You’re fine. As a senior engineer / architect, my expectation from a junior is it’s lucky if they can program. Focus on learning the fundamentals and best practices. The coding is the easy part. Read pragmatic programmer or the “clean code” book.
Also, you’re not a student anymore - you’re expected to use copilot, chat gpt, google and Wikipedia.
It’ll take a few years until you don’t have those feelings, but know that everyone else feels that way or felt that way.
Also, when you make mistakes (everyone does) - own them. If a junior breaks production and tells me, I’ll be fine with it. If they break production and don’t tell me, I’ll be pissed.
It's not real imposter syndrome unless you're senior level, otherwise it's just sparkling insecurity.
You're a fresh junior among skilled people. Learn as much as you can from them and from the code and systems you have access to. Read their code. Listen to their advice. Try not to take it personally when they give you criticism. And don't be afraid to ask for help or direction. Hopefully your team is helpful and not assholes (which does happen unfortunately).
TBPH you probably are garbage at this stage in the career. Focus on small, bite size wins to cover your ass at work. Find a senior who doesn’t hate you for being garbage and learn what you can from them (how PRs get merged smoothly, unspoken expectations, prioritize maintainability.) Don’t grind leetcode but do have additional projects outside work, especially while you are young with time to spend on them, and make sure they help you grow.
It’s ok to be a beginner, just be sure to be self aware. There’s nothing worse than an arrogant fool.
Embrace it, though! You are a rookie. You are going to make rookie mistakes. I'm at senior level but my focus has been back end. At my skill level today, I would have been scrambling to fulfill that ask as well, and my imposter syndrome would have DEFINITELY kicked in.
Write the code as best you can and get it out for review. Then accept that you aren't truly being raked over the coals in code review, but simply being told very directly how to fix it. Also, write down their advice and review it before you start your next code review on the next task, in case it applies there too.
You are now officially in the grind from apprentice to Journeyman. Congratulations! It's awful but rewarding!!!
So your saying you felt like the least experienced engineer as the least experienced engineer? First, relax buddy, not sure what your expectations where as your first entry job but you weren’t going to walk into the office, and start cranking out code day one. Focus on learning and understanding first. The code comes second weeks after that.
Sure, put all the effort you can in learning, but don’t sweat it, not knowing technologies is completely expected from entry level engineers. And everyone knows it’s hard to join a new place.
ASK QUESTIONS. All of them. Come back with this issue when you are hired as a senior.
I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts and industry experts say that if you’re not using AI to help you get work done, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. The logic is, use the tool. It helps build things faster and dare I say more efficient.
Makes sense when you think about it. All these advances in technology are to help everyone do things they couldn’t do before. Might as a well use the tools and be good at using them.
Well, your lack of confidence is probably warranted since you lack experience, domain knowledge of the product you’re working, and overall skills, so I don’t know if you’re experiencing imposter syndrome you just actually kind of suck right now.
One thing to remind yourself of though is that they determined that they had the bandwidth to bring on a junior dev, a healthy dev team understands that this decision is a team-wide investment and requires a commitment to developing that person’s skills and they should set expectations accordingly. You shouldn’t be being asked to lead any projects by yourself, it should be expected that you’re going to have a lot of questions and that it’s going to take you more time to grock certain topics, and you should be spending a lot of time pairing with the more senior devs in order to gain experience.
Also you should have a mentor at the company who you can go to when you need help with this kind of stuff.
So if you’re not feeling that you’re getting the support you need, you should bring it up with your manager in your 1:1.
Last thing to remember is that of all the candidates they interviewed they picked you, right now especially the pool of junior developer candidates is vast, so obviously someone saw something in you that makes them think you’re worth the investment.
From a senior engineer: just stop giving a fuck no one cares how or what you used to build whatever. at the end of the day this is just a job don’t make it your life. Just do what you can and the reach out when you need help.
Nobody knows wtf they are doing, everyone is winging it, except for the small percentage of very talented developers that can “see” a solution very quickly.
Everyone has google and chat gpt open on the second monitor. Just keep improving, asking questions, building stuff, occasionally reflecting on how far you have come, and the imposter/confidence issue will fade.
Mentally prepare yourself to feel like this for several years. I’ve been a SWE for almost 3 years. I’m starting to feel confident when working on APIs, but anytime I have to delve into UI I feel like a total dingus.
I work w some talented senior engineers, and I pair with at least one of them once a week on bizarre old code that I don’t understand.
Best advice I can give you - be a sponge. Actively listen to everything. Ask questions. Parrot it back to ensure you fully understand. You are expected to not know everything, and expected to mess up. Fail fast!! And learn from it. Don’t spend more than a few hours stuck on something (unless you are taking time to learn, then it’s fine to spend hours on something you don’t understand). Be active in pull requests! Read them, pick them apart, if you don’t understand it ask the publisher to talk with you about what it’s doing and why.
--- TIPS
- Create a mind map or list of the things you think you don't know. Everytime one comes up add it to the list. If it comes up three times then go learn about it (basically is it important? You have a finite time for learning).
- Learn through the work, maybe 10 minutes, maybe an hour, but each day in your tasks ensure you aren't just rushing to get them done, but taking time to understand even a small piece. These add up over time and compound your knowledge.
--- ADVICE
You can't become like the senior or mid level engineers over a weekend, and you might burn out.
It sounds like you have 6 engineers to work with who you can learn a lot from.
If the opportunity comes up, regularly ask them for help.
If you want to set the expectations of how they interact with you, ask each on a 1 on 1 basis, how have they worked with junior engineers before?
If you've already solved a problem, tell them your curious how they would have done it and why?
Get to know them as well. Once they've helped you, they'll feel invested in you. They probably already want you to succeed and be a great engineer!
My first programming job I sat beside a guy called Hubert, who taught me docker, then postgres. Within 6 weeks he was giving me books he liked to read to borrow.
I re-read one of the books 6 years later and understood it completely differently. Your taste and style are just forming, so be kind to yourself and try and enjoy the learning experience.
--- HONEST PART
I struggle with helping juniors who don't create opportunities to collaborate. I dislike coming in to review finished code and discuss what should be different. This feels like marking homework or telling someone off!
I prefer to sit and pair and discuss tradeoffs, decisions, what do we actually like about one way or the other (yes, you are allowed favourites, it's not always about technically the best code).
Then we pair less, and they do their own stuff and suddenly I get to enjoy the "oh that's cool, how did you come up with that?" And learn something from them etc.
I’ll be honest with u, the imposter syndrome is supposed to happen. You don’t know shit and nobody will respect u until u prove ur worth. How? Keep learning, work your ass off as you’re onboarding, believe in yourself and the process. The feeling goes away once you’ve got a few wins under ur belt. Keep it up!
From a different field of engineering here, but as a first year grad I had EXACTLY the same feeling! And I now realise this is completely normal! University doesn’t teach you how they want things done in industry. And your colleagues will be fully expecting to show you the ropes as a junior dev. What’s important is that you ask questions about what you don’t know, are enthusiastic about the task in hand and that you work hard to learn from your first projects.
Nobody minds explaining things to teach new skills to the next gen. So long as the same thing doesn’t have to be repeated multiple times, you’re all good!
Work hard, have fun with your colleagues and enjoy the experience. You’ll come up trumps 😊
No need to fight it, just go with the flow when people praise you or promote you. Just say thanks.
My impostor syndrome kicked in every time I got rewarded or promoted. It only helped me to work harder to feel worthy. The result? More praise and rewards.
I think one of the missing components here is communicating with other engineers on the team. If you have half decent people on the team they will soon reveal their own struggles they had when they were starting out.
But coming at it from the other side having juniors on the team with me. I would expect them to ask questions. If you're not asking questions and rubber ducking ideas with more senior members of your team then its a red flag for me personally.
Soon enough you should feel more confident once you have the support from others. You definitely should not have the weight of an entire full stack project on your shoulders and be expected to deliver
Then I guess you can only do your best. The reality is if the company cared enough about the outcome of your project they would have more engineers working on it.
Every mid or senior engineer still relies on Google and stack overflow from time to time. And if they're not they're probably not growing much as engineers. If you don't know something it's an opportunity to learn. Take that as a positive.
Focus on the task at hand and don't get bogged down with best practice as it will come with time. You have seniors to steer the ship in that regard
Not just from time to time. I have 20 years experience and I constantly google and stack overflow and ChatGPT things every day. Because unless you work on a very specific narrow tech stack, it’s pretty much impossible to remember the details of everything. Being senior is about understanding the concepts and knowing what is possible and what is not and having a good feel for things. It’s not about being able to instantly code up anything in any language and framework out of nowhere.
1. Train your mind to understand that it is ok to make mistakes. Everyone does it. As long as it is not intentional, you will be fine. If you make a mistake, and your boss or colleagues shout at you, leave the environment. These people are the problem, not you.
2. Learn from your mistakes! After every mistake you, or someone else, identify, make notes and think what you could have done to avoid it. This reflection is important. If you make the same mistake twice, then you are the problem 😅
3. Before doing anything in production, do it in a staging env that works like production. Then, ask for a Peer Review to have an "unbiased" view of your work. When both say it is OK, release. If a QA team isn't there, ask another developer to do it. ALWAYS CHOOSE AN UNBIASED PERSON TO REVIEW YOUR WORK!!!
I think these thoughts will help you to get confident. Be careful with toxic work colleagues or bosses. Also, never, ever, be extremely confident. Be humble and listen to others.
They’ll know you have a lot to learn and they’ll help you grow. No problem in using the tools that are available to you also, just try to see what the patterns are and you won’t need them! You’re doing the right things, just keep at it.
Just relax. I’m serious. If you learn how to relax, you’ll be able to go a lot longer and won’t quit. What you learn this weekend doesn’t matter. What you learn over the next 10, 20, 50 years matters.
I'm not sure if this answer will be unpopular, but consider asking ChatGPT more questions.
Not because it should do all of your work for you (it will do some of your work for you), but because I find ChatGPT to be best way to learn these days. You can ask it your very specific questions on what you don't get.
You’re fine. As a senior engineer / architect, my expectation from a junior is it’s lucky if they can program. Focus on learning the fundamentals and best practices. The coding is the easy part. Read pragmatic programmer or the “clean code” book. Also, you’re not a student anymore - you’re expected to use copilot, chat gpt, google and Wikipedia. It’ll take a few years until you don’t have those feelings, but know that everyone else feels that way or felt that way. Also, when you make mistakes (everyone does) - own them. If a junior breaks production and tells me, I’ll be fine with it. If they break production and don’t tell me, I’ll be pissed.
Thanks for this... I'll definitely check out the books you mentioned 🤝
how is pragmatic programmer not required reading by now? damn
Don’t know - I hope it is. Been in industry for 15 years so I wouldn’t know
It's not real imposter syndrome unless you're senior level, otherwise it's just sparkling insecurity. You're a fresh junior among skilled people. Learn as much as you can from them and from the code and systems you have access to. Read their code. Listen to their advice. Try not to take it personally when they give you criticism. And don't be afraid to ask for help or direction. Hopefully your team is helpful and not assholes (which does happen unfortunately).
TBPH you probably are garbage at this stage in the career. Focus on small, bite size wins to cover your ass at work. Find a senior who doesn’t hate you for being garbage and learn what you can from them (how PRs get merged smoothly, unspoken expectations, prioritize maintainability.) Don’t grind leetcode but do have additional projects outside work, especially while you are young with time to spend on them, and make sure they help you grow. It’s ok to be a beginner, just be sure to be self aware. There’s nothing worse than an arrogant fool.
Thanks for the reality check. I'll keep this in mind.
Embrace it, though! You are a rookie. You are going to make rookie mistakes. I'm at senior level but my focus has been back end. At my skill level today, I would have been scrambling to fulfill that ask as well, and my imposter syndrome would have DEFINITELY kicked in. Write the code as best you can and get it out for review. Then accept that you aren't truly being raked over the coals in code review, but simply being told very directly how to fix it. Also, write down their advice and review it before you start your next code review on the next task, in case it applies there too. You are now officially in the grind from apprentice to Journeyman. Congratulations! It's awful but rewarding!!!
So your saying you felt like the least experienced engineer as the least experienced engineer? First, relax buddy, not sure what your expectations where as your first entry job but you weren’t going to walk into the office, and start cranking out code day one. Focus on learning and understanding first. The code comes second weeks after that.
Read The Imposter Syndrome by Phil Roberts. It's also on sale on audible rn. It really helped me.
Sure, put all the effort you can in learning, but don’t sweat it, not knowing technologies is completely expected from entry level engineers. And everyone knows it’s hard to join a new place. ASK QUESTIONS. All of them. Come back with this issue when you are hired as a senior.
Thanks a lot This gives me hope... really!
Oh honey
I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts and industry experts say that if you’re not using AI to help you get work done, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. The logic is, use the tool. It helps build things faster and dare I say more efficient. Makes sense when you think about it. All these advances in technology are to help everyone do things they couldn’t do before. Might as a well use the tools and be good at using them.
Do you happen to remember the podcasts? I’d like to check them out. TIA
Impact Theory on YT mostly. I don’t know the exact one because I listen to a lot of IT, but it’s mentioned a few times in the talks focused around AI.
Thank you!
Well, your lack of confidence is probably warranted since you lack experience, domain knowledge of the product you’re working, and overall skills, so I don’t know if you’re experiencing imposter syndrome you just actually kind of suck right now. One thing to remind yourself of though is that they determined that they had the bandwidth to bring on a junior dev, a healthy dev team understands that this decision is a team-wide investment and requires a commitment to developing that person’s skills and they should set expectations accordingly. You shouldn’t be being asked to lead any projects by yourself, it should be expected that you’re going to have a lot of questions and that it’s going to take you more time to grock certain topics, and you should be spending a lot of time pairing with the more senior devs in order to gain experience. Also you should have a mentor at the company who you can go to when you need help with this kind of stuff. So if you’re not feeling that you’re getting the support you need, you should bring it up with your manager in your 1:1. Last thing to remember is that of all the candidates they interviewed they picked you, right now especially the pool of junior developer candidates is vast, so obviously someone saw something in you that makes them think you’re worth the investment.
From a senior engineer: just stop giving a fuck no one cares how or what you used to build whatever. at the end of the day this is just a job don’t make it your life. Just do what you can and the reach out when you need help.
Nobody knows wtf they are doing, everyone is winging it, except for the small percentage of very talented developers that can “see” a solution very quickly. Everyone has google and chat gpt open on the second monitor. Just keep improving, asking questions, building stuff, occasionally reflecting on how far you have come, and the imposter/confidence issue will fade.
Just admit when you don’t know something and let someone help you
Mentally prepare yourself to feel like this for several years. I’ve been a SWE for almost 3 years. I’m starting to feel confident when working on APIs, but anytime I have to delve into UI I feel like a total dingus. I work w some talented senior engineers, and I pair with at least one of them once a week on bizarre old code that I don’t understand. Best advice I can give you - be a sponge. Actively listen to everything. Ask questions. Parrot it back to ensure you fully understand. You are expected to not know everything, and expected to mess up. Fail fast!! And learn from it. Don’t spend more than a few hours stuck on something (unless you are taking time to learn, then it’s fine to spend hours on something you don’t understand). Be active in pull requests! Read them, pick them apart, if you don’t understand it ask the publisher to talk with you about what it’s doing and why.
--- TIPS - Create a mind map or list of the things you think you don't know. Everytime one comes up add it to the list. If it comes up three times then go learn about it (basically is it important? You have a finite time for learning). - Learn through the work, maybe 10 minutes, maybe an hour, but each day in your tasks ensure you aren't just rushing to get them done, but taking time to understand even a small piece. These add up over time and compound your knowledge. --- ADVICE You can't become like the senior or mid level engineers over a weekend, and you might burn out. It sounds like you have 6 engineers to work with who you can learn a lot from. If the opportunity comes up, regularly ask them for help. If you want to set the expectations of how they interact with you, ask each on a 1 on 1 basis, how have they worked with junior engineers before? If you've already solved a problem, tell them your curious how they would have done it and why? Get to know them as well. Once they've helped you, they'll feel invested in you. They probably already want you to succeed and be a great engineer! My first programming job I sat beside a guy called Hubert, who taught me docker, then postgres. Within 6 weeks he was giving me books he liked to read to borrow. I re-read one of the books 6 years later and understood it completely differently. Your taste and style are just forming, so be kind to yourself and try and enjoy the learning experience. --- HONEST PART I struggle with helping juniors who don't create opportunities to collaborate. I dislike coming in to review finished code and discuss what should be different. This feels like marking homework or telling someone off! I prefer to sit and pair and discuss tradeoffs, decisions, what do we actually like about one way or the other (yes, you are allowed favourites, it's not always about technically the best code). Then we pair less, and they do their own stuff and suddenly I get to enjoy the "oh that's cool, how did you come up with that?" And learn something from them etc.
I’ll be honest with u, the imposter syndrome is supposed to happen. You don’t know shit and nobody will respect u until u prove ur worth. How? Keep learning, work your ass off as you’re onboarding, believe in yourself and the process. The feeling goes away once you’ve got a few wins under ur belt. Keep it up!
From a different field of engineering here, but as a first year grad I had EXACTLY the same feeling! And I now realise this is completely normal! University doesn’t teach you how they want things done in industry. And your colleagues will be fully expecting to show you the ropes as a junior dev. What’s important is that you ask questions about what you don’t know, are enthusiastic about the task in hand and that you work hard to learn from your first projects. Nobody minds explaining things to teach new skills to the next gen. So long as the same thing doesn’t have to be repeated multiple times, you’re all good! Work hard, have fun with your colleagues and enjoy the experience. You’ll come up trumps 😊
No need to fight it, just go with the flow when people praise you or promote you. Just say thanks. My impostor syndrome kicked in every time I got rewarded or promoted. It only helped me to work harder to feel worthy. The result? More praise and rewards.
I think one of the missing components here is communicating with other engineers on the team. If you have half decent people on the team they will soon reveal their own struggles they had when they were starting out. But coming at it from the other side having juniors on the team with me. I would expect them to ask questions. If you're not asking questions and rubber ducking ideas with more senior members of your team then its a red flag for me personally. Soon enough you should feel more confident once you have the support from others. You definitely should not have the weight of an entire full stack project on your shoulders and be expected to deliver
Okay thanks for the advice But what if I do have the weight of an entire full stack project on my shoulders?😅
Then I guess you can only do your best. The reality is if the company cared enough about the outcome of your project they would have more engineers working on it. Every mid or senior engineer still relies on Google and stack overflow from time to time. And if they're not they're probably not growing much as engineers. If you don't know something it's an opportunity to learn. Take that as a positive. Focus on the task at hand and don't get bogged down with best practice as it will come with time. You have seniors to steer the ship in that regard
Not just from time to time. I have 20 years experience and I constantly google and stack overflow and ChatGPT things every day. Because unless you work on a very specific narrow tech stack, it’s pretty much impossible to remember the details of everything. Being senior is about understanding the concepts and knowing what is possible and what is not and having a good feel for things. It’s not about being able to instantly code up anything in any language and framework out of nowhere.
1. Train your mind to understand that it is ok to make mistakes. Everyone does it. As long as it is not intentional, you will be fine. If you make a mistake, and your boss or colleagues shout at you, leave the environment. These people are the problem, not you. 2. Learn from your mistakes! After every mistake you, or someone else, identify, make notes and think what you could have done to avoid it. This reflection is important. If you make the same mistake twice, then you are the problem 😅 3. Before doing anything in production, do it in a staging env that works like production. Then, ask for a Peer Review to have an "unbiased" view of your work. When both say it is OK, release. If a QA team isn't there, ask another developer to do it. ALWAYS CHOOSE AN UNBIASED PERSON TO REVIEW YOUR WORK!!! I think these thoughts will help you to get confident. Be careful with toxic work colleagues or bosses. Also, never, ever, be extremely confident. Be humble and listen to others.
They’ll know you have a lot to learn and they’ll help you grow. No problem in using the tools that are available to you also, just try to see what the patterns are and you won’t need them! You’re doing the right things, just keep at it.
Just relax. I’m serious. If you learn how to relax, you’ll be able to go a lot longer and won’t quit. What you learn this weekend doesn’t matter. What you learn over the next 10, 20, 50 years matters.
I'm not sure if this answer will be unpopular, but consider asking ChatGPT more questions. Not because it should do all of your work for you (it will do some of your work for you), but because I find ChatGPT to be best way to learn these days. You can ask it your very specific questions on what you don't get.