I I think that we have to kind of break through that. And it's challenging. I know that it's easier to say that than it is to do it, but I I encourage you like to break through. Like I think people get get this confused a little bit and uh and I don't blame them. So, I'm not I'm not sitting here going, "Oh, you're all dumb if you think or feel this way." Not not the case at all. Like, I I get it. But I I want to say it out loud so that you can kind of you can hear someone acknowledging this, right? Like I think people get confused that by asking questions, it makes people think that you are not smart, right?

If you ask and that indicates you don't know, therefore not knowing is not intelligent. Right? Um and that's just like it's not true. Uh because the reality is no one knows everything. You have to ask questions. Right? Asking questions is like it's not um asking the question does not mean hey look at me. I'm dumb for not knowing. Asking the question is basically like hey look at me acquiring information. This is literally me getting smarter by asking a question and getting an answer. Right? What I think people get confused is that asking questions to understand and get clarity is not a matter of like you must be dumb if you're asking. I think where people have a misstep with this stuff is that if you're asking for help on something and you have to keep asking because you're not uh sort of taking the the opportunity to learn or um whatever learning mechanism the mode of that information being conveyed to you is not landing well.

Um, I think people over time get frustrated if they're like, "Hey, look, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into helping you learn this and you're not putting in the time and effort back to try and learn." That's when I think people get frustrated with people asking questions. uh at least in my experience and I mean this genuinely um there's basically two scenarios where I find that people get frustrated and this is from like talking to say more senior people on teams who have to work with more junior people. The two major situations I see this happening are one the person is just genuinely overloaded and it doesn't matter if you were the smartest person on earth or the dumbest or whatever has nothing to do with it. They're just like I don't have capacity to you know to spend time or help other people which I don't think is a good spot for anyone to be in if you're that overloaded but that is one such situation.

The other is like hey look I have been trying to put time and energy into helping this person but they don't seem to be putting the time and energy back. So they always come to me with the same questions. I have been spending time trying to teach them uh explain to them in different ways and routinely buddy you're cutting across all the lanes. Come on. Uh and routinely like they just don't know. They haven't put in any effort and I'm kind of like doing it from scratch. So that's like that's more of like a not I think this person's dumb. that's more I'm just frustrated because like why should I continue to put the same time and energy in right if it's if it's just not progressing which means we have to try something different but those are the two things that I see coming

up and so I say that because none of those two things are this person's dumb and like I think they're stupid for asking questions almost always when I talk with people they're more than happy to try explaining things, helping out, and answering questions. Selfishly, like, think about it this way. Selfishly, it's in other people's best interest if you are smarter, right? If they can help you be smarter, it's in their best interest because then they don't have to do the thing that you're asking for, right? Like you are better equipped now that you know, right? And if I could show you how to do something and explain it to you and then rely on you to do it, I don't have to do it anymore. Or I at least don't have to be the sole person to do it, that's great selfishly, right? Even if it's purely selfish, I think there's like opportunity there.

So, um, again, I I just encourage you that when you're trying to navigate things that are ambiguous or challenging, um, ask questions, get clarity, do it early, do it often, get comfortable doing it. Um there's there's inevitably going to be, you know, especially as you're getting more and more senior, there's going to be tasks that you're assigned where it's like we have this challenge to overcome and like no, we don't have, you know, the answers already kind of figured out. You have to go figure that out, right? And like as you're more junior, a lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time there's, hey, there's this challenge. there's probably uh one or two kind of maybe solutions that are kind of floating around. It's less ambiguous. And the reason that that work is works really well for juniors is there's just less to guess at, right?

There's the ability to build up more consistency so that you can be delivering on work, kind of ramping up, being consistent, doing better work, and then over time you get larger and more ambiguous problems to go solve because you are able to handle them successfully. So, inevitably, as you're growing and taking on bigger challenges, more ambiguous challenges, you're you're always going to kind of be up against this this uh sort of like metaphorical wall of like this is probably a little bit more challenging and ambiguous than you're used to. And so, that's a really good growth opportunity. And if you don't know the answer, okay, right? Like this is where you're going to get clarity on what the problem actually is, right? Like what problem are we actually trying to solve here is we're going to explore the problem space, trying to break it down into smaller problems, try to understand that more start collecting thoughts on it, form your opinion.

Right? A lot of the time, I mean, at least in my experience, you're you don't want to be like operating completely in a silo. So even if it's something that you're going to be working on and responsible for like the best solutions in my experience come from working with other people and that might mean that you're leading something but that doesn't mean that you operate in a vacuum or in a silo never interact with others and just ship stuff that you came up with. So getting feedback from others, collaborating with others, right? Like I think that's super helpful as well. and you like by going through that process, you're getting some of the ambiguous parts figured out, right? Maybe maybe you understand now what the goal is because you've asked some clarifying questions, but you could see one, two, or three paths to go down. Okay?

So, form your opinions about those. You know, collect data, back it up. This is the engineering part. This is analysis. It doesn't mean that like at that point you must have the right answer, but at least now you have something where you can have a conversation around it and then you can work with people on your team to kind of pitch those ideas and say like what do we think? Are there other ideas that we should factor in that I miss something? And if we're doing this early and often then you can I don't know like you can close a lot of gaps this way. But I I think that we perpetuate a lot of this uh I don't know like imposttor syndrome like I'm not saying this solves imposter syndrome by the way but we perpetuate a lot of it by by kind of

isolating ourselves and putting this expectation like self-inflicted that like I'm just expected to know all these things on my own have it solved then you layer on the comparison to others it reinforces that for you Like if I I'm just to give you an example. If I had anyone on my team were was like, "Hey, like here's the next priority that you know from our conversations and roadmap like I think you'd be great to work on this." If if they were like cool and like could we just like set up some time and we could like walk through this together. I don't care like what level that person's at. Like absolutely yes. I'd be happy to go do that because I would much rather that we spend time early getting on the same page and if we do that and then we have to regroup again like that's fine, right?

Like I'm happy to do conversations like that. I don't think that makes someone stupid. I don't think that means they're less intelligent, less capable. I think they're being resourceful. And again, the what would frustrate me or look like a problem is if is if we're having those conversations and then at the end of it, they're just like, "Well, Nick, what one are you going to pick and I would be maybe looking at them like, I need basically, I need you to make the decision, right? Like, if you want my input about how I weigh these things, I can tell you that." Um, if we're genuinely talking about like, you know, we've gone through and compared some options and there's like there isn't like one standout one, sure, I can help, you know, like veto or sway things. That's fine. But, um, at the end of the day, like I'm expecting that you're going to form an opinion.

And I would, again, be happy to work with people to get them there because in some situations, maybe people have never done that, right? Maybe it's their first project where they're being tasked with, you know, we're expecting you to come up with your informed opinion. Maybe they've been on teams where they haven't been afforded that opportunity, right? Where, you know, maybe that is the expectation, but there's more senior people on the team that have always kind of just like steamrolled them. So, they've never had the opportunity to really do that. So, these are just things that like you practice and do in your career. So anyway, kind of going off the rails here, but um I think a lot of the time when it comes to ambiguity, when it comes to imposttor syndrome, I think some of this is uh is definitely self-inflicted, unfortunately. And I say that not to blame anyone for feeling that way.

That's not my intention. I get it. Um, and I'm only saying out loud it's self-inflicted to sort of remind you like that also means that you're in control, right? Like you have some influence over this, which is great news, right? Change how you're comparing yourself to others. Acknowledge that no one's expecting you to know everything and solve every complex problem on your own. And then lean into cool like people are people are uh relying on you to solve problems. They don't expect that you know the answer to everything, but they expect and rely on you that you will be able to go find the answer. That's the difference, right? Through your engineering efforts, you will come up with a good answer grounded in data and then they can rely on you to uh rely on you to deliver that. So, try to keep that in mind.

I hope that helps. And again, if you have questions or like specific scenarios, leave them in the comments or you can go to codemute.com. You can write something up if you want me to walk through my thoughts on that particular scenario. Happy to make a video for it. Thanks for watching. I will see you in the next one. Take care.