March 6th, 2020
I’m not one of those “I have imposter syndrome woe is me” type of people.
But I definitely experienced a little mini revelation about impostor syndrome.
Before my startup days, I worked as a software engineer. I learned coding from a bootcamp, a non-traditional route.
To be honest, I never thought I was a good engineer. I wasn’t a bad engineer, I was just very mediocre.
I was never able to talk “high level” with other engineers about programming concepts and technologies, so when our engineering teams would have discussions or meetings, I would feel inadequate and just shut down.
I was never good at code reviews. I couldn’t (and still really can’t) read code abstractly - in other words I’m not good at reading code on paper and understanding what it does. It’s better if I write it or walk through it with a debugger.
It always felt like I was moving too slow, and the other engineers were just a whole different level in terms of skill, speed, intelligence, etc - they could just pick things up faster.
After the boot camp, I got a programming job for $105K in SF. I always felt like I was overpaid - for the work I did. “This week I shipped only test code and make $X” or “this week I made a simple change to the settings page”.
I felt like my salary was so high that the company would finally have enough of me and let me go.
I would get called into a 1:1 with my manager and I was certain I was getting let go, or given a warning about how slow I’m shipping. Then, they would say “Pat, you’re doing a great job and we’re giving you a raise”. Haha! (Not a crazy raise just normal stuff though)
Once I got a programming job in New York City, I upped my salary again, from what I was making in SF.
That NYC startup had a much stronger engineering team, and I legit felt like I was the worst engineer on the team. However, I had this eerie feeling that I was making more than some of the extremely talented engineers.
This gave me even more impostor syndrome… Anyways, the list goes on but that’s not the point of the story.
Once Starter Story started taking off, I quit. Quitting felt almost like a relief - like I had somehow escaped my firing… I didn’t quit for that reason obviously - I quit to follow where my passion was and start my own business.
It’s been over a year since I quit, and I actually heard from a friend that they had some layoffs in their engineering team a few months ago. I laughed about this and said something like “if I was still working there I would have been one of those layoffs! Thank god Starter Story worked out”.
Anyways, the moral of the story is that this impostor syndrome was mostly in my head!!
Why?
Because today, I got an email from the CTO - he asked if I was interested in picking up some contract work for them.
Me being asked to do contract work? As an engineer? Who the fuck would want to hire me for that!? Haha!
Getting that email was a nice feeling, a little pick me up that I’m not a good-for-nothing software engineer :)
But I definitely experienced a little mini revelation about impostor syndrome.
Before my startup days, I worked as a software engineer. I learned coding from a bootcamp, a non-traditional route.
To be honest, I never thought I was a good engineer. I wasn’t a bad engineer, I was just very mediocre.
I was never able to talk “high level” with other engineers about programming concepts and technologies, so when our engineering teams would have discussions or meetings, I would feel inadequate and just shut down.
I was never good at code reviews. I couldn’t (and still really can’t) read code abstractly - in other words I’m not good at reading code on paper and understanding what it does. It’s better if I write it or walk through it with a debugger.
It always felt like I was moving too slow, and the other engineers were just a whole different level in terms of skill, speed, intelligence, etc - they could just pick things up faster.
After the boot camp, I got a programming job for $105K in SF. I always felt like I was overpaid - for the work I did. “This week I shipped only test code and make $X” or “this week I made a simple change to the settings page”.
I felt like my salary was so high that the company would finally have enough of me and let me go.
I would get called into a 1:1 with my manager and I was certain I was getting let go, or given a warning about how slow I’m shipping. Then, they would say “Pat, you’re doing a great job and we’re giving you a raise”. Haha! (Not a crazy raise just normal stuff though)
Once I got a programming job in New York City, I upped my salary again, from what I was making in SF.
That NYC startup had a much stronger engineering team, and I legit felt like I was the worst engineer on the team. However, I had this eerie feeling that I was making more than some of the extremely talented engineers.
This gave me even more impostor syndrome… Anyways, the list goes on but that’s not the point of the story.
Once Starter Story started taking off, I quit. Quitting felt almost like a relief - like I had somehow escaped my firing… I didn’t quit for that reason obviously - I quit to follow where my passion was and start my own business.
It’s been over a year since I quit, and I actually heard from a friend that they had some layoffs in their engineering team a few months ago. I laughed about this and said something like “if I was still working there I would have been one of those layoffs! Thank god Starter Story worked out”.
Anyways, the moral of the story is that this impostor syndrome was mostly in my head!!
Why?
Because today, I got an email from the CTO - he asked if I was interested in picking up some contract work for them.
Me being asked to do contract work? As an engineer? Who the fuck would want to hire me for that!? Haha!
Getting that email was a nice feeling, a little pick me up that I’m not a good-for-nothing software engineer :)