Of impostor syndrome and running in circles (part 1)

I just got back from SmartWebConf in Romania. I gave the closing talk. I wanted it to be of a slower pace and more reflective than what I normally deliver. I messed that up, as I got passionate about the subject again, but it was for the better. I am happy and humbled about the feedback I got. Many people thanked me for putting their worries into words. That’s why I offer the recording and slides here, and write a longer post about the ideas covered in them.

This is part 1 of 3.

• Part 1: never stop learning and do it your way
• Part 2: you got what you asked for, time to use it
• Part 3: give up on the idea of control and become active

Update The video of the talk is now out.

The screencast recording is on YouTube (if you want to download it, I use Youtube-dl)

The Slides are on Slideshare and have been featured on their frontpage.

The end of a conference is always a wonderful time. You are inspired, fascinated, excited, hopeful and ready to apply and play with all the cool stuff you heard. You had interesting talks with people. You found out that other people have the same problems and worries you have. You’re driven to tackle them head on (the problems, not the other people). That’s what happens when the presenters and organisers did their jobs right.

The problem is that these fuzzy feelings tend to evaporate when you go back to work. Conferences are a cocoon of being with people who get you – as they have the same ideas and deliveries.

Going back to your daily work can make you feel not as good any more. You go online. You get overwhelmed by the avalanche of stuff you find on our industry’s social media channels. You feel you should know a lot more than you do and use all the clever solutions the cool kids use. Instead, you look at a huge list of bugs you need to plough through. You look at the product you worked on for a year. And you suffer the convoluted processes it has. And you get frustrated by the code you’d love to clean up but can’t touch.

The impostor syndrome rears its ugly head and brings those darker feelings.

• That feeling that you don’t belong…
• That feeling that you’re not good enough…
• The feeling that you can’t contribute anything useful…
• The feeling that you should apologise for not using the newest and coolest…

All these are bullshit and you should not spend a second of your precious time on them. You don’t have to impress anyone, you don’t have to beat others. All you need to worry about is being a better you tomorrow than you are today. You can do this in many ways. Be a kinder person. Learn something new. Question your biases. Try to understand why someone dislikes what you do. And many more.

In our little world, we started to put ridiculous pressure onto each other. And it is based on one thing: engineering and technology. OK, that’s two things but one tends to lead to the other.

We turned engineering into a religion. With all the dogma and holy wars that comes with that.

This manifests itself in a few ways:

• We value code over everything else. We made “learning to code” a proper fetish and the answer to everything. And we keep stretching the term “code” to painful proportions. Everything you type and follows some logic or instructs a runtime to do something is considered code. The thinking behind it becomes secondary, which can be terrible. Writing good HTML is not about instructing a machine to do something with it. Writing good JavaScript is not about writing out a lot of content.
• We measure our worth by quantity and visibility, not by how we contribute. As Sarah Mei put it on Twitter

  Here’s my github contribution graph. I write code all fucking day. I want to do something different outside of work.

  Is she less of a coder as she strives to make a difference in her job rather than her free time? Is our creative work disconnected from our deliveries?
• We consider automation the end goal of everything. Humans should do other things than menial tasks that computers can do better. We value libraries and scripts and methodologies that automate tasks more than repetition. Repetition is considred failure. It could also be good for building up muscle memory. By automating all our tasks, we rob new developers of the learning why these automatisation tools are so useful. We remove them from the original problem. And they could learn a lot by facing these problems instead of relying on a magical solution they don’t understand.

This is dangerous thinking. Being human, we are more than number crunching machines. We can’t work at the breakneck speed of machines. Taking time off doing nothing is an important part of our mental health. By creating machines to make our lives easier, we might eventually end up with a world that doesn’t need us. This can be good, but the economics of it are pretty screwed up. CPG Grey’s Humans need not apply is an interesting 15 minute show about this.

This unhealthy focus on technological solutions for all our problems lead to a change in our hiring practices that annoy me. It seems we celebrate social ineptitude in our hiring and training. We have ridiculous brain teaser questions in interviews like the Fizz Buzz Text, which helps

filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can’t seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag.

Arrogance like this doesn’t go unpunished. For example Estelle Weyl showed that a few lines of CSS can solve the Fizz Buzz test. That she jokingly framed her tweet as a “CSS interview question” scares me. People might not get that sarcasm and consider it an invitation to do CSS interviews from a pure programming logic point of view. CSS is not about cryptic coding puzzles, it is about describing interfaces and interactions. Once more we bring something that has an important role to play back to “code”. Thus we make it more palpable for the engineering crowd. A crowd that had not much respect for it in the first place.

Interview questions like these are scary, arrogant and short-sighted. We keep complaining about a lack of diversity in our market. Yet we put trip-wires like these in our onboarding process instead of celebrating diversity. And don’t get me started on the concept of hackdays to increase diversity. There is no silver bullet to force integration. If we want to be more diverse, we have to change our hiring practices. We also need to adapt our promotion and compensation paths. Right now our market values the “rockstar ninja coders” who are in constant competition with their peers. That’s not a good start to build teams.

Diversity isn’t a goal – it is a beginning. Your products will be more resilient, interesting and delivered faster with diverse teams than with a group of likeminded people. You add spices to food when you cook it. This is what diversity can bring to our market.

The way we teach shouldn’t be about hypothetical examples but about the medium we work in. Three years ago Brett Victor released Learnable Programming, a hands-on training course taking a different approach to learning to “code”. We should have more of these, and less of yet another resource to learn the coolest and newest.

There is no shortage of resources to learn our craft from these days. The problem with a lot of them is that they assume a lot of knowledge and expect a certain environment.

Learning is a personal thing. If you feel stupid trying to follow a learning resource, don’t use it. You’re not stupid – you’re using the wrong resource. We all are wired differently. If you don’t understand something – ask the person teaching the subject to explain it. If there is an aggressive answer or none at all, you know that the goal of the teaching resource was not to educate, but to show off. That’s fine, but it shouldn’t be something that frustrates you. Maybe you don’t need this new knowledge. Find something that makes you happy instead. Something that you are much better at than others are because you like doing it.

Continued in part 2, where I will look at what we have and why we don’t use it.