Getting Rid of Imposter Syndrome as a SWE | Prime Advice

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[ThePrimeTimeagen]

HEY! LISTEN TO THE END, IT WILL MAKE A TON OF SENSE.

I am sorry for the alerts. It was on the opening to my stream and i just felt inspired. The opening of the stream i just let them fly because its fun (its where 80% of them happen). So sorry, but i mean this from the bottom of my heart. please don't have imposter syndrome and i do think what i am saying, if you listen to the end, will help you.

[headlights-go-up]

You're the senior dev and mentor everyone could benefit from, and the fact you're able to broadcast your wisdom and advice is amazing. I can't say it enough, thank you for uploading these to the YouTubez <3

[kylestubblefield]

Real Talk. I have been able to be a part of so many amazing things in my carrier because of the "Can Do" attitude. I don't know everything, but I am confident in my ability to learn what needs to be known to do the task that is placed before me. That has served me so well professionally. "Big K can you do this?" "I've never done it before, let me figure it out. I will tell you in an hour what I think it will take." The boss loves that.

[JoseTrigueros]

"It is so much better failing, than to never try"

100% jive with this mentality, keep on preaching!

[analisamelojete]

You have two takes to deal with the syndrome:

1). You can feel sad because there’s much to learn, much you don’t know. This is a let down for you.

2). Avoid comparison with others, get excited for new things to learn, and as prime said, build stuff.

Just be curious, try different techniques, stacks.

[zsmain]

Key points:
- Continually expand your skills and knowledge through exploring new technologies (both in and outside of work).
- Reviewing basic data structures.
- Practice building greenfield projects.
- Try, even if they fail, as it's better than not trying at all.

[ExpertOfNil]

I have made my career off of being able to translate my "hobby" programming explorations to innovative solutions within my field. You are 100% right about the value of "side-projects". And the beauty of R&D is that failure is often more informative than success... at least initially 😉

[julienarpin]

My secret? I suffer from Dunning-Krueger Effect, and can read.

[sadkebab]

I just recently got out of Impostor Syndorme after left my full time Java/C# developer job and spend the last year and a half working the bare minimum I needed as a freelancer while spending most of my time learning as much stuff as possibile and building a lot of useless side projects.
Now not only I feel confindent... I also enjoy building software and learning about new techs like nothing else I do.
(and hopefully this will lead me to much better paying jobs in the future)

[lazyhrse]

Dunning-Krueger is the secret to programming. Until lately, I have been always dismissing "hard" ideas when I want to create a side project. Trying to come up with something in my "level", which deemed impossible, because simple ideas are boring, and boring ideas will make programming not fun.

[joelkorpela]

I moved from Support into a Junior Dev role. It was me and two senior devs. After three years in I quit purely because I didn't think I was good enough. I've been back in the field for years, and in hindsight I was crushing it and could have easily been given a raise had I asked instead of quitting. Please learn from my mistake, if you're in your first few years of dev just focus on being better than you were yesterday by working on problems that push you. If you do that you are already ahead of 99% of people and will soon shed any remaining imposter syndrome.

[hawkingradiation]

dude i dont know why talks from this guy motivates me to become me better engineer and actually kinda reminds why do i like this stuff and why did i started it in the first place...
thanyou primeagen!

[Prod-]

Absolute stack of good things in this video.

I'm also in one of these situations right now. Shoehorning localisation into the heart of a complex old system with every gotcha in the book being thrown at me. Client has given me 1/5th of the time needed to do it in. Every other team member says "hell no, not me". The kind of change that once you start, you have to write an enormous of amount of code and change almost every part of the system before it will even run again.

Having used all the tech stack in an ideal environment, often in my own time "greenfield" style, is my saving grace.

[NNull]

Message received. I work at Costco now.

[robotron]

I’m not studying to be a programmer, I’m studying to become an ethical hacker, but I find your videos extremely relevant, interesting and also pretty hilarious. I need to learn a little bit of programming to be able to hack, so there’s a lot of overlap here.

[theLowestPointInMyLife]

The problem with this advice is it's supposed to be a job, something you do for X hours per day, so you can afford to switch off and do other things in the other hours. The idea that you should be effectively working 24/7 just to keep your job is so bad. Most of us enjoy exploring this area in our own time, but we shouldn't let companies take advantage of that or demand it as a minimum.

[blackfie]

Great advice about greenfield projects. Before I try to incorporate new technology into existing codebase, I almost always have to try it on a side/empty/new project. That way I can get a feel of how it works, and less chance of something going wrong and bringing things down. It's also much easier to learn on a new project than an existing project that may have many layers to it already.

[developerdeveloper]

5:17 -> 6:07. Now that was just gold! Good stuff here.

[bikidas]

One of the thing i do personally is fail. Badly building something which is quite complex at the beginning but as soon as i start, i get to solution to some problems and some i don't but everytime there is a new thing i learn!

[mnmli]

So basically, leveraging the forgetting curve on commonly used data structures...
Good point about greenfield projects. Sage advice.