It has been 6 months of active learning, maybe a few weeks of passive learning in between, you are a self-taught developer, designer, data scientist, or perhaps a machine learning engineer who learnt everything you know currently by watching tens or hundreds of tutorials, you finally get employed as a developer/engineer/designer/data-scientist and then certain things start to seem all too weird to you (at least for the first few weeks or months, depending on the individual), you are being given a task and suddenly you froze for a few hours or days maybe, or perhaps you are being asked a technical question and then again, you froze then and there, i think some of us have been there (at least I know I was). Now, remember those tens of tutorials you watched or are currently watching, none of it would teach you how to handle the mighty "Impostor Syndrome" (well unless you decide to watch a video on how to handle it).
So let me share a personal experience, I was given a task at work, I was told to convert a string that contains HTML markup to its HTML format and convert that format to an image in C# (this is the language I use day to day), and to be honest, i haven't done anything of this nature before so it all looked new to me, anyway i decided to start making some research so see how i can solve it, i saw some packages that i could use but none of the packages was free, i asked a few people in a c# community group and a few developer friends and their suggestions were unfortunately not very helpful, keep in mind that i had 24hrs to actually get this job done, and i had already spent 48 hours on this issue, so on the third day when i was having my daily stand-up, my boss said: "This is an easy task that even a beginner who just started learning C# can solve", i was hurt beyond what words could describe because i had been faced with more complex stuff than this current task but i was able to scale through on my own then out of nowhere this comment comes up, phewwww.
After the meeting a lot of things started to go on in my head, i started to ask myself different questions such as "do i deserve this role?", "am i that bad?", "am i good enough for this role?", "he said a beginner can solve this problem, does that mean i am a fraud?", i was in my feeling for the whole day, my head was messed up throughout the day, so much so to the point that i wanted to just quit the job because i felt i wasn't good enough.
But hold on, why did all the tutorials i have been watching not give me any heads up about this, no one mentioned this part of the job, none of those tutorials said i would feel this way and how to handle it, then i realized that none of them will because hey, did i expect the teacher to switch from "How to convert a string to an int" to "How to convert a string to an int and deal with impostor syndrome when you can't", what i had to do was to answer the questions i had in my head, "do i deserve this role?" Yes! I worked hard to get it, "am I that bad?" No! i have solved harder tasks than this current one and I will scale through, "am i good enough for this role?" YES!, "he said a beginner can solve this problem, does that mean i am a fraud?" No this doesn't make me a fraud and even though the beginner can solve it, i would learn from it and add it to my toolbox or possibly use it in a personal project..
If you are reading this and you are currently in this same situation presently or you somehow find yourself in this position in the future i want you to replace the negative emotions or feelings with positive ones and tell yourself that you are good enough and you did not get the role through luck but you worked for it.
Selah, and happy coding.