How to overcome imposter syndrome in tech

Darren: All right. That's get started. Hello everybody. Welcome to Codementor events. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Darren, and I'll be your host. So today's topic is how to overcome imposter syndrome in tech. But before we start, I just wanted to let you all know if you have questions during the talk, feel free to put them in the chat and we'll get to them during the Q&A section at the end of I've got a few colleagues here who will be hanging in the chat and writing down your questions.

Darren: And also, I see a lot of you have your video on and we do encourage them if possible. All right. So today our speaker is Rahul. He is a tech lead at Facebook and a lecturer at Stanford university, and he also runs a YouTube channel and slack workspace to help people with tech careers. I think he's going to have lots of health experiences, insights to share with us.

Darren: So yeah, without further ado, I'm going to hand the floor to you now.

Rahul: Perfect. Thanks Darren. Let me share my screen. And then can I ask Darren, are you able to see that. Yeah. Okay. That's perfect. Yeah. Thanks so much, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you are in the world.

Rahul: What I want to spend today talking about is overcoming imposter syndrome. So Darren gave a great intro. I'm Rahul. I'm at Facebook. Also, I'm pretty active as a teacher. I teach at Stanford along with, you know, I put content out on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter. So happy to connect with anyone after the event, for follow ups or questions, if people are interested.

Rahul: So what I want to talk about today is this topic, which certainly has impacted me. And I think based on the numbers that we have today, it's impacted many of you, this idea of impostor syndrome. And so I have maybe 15-20 minutes of content and then I'll leave some time at the end for Q&A.

Rahul: So I want to break down the next 20 minutes into four different sections. First off, let's define what is imposter syndrome. Then you know, how do I think about imposter imposter syndrome in terms of like, a mental framework of how to make sure that it doesn't actually impact me to think beyond, but beyond what it normally does in Palestinians inevitable.

Rahul: And I'll talk more about that, but how can we minimize the impacts of imposter syndrome? And then I want to share some tactical tips, some actual things you can implement today to help you overcome imposter syndrome. And then finally working within a team, I think for better or for worse, if you're trying to do anything meaningful in software or in any industry, really you're going to have to work with a team.

Rahul: And so the way you collaborate, the way you build trust with the team, You to find success and for you to overcome imposter syndrome. And so I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about how to work more effectively with the team. So first off, what is imposter syndrome? I love this image of this dog.

Rahul: So we have this internal tool called fabricator, which is used for code review. And so oftentimes what people will do is when they're making a code change and they don't really have a deep understanding of the change they're making, they'll include this image in the code review. They'll say, I really have no idea what I'm doing.

Rahul: Please give me feedback. Please tell me how I could improve this. And I love just the authenticity of that, that, you know, if you really don't have a great awareness of what is the code doing, you're kinda just copy pasting stuff here, matching a template. I think it's really valuable just to call that out.

Rahul: And I'll talk more about the benefits of acknowledging imposter syndrome or the benefits of acknowledging that you don't have everything figured out. There's a ton of. Benefits in terms of trust and getting help if you do that. but what this is, this picture is really talking about is imposter syndrome, right?

Rahul: So imposter syndrome refers to it's feeling that you don't really belong or another way of phrasing. It is believing that you're not as competent as people perceive you to be. So basically it just means that you feel like you're a fraud and I can certainly relate to this feeling because, I went to Stanford, I had the, I was lucky enough to go to Stanford.

Rahul: My freshman year, my first year at Stanford, I was able to land an internship, but literally I had taken like two computer science classes and I felt like the only reason they gave me that internship was because, Hey, I was somehow able to get into Stanford and they gave me this internship, but I really had so much anxiety around, but like actually be able to add value to this company, given how little I actually know, I really felt like I wasn't equipped to succeed.

Rahul: I was, I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing. And I think that fear or that. Fear of judgment really paralyzed me and that summer, I think it was really, really hard for me because I felt like I didn't have that support. Didn't really know how to ask for help. And that's what I'm hoping, you know, at the end of the next 15 minutes, a lot of you can have some tools in your toolkit to help overcome that paralyzing fear that I felt I wanted to call that also that imposter syndrome is a major issue in tech.

Rahul: It's not just that me or you feel the majority of people in tech will experience imposter syndrome at least once. So that one study I read through said that around 60% of tech employees experience imposter syndrome, and I would actually say that's fairly low. There was another one that said around 80%, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of people who I've interacted with have felt imposter syndrome in one form or another.

Rahul: And this feeling will often come up through different milestones in your career. So for example, when you switch a job or if you get promoted, these are often the times when you will most deeply feel imposter syndrome. So when, when things are going well, ironically, that is a time when this fear of judgment, the feeling like you don't belong.

Rahul: That is often when you really feel that in a very deep way. Even though, you know, you earned that promotion, right, or you were able to get that job switch, so you should have a bit more confidence, but I think this is something that really does plague many people in tech. And I think not only is it difficult from a mental perspective that it might be hindering you from achieving your best work or doing your best work at your job.

Rahul: But I think that this is also a systemic issue with tech in general. So Sheryl Sandberg wrote this book called. A while ago. And in one of the chapters in the book, she talked about how at Hewlett Packard, women applied to open jobs in the company. If they met a hundred percent of the criteria listed men apply for the job.

Rahul: If they met 60% of the requirements on the JD, on the job description. And so what I wanted to call out here is that, you know, it's fairly well studied that women or underrepresented groups in tech are actually, they feel imposter syndrome oftentimes to a greater extent. And what the result of that is that things like putting yourself up for promotion or advocating for yourself, putting yourself in a position to get lucky.

Rahul: These are things that. Some people are really hesitant to do, and that has a longer term impact in terms of the diversity of background or thought on the team or the company. And so I think if we are able to really acknowledge that imposter numbers and that everyone feels, and it's something that we should be comfortable with and we should be able to overcome.

Rahul: I think that will really lead to not only, benefit personally for people like me and you, but also just broadly the tech industry, that's the kind of environment we want to create.

Rahul: And so, I'm sure many of you have felt the impacts of imposter syndrome. Like when I was reading through this, I was like, this feels so familiar to me. Like you're very sensitive to any kind of criticism. You have fear of failure. And so even if, if you have a small task, like we should take maybe an hour or two, you end up actually working way harder at that path that you spent maybe eight hours or 10 hours on that, because you are really afraid of failing and you make sure you dot the I's and cross the T's.

Rahul: And to some extent, that's good. You want to work hard, but if you're working much, much harder than you'd really need to, and not actually think it'll impact on the core work, you have diminishing returns. You're actually not doing yourself a favor by doing so much more than needed. Right. and then the third impact of imposter syndrome is like, we talked about you've lack initiative or a self-advocacy.

Rahul: So you don't put yourself up for promotion. You don't ask for the new project, you don't, offer to lead the meeting because you're afraid of what might happen if you fail. Right. And so, in general, what this means is that you have, you're not able to properly correct. How you're perceived or what your strengths and weaknesses are because you're so afraid of criticism or failure.

Rahul: So now we know what is imposter syndrome. I want to talk about how can we reframe imposter syndrome into something which is less pernicious, less harmful to our day-to-day working life. And the first thing I want to mention here is that we have to be okay with imposter syndrome. This is not something that, okay, you came to the seminar or you read an article and now you have solved imposter syndrome.

Rahul: The fact of the matter is that you are most people in the tech industry are going to deal with imposter syndrome in some form or another for the rest of their career, no matter how successful they are, no matter which company they're at. And so I think if we just acknowledged that, Hey, we are going to feel this to some extent, and that goes a long way in making it okay.

Rahul: And now we can be more productive about how we actually minimize or mitigate the impacts of imposter syndrome. The first thing that just call out is that everyone does feel inadequate at times, right? it's not really a representation of how skilled you are or how much confidence you have, no matter if you're the most confident person in the world, you still we'll feel inadequate.

Rahul: And the reason is because change is constant, especially in tech, which is, you know, our background every couple of years, you're going to have to learn and then relearn something. Right? So tools, frameworks, programming, languages. the fact of the matter is that the rate of change is so rapid that you have to be comfortable with not knowing everything.

Rahul: You have to be comfortable feeling inadequate. And there's gonna be someone who knows more than you because there's just too much to know. Right? So for example, in 20 14, 20 15, when I first started doing Android development, the language of choice was Java. And then in the past two or three years, Android has had a pretty fundamental change in how it's developed because now most app developers will use a language called Kotlin, which is a fairly different language.

Rahul: And so your entire knowledge of the fundamental language that you're using, right. Internet has now changed, and you have to be able to be okay with not knowing everything. And you have to now go through the paces of, okay, let me figure out what is common, what is different about it? How do I get back to the same level of competency as, as what I was?

Rahul: And so, if you're, if we acknowledge the fact that imposter syndrome is going to be there, then I feel like, we'll be much more forgiving to ourselves. When we are spending time learning or relearning these tools, frameworks, languages. And so I think the main thing I want to can we take here that you should really try to reframe your attitude toward discomfort?

Rahul: So whenever you have like a meeting that you want to, you need to lead on your team or a project that you're nervous about, whether you can really tackle it or, any kind of, kind of task or project or meeting that you're have anxiety about at work, reframe that as an opportunity for growth. So whenever you, whenever you feel discomfort, train your brain to say, Rahul: Hey, this is now a wonderful opportunity for me to actually learn something new and grow as a technical person or as a manager or whatever your role might be.

Rahul: Broadly think about imposter syndrome mentally, but now I want to share some concrete things that, you know, you could do if you want to, minimize the impacts of imposter syndrome the first off, whenever you're given a task or a project at work, one thing I found is that people often don't have clarity about what exactly they're trying to do.

Rahul: What happens is that if you have imposter syndrome, you naturally will have anxiety around. I'm not sure if I can achieve the outcome with this desire here and that anxiety can be paralyzed and you actually end up not being productive, not even getting started on the problem. And so the antidote that I'd recommend if you fall into that bucket is really.

Rahul: Precise about what is the next physical action you can take to make progress on the problem. And the way you do that is you would really go deep and decomposing the problem. So for example, you might have like a task at work, which is, I want you to redesign the setting stream in the mobile app or the web app.

Rahul: The thing is that redesigning the settings is so high level, so ambiguous that no one, none of us will be able to make progress on that. What you need to do is when you're showering or when you're at work or when you're going on a walk, you need to break that down. Read it understanding screen means three things.

Rahul: Number one, I want to reorient the buttons so that they're horizontal to vertical. I want to change the color of steam and I want to change the navigation flow between the different elements and that very first one with reorienting the buttons there for this particular UI component that's developed by the core team.

Rahul: I'm going to adopt that and then, put out one code change for that, right. So you can kind of see for each of those three different tasks that we've identified, let's break them down further. And I think when you have. A lot of clarity on here's exactly what I would need to do. That is what will lead to action.

Rahul: And action will lead to progress and progress is how you fight imposter syndrome. the next thing I recommend for everyone, whether you're an engineer, product manager, engineering manager, whatever it is, keep a job diary and track how you spend your time. So what happens like on my team, I'll often ask people, Hey, what have you done in the past week or month?

Rahul: And what was a productive use of your time was not productive. And most people are not really able to give me a precise or a good answer on how they spend their time. And that's really challenging because if you want to get better and you want to figure out how to cut out the parts of your day, that didn't actually have any impact, you need to be able to cover.

Rahul: And here's where I'm spending my time today. And here's how I am able to minimize that going forward. And the way you do that is you need to be able to write down every day here. Like the fourth thing I spend my time on, and here's where I thought I had bang for my buck. Here's what I could probably eliminate.

Rahul: This meeting is not helpful for me, or, instead a lot of time as rabbit hole, which really didn't yield any productivity or any gains, next time I'm going to tackle this problem or this space in a very different way, which will save me hours of time. Right? So you need to be able to have that ability to look back at what you did a week ago or two days ago, and then keep improving and then finally ask some questions.

Rahul: And this is important enough of a topic asking questions that I have a separate side for it. I love this quote by Alice Walker, a novelist. And she said, people do not wish to appear foolish to avoid the appearance of foolishness. They're willing to remain actually fools and to so, so apt and I used to like, I've certainly done this where like, I'm just so afraid of asking questions.

Rahul: Like, what does the acronym mean? Or like, can you explain the architecture here one more time? Or can you explain this coaching? I don't really understand that, but instead of asking that I'd rather stay silent. Because I don't want to expose my ignorance or what I don't know. But the upshot of that is that now in the longer term I have remained a fool, right?

Rahul: Like I still don't know what's going on. And so I think being able to be okay with maybe looking foolish in a meeting locally, but now globally, you have a lot more context and a lot of work, a lot more awareness of what's happening is so important. And I think this is really gets to the heart of being able to ask questions.

Rahul: And I think there is certainly a art and a proper way to ask the questions that I want to talk about here. So the first thing to keep in mind is that asking a question is always better than being stuck. my rule of thumb for people is if you're stuck for more than 15 minutes, so you should stop what you're doing and document what is it, what it is you're trying to achieve, what you've tried.

Rahul: And what is the current behavior, and then pull in someone for help. And I think some amount of struggle is good. That's why I put 15 minutes. You don't want to give up after two minutes or five minutes, you want to struggle a little bit, because that is oftentimes where the learning will happen. But once you get to 30 minutes, one hour, two hours stuck on a single problem, you really have diminishing returns and that feeling of, okay, I really don't know how to make progress.

Rahul: That can be really damaging for someone who's feeling imposter syndrome. And it's much, much more productive to be able to pull in someone who you can lean on for advice or for help. And the other thing that is that people don't realize is that the act of writing the question when they are documented, you know, here's what I'm trying to do.

Rahul: Here's what I've tried. Here's a current observation that act of writing down your question will actually help you tremendously and learning. There've been many, many instances where in the process of articulating my question, I asked you I'm able to solve it. And so that's another reason why I think if you just are stuck in your head, Being your head against the wall on a particular problem, it really is going to be challenging to, to, to make progress.

Rahul: And when you actually start to get things out of your head and on paper, that is where a lot of the learning will happen. And then finally, this is a new, this is something that I think people don't realize that obviously the question asking a question will help you, hopefully we'll get unstuck. But the other thing that happens is that if you ask the question effectively, it's actually a really powerful way to build social capital.

Rahul: There've been many instances on my team where someone new to the team, or even me I'll ask the question and then two other people say, oh my gosh, I had that same question. Thank you for asking that. Now I can learn from your experience. Next time I encounter that. I'm just gonna, you know, do what the answer suggested here.

Rahul: So there's a lot of ability to build trust and social capital. If you're able to ask questions in a way that's helpful for other people. And then finally, I want to talk about working within a team, which is so fundamental to. any kind of tech job, because anything meaningful gets done because of a team effort, very few things are solo projects.

Rahul: You have to be able to be work. You have to be able to figure out how to productively work within a broader team. And so I've two things I want to share here. First off, if you're ramping up on a new team that is often I have found when people experienced the most, the deepest imposters. I'm on a new team.

Rahul: I really don't know what's expected of me. I don't really know how to build trust. And here is the algorithm that I want to share with you on how you can really overcome this. And I stole this from Andrew Bosworth. Who's a VP at Facebook and I've used it pretty effectively in my own team switches. This is called the career call start algorithm or the new role call start algorithm.

Rahul: And the idea is that you find someone on the team and you meet them for 30 minutes, and then you ask them, number one, what do they do? Number two, what are the biggest challenges they face? And three, ask them at the end of the meeting, who else on the team or on a decent team, should I meet the same names?

Rahul: Start coming up again and again, in. And this has two really powerful outcomes. Number one, this is a very obvious way for you to get to know everyone, a team, and for everyone on the team to get to know you and what I have found again and again, is that distance breeds content. If you don't know the people you're working with, it's so easy for them not to help you, or it's so easy for them to kind of view them as the other.

Rahul: And you kind of not really how to productive all the algorithm, you become much more aware of the other people. And that, that goes a long way in having a productive, working relationship with them. And number two, this whole process will build a ton of trust, right? You're literally going in and you're saying, Hey, what do you do?

Rahul: What are the challenges that you have? How can I help you? Right. And so it's hard for people not to have some Goodwill. If you actually follow this algorithm, you're not asking them for anything. You're not demanding anything you're going in. And you're trying to learn. And so I feel like if you properly do this, you will build up a lot of trust.

Rahul: And that goes a long way in overcoming imposter syndrome. Because when you have a set of people around you, who you trust and they trust you, you're able to do a lot more in terms of getting help getting unstuck. And that is a antidote to imposter syndrome.

Rahul: And then finally, I wanted to talk about getting high quality feedback. So at the very beginning, I talked about how, if you have imposter syndrome, one of the outcomes is typically that you don't really have a way to calibrate where you stand. Are you doing well? Are you doing poorly? It's not really obvious to you because.

Rahul: Stuck in your head about, you know, how you're doing. And that's like, the key insight is that ambiguity causes anxiety. If you're not sure how you're doing that is a big cause for uncertainty and anxiety, because now you might get fired or, you know, you might be, you might be doing really well, but it's hard for you to know because you're so worried about this perception that people have.

Rahul: And so what I'd recommend you do here is really seek out feedback rather than it being a surprise or a mystery. You should schedule dedicated one-on-ones for feedback and ask questions, which forced deeper reflection. So a lot of people will ask you to do this as, Hey, a feedback is a good thing, right?

Rahul: Let me schedule a meeting with Raphael and say, Hey, what, what feedback do you have for me? And that that's like a starting point, but a much better way of asking for feedback is to go deeper and say, Hey, here in the past week, here's an observation I had, you know, in this meeting, I felt like. The meeting didn't really go that well.

Rahul: And I feel like I wasn't able to contribute what feedback do you have for me on that meeting or, Hey, what should I start doing to become more effective? Or what should I stop doing to become more effective, right? Because you ask the deeper questions like that. I guarantee you'll get much higher quality feedback because you're forcing the other person to think a lot more and you'll be able to build up a lot more trust going forward.

Rahul: And that I think is goes a big way, a long way in overcoming imposter syndrome. And then, in terms of actual code, right? If you're a software engineer and you are putting out a code change, it's also really helpful to proactively identify areas where you have concerns or questions. So if you put out a coach in and you say, Hey, here's something where I really don't understand the API.

Rahul: Someone helped me with a point a code pointer or an article, which one. Make this better. What you're communicating is that you're open to feedback. You would like people to help you get better. Right? I think that goes a really long way in other people being able to share whatever they have, and it'll help you get better.

Rahul: And I think both of those, again, go a really long way in, in combating imposter syndrome. And then the last thing I want to mention here is this is kind of counterintuitive. So one thing I have found, which really, really helps imposter syndrome is actually helping other people, which is kind of weird because I think imposter syndrome, it's like, you're so focused on like, am I doing good enough?

Rahul: Or am I a fraud? Or am I do I belong here? But what I have found is that if you really go out of your way to help that new person on your team and you say, Hey, but I want you to go on right now, as you ramp up is asked me a ton of questions. Don't worry if it's a stupid question, just come to me and ask questions.

Rahul: And if you create that friendly. What I have found is that that really does help you. When you start to understand how other people are ramping up, how other people have viewed their role on the team, what knowledge do they have that goes a really long way in helping you understand that you're not, you're not that different.

Rahul: You're not, like not everyone has figured out and helping other people will really help you. So I feel like, even if you feel like you're stressed out spending some part of your day and helping people, writing documentation, being a resource for other people that can go a long way in helping you as well.

Rahul: Okay. So, I think that we'll find a little bit over time, but I appreciate all of you joining. thanks so much for spending some time talking to my imposter syndrome. once again, I'm happy to connect with folks after the session on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever your platform of choice is. And with that, I will hand it back to Darren.

Darren: Okay, well, thank you so much Rahul, for sharing everything with us. I thought it was very clear, very practical, and, it's just really overall very helpful insights of how to overcome imposter syndrome. Yeah. So, so thanks again for taking the time to share. All right. So we'll have a little bit of time for the Q & A section.

Darren: Our team will collect the questions from the chat. but yeah, right now you can, you can keep them coming if you want. And this Q & A section, we won't be able to get through all the questions because of time, but we'll try to squeeze a few of them in. So the first question we got is, what can help you take criticism better? Whether it's good or bad ones?
Rahul: Yeah, I feel like for criticism, one thing that has really helped me is me being the one to speak. So oftentimes like if I'm in a meeting and an unexpectedly, like my manager says, oh, here's something that you could have done better. Or here's some that I wish that you could, you could do more of where you can do better. I think that is oftentimes when it stinks, but when, when I'm the one in the driver's seat and I say, hey, I want to have a dedicated one-on-one rep. You tell me what to do better. It's not a surprise. And I think that certainly goes a long way in reducing the sting of it.

Rahul: I think the other thing I'll say is that, inevitably criticism does hurt a little bit, right? It's like someone is telling you to do something better. I think what really distinguishes really good engineers is what happens after the fact. And so if someone does say, hey, I feel like you're not active enough in meetings, you can say, okay, hey, I'm going to translate that criticism into concrete action items. And I'm going to really make sure that my goal is now to say at least two productive things in every meeting going forward.

Rahul: And then what you do is you circle back and you say, Hey, two weeks from now, I'm gonna check in with you again. And I want you to tell me if I've made progress. I think that is really what, you know, distinguishes the best engineers that they're able to really take that feedback translate that into action and then circle back and say, hey, can you tell me, firstly, made progress on what you've said?

Rahul: I think that that kind of builds up trust and it turns criticism, which is a negative thing into a positive thing for your relationship with them.

Darren: Okay. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Great tip. We just have time for one more question, unfortunately. But we encourage you to keep the conversation going, like connect with them on social media, or he gave him post on our event discussion section.

Darren: Okay. So this question is as a manager or senior engineer, what are some good ways to encourage an environment that mitigates or reduces the level of imposter syndrome across the entire team?

Rahul: I like this. I think that there are definitely ways that the leadership of a team can create a culture where it's okay to ask questions and that goes a long way to combat imposter syndrome. And there are two things. One is you need to have enough socialization and a trust within the team where people feel that they're not going to be judged if they ask a question or they don't know something. Right. And so I think it goes back to that point on, you need to have familiarity or intimacy within the team to make that okay.

Rahul: And if your team only meets like once a month and there's really not that much cohesion, it's very difficult then to have a comfortable environment for people. So that's one thing. And the other thing I'll do is like, I think, one thing I found pretty effective on my teams is to have sharing sessions. We're like, hey, tell me what you've learned in the past one or two weeks and you kind of rotate through your team. And then I think people start to understand that, hey, everyone on the team is constantly learning. And so not only it's a good knowledge sharing technique, but it also kind of encourages this culture of knowledge sharing, which is again, a really good way to combat imposter syndrome.

Darren: Okay. Great. So in order to respect the speaker at everyone's time, that's put a wrap on this event. And like I said earlier, I didn't have any questions or thoughts, feel free to leave them in the discussion section in our event page. And so my colleague just posted that in the chat if you want the link. So I just want to say thanks again for joining our event today everyone, and you know, another huge thank you to our speaker, for taking the time to share with us. And I hope you all enjoyed the talk today.

Darren: We'll share about our next next one's events. i think someone's going to put up a graphic it just a little bit. So next week's event is going to be called Deadlines & Estimations and What do I do with them? And this one is going to be special because there are actually two speakers, not just one but two. so I really encourage you all to join and you can use this QR code or also look for the link in the chat to the event page.

Darren: Yeah. So we'll leave this zoom meeting open for another minute or two. So you have time to get the embedded info or do you want to follow Rahul on his social media and things like that. Or if you just want you to enjoy the music or something, that's fine too. yeah. Thanks again and see you. Awesome.

Rahul: Thanks. Thanks everyone for joining. See you!