Dealing with Impostor Syndrome

70% — That’s the percentage of people who have felt an episode of impostor syndrome at some point in their careers. Dr. Pauline Rose Clance was responsible for the study that published this number, as well as a lot of the initial research into impostor syndrome. She defines it as “the psychological experience of believing that one’s accomplishments came about not through genuine ability, but as a result of having been lucky, having worked harder than others, or having manipulated other people’s impressions”.

We’ve all been there at some point. The feeling that you’re underqualified or don’t deserve to be where you are, that everyone around you is much smarter and more capable than you are, that you’ve somehow scammed your way into a role that you have no right to be in.

I’ve faced it at various points in my life and never fully accepted it or tried to address it. More recently, what helped me the most was knowing that it’s something that a lot of people go through, particularly in tech. So the main goal of this post is exactly that — to share my personal experiences with impostor syndrome, hopefully making it easier for someone else who may be having similar experiences and showing them that they’re not alone.

My history with impostor syndrome

I’ve been dealing with some form of impostor syndrome for most of my adult life, though I wasn’t really able to put a label on it until I met more people with similar feelings. While prepping for college, I constantly felt like I didn’t understand physics and chemistry well enough, and that any high scores I got were only because I was good at guessing multiple choice answers.

My impostor syndrome was at its worst during undergrad, where I did well in exams but often wasn’t able to link the concepts I was learning in my mechanical engineering courses to practical applications, or make connections between ideas in different courses. This played a big part in my decision to change fields to machine learning for grad school.

Of course, switching to a whole new field meant my classmates in grad school all had essentially years more computer science and statistics experience than me, which had me constantly questioning why I was admitted into the program in the first place. I remember that for one of my first assignments, I had to retrieve data from one of the school servers and I had no idea how to do it, since I’d never ssh’ed into a server before.

And of course, it’s no surprise that this continued into my first job at Twitter. I constantly felt overwhelmed by the number of systems I had to understand and concepts I had to pick up. I felt ashamed whenever someone pointed out a mistake in a code review, and I believed I didn’t have anything relevant to comment on anyone else’s code reviews. I’d often panic when I was given a task to do because I had no idea how to do it. Every time someone asked me a question about something I had worked on that I couldn’t answer, the impostor syndrome would flare up.

What causes impostor syndrome?

This Time article describes the findings of Valerie Young, author of The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women. She talks about different personality types that can lead to impostor syndrome. One example is “perfectionists”, who will question themselves with every small mistake even if they are successful most of the time. Another is the “natural genius”, who is used to having things come easily to them, and consider themselves impostors when they have to work hard to achieve something.

“Experts” feel like they have to know everything about a task before they start working on it. Admitting that they don’t know something, especially something they think they should know, can feel really embarrassing. They may be hesitant to participate in discussions because they worry about looking foolish. “Soloists” feel like they need to complete their work alone, and that asking for help from someone else is a sign of failure and being an impostor. While the book focuses specifically on successful women, these personality types are more broadly applicable to anyone. We can all probably relate a little to each of these “causes” of impostor syndrome.

Additionally, when we look at other people, we typically only see their success and their achievements. It can be easy to generalize based on what we see, and assume that success came naturally to them. But when we look at ourselves, we see everything and we tend to focus on the failures and mistakes. This makes it seem like success comes easily to everyone else, and that the challenges we face are unique to us. This naturally makes us worry that others may be judging us on our mistakes, and questioning any success we achieve.

Remedying impostor syndrome

Based on these causes of impostor syndrome, overcoming it requires us to internalize some truths. It’s okay not to understand or remember everything all the time! Over time as you focus on new projects, old concepts and ideas tend to fade. So if someone asks you a question that you can’t answer or you don’t know how to approach (the majority of times that I’ve felt impostor syndrome was in exactly this kind of situation), it’s always okay to say that you’re not sure or that you’ll get back to them. This was the hardest thing for me to realize, and took close to a year of working at Twitter to really internalize. I’ve never been in a situation where someone asked me a question and “I’ll think about it and get back to you” wasn’t a reasonable response.

It’s okay to make mistakes! You shouldn’t expect yourself to get everything right 100% of the time. There are times where you’ll feel lost, or you’ll do something wrong. What’s most important is to learn and grow from the experience, instead of judging yourself for it or feeling guilty about not getting it right the first time.

Over the course of your career, you’re going to have to specialize and focus on certain things. As a result you’ll sometimes end up working on things that you haven’t been able to focus on as much, and may feel a little lost. No one knows everything, and you’ll never be too senior to ask someone a question or get help from someone. Identifying your areas of strength and reaching out to someone to help you in areas of weakness are vital to establishing a healthy work environment for yourself.

It’s important not to compare yourself to other people since you never know the exact circumstances of their life, both in terms of privilege and hidden struggles. When it comes to seeing only others’ successes and your own failures, the only way to remedy it is to understand that no one’s perfect, and everyone goes through their own difficulties and failures. To do exactly this, I once saw a successful friend post an “anti-resume”, a list of her failures that someone looking in from the outside wouldn’t typically know about. In the same spirit, here’s a list of my mistakes, failures or impostor syndrome-triggering incidents from the last few years.

• I once caused a SEV3 incident at Twitter because instead of setting a parameter to 0.1%, I set to the fraction 0.1, i.e., 10%
• Once in an interview I was asked to write an algorithm to do in-order traversal of a binary tree. Having very little CS/algorithm background, I didn’t know what in-order traversal was and had to have the interviewer explain it to me, after which we spent an awkward 45 minutes with me getting nowhere. Needless to say, I didn’t get a second interview.
• At an internship, having never used version control before, I accidentally deleted all the work I had done about 3 weeks in.
• Speaking of version control, I still barely understand git commands beyond the most basic ones (I constantly have to use Stack Overflow for complex commands), and I have more than once had to completely delete and redownload a repository because of git mistakes.
• I once interviewed for a scholarship to grad school, where they had brought in a panel of experts from different fields to dive into my knowledge of all the fields I’d worked on — mechanical engineering (my undergrad degree), finance (an internship) and machine learning (the field my grad school degree would be in). I wasn’t able to answer any of the questions that the 3 experts asked me, and I certainly didn’t get the scholarship. That day was likely the single worst case of impostor syndrome I’ve ever felt, since it invalidated my experience in everything I had worked on across 3 fields.
• Like I mentioned before, there was the time I had to retrieve data from a server and had no idea how to do it, since I’d never used ssh before.
• At a slightly later point, I didn’t know how HDFS worked despite having recently learnt about it in a course, and so although I now knew how to use ssh, I still couldn’t figure out where the data was stored or how to access it from the server. To be clear, at this point I was about a year into grad school at CMU, which had one of the best CS departments in the country.
• In high school, I was selected among other high-scoring students to attend a residential training programme for college prep. It was grueling — lessons and tests all day long. I burnt out in two weeks and was the only one to leave.

This was just a list of the main things that came to my mind, but I still do things that cause me to question my role on almost a weekly basis. It took awhile for me to realize that it doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve to be where I currently am.

Before I conclude, I want to bring up one aspect of impostor syndrome that I haven’t talked about yet — tech’s demographic breakdown, with certain groups being significantly underrepresented in the industry. Being an Indian man, I’m lucky enough to see a lot of other people like me at work. I have many positive role models to look up to and am given a lot of leeway to learn and to recover from mistakes. However, if you are in an underrepresented minority, failure can be even more daunting since people can be biased against you, and you feel like you’re expected to “represent” your community. These are very valid feelings that I have no easy answer for since my experiences in tech are relatively privileged in this sense. The only thing I can say about this is to find yourself a team and a culture that allows you to bring your whole self to work, and supports you irrespective of your identity.

Conclusion

Impostor syndrome can really suck sometimes. Even while writing this post, I questioned myself multiple times — I’ve only been working for two years, am I even qualified to write about this? What could I possibly have to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times already? So I can’t say that I’ve “gotten over” my impostor syndrome. What has helped, however, is being able to identify it when I do get these thoughts and be less judgmental about myself.

No one’s perfect and everyone makes mistakes, irrespective of what you do or how successful you are. But the mistakes you make and difficulties you face don’t mean that you don’t deserve to be where you are. So put yourself out there, acknowledge your weaknesses, learn and grow from your mistakes. Remember, everyone around you is likely going through similar challenges, so don’t judge yourself too harshly :)