Anyone else experiencing this??? Now that I am nearing the end of the curriculum, imposter syndrome is hitting me hard. Confidence is always something that I have lacked my entire life and I buckle under pressure. It also doesn’t help when I’m trying to join a field where I’m asked to showcase my skills through technical interviews. However, I came across an article about overcoming imposter syndrome from Alicia Liu and hopefully it helps you as much as it helped me.

https://medium.com/counter-intuition/overcoming-impostor-syndrome-bdae04e46ec5

Unlike learning other skills where one can expect to be reasonably competent after sufficient practice, programming largely consists of constantly failing, trying some things, failing some more, and trying more things until it works. One of the biggest differences between experienced and novice programmers is that experienced programmers know more things to try…

Impostor Syndrome instilled in me a deep fear of failing. I was afraid to speak up or ask questions for fear of saying something stupid, and people would find out I didn’t really know my stuff. The stakes were even higher because as the only female engineer on nearly every team I’ve been on, I felt saying something stupid would be representative of my gender. I quietly avoided doing things I didn’t think I’d be good at, even though the only way to get better is to do them. I had put things I could do and things I wasn’t good at into separate mental buckets, and saw these artificial groupings as static and impermeable. That was the biggest loss for me, not learning and doing more things because I was afraid I couldn’t.