NICKOLAS MEANS: How's everybody doing? AUDIENCE: Good! Yeah!
Yeah! N. M.
: Nobody's saying tired? I would have said tired if somebody asked me that question. I'm so exhausted.
It's been a great conference, but it's been long and I am privileged to have the last speaking slot. Which is a really funny joke to play on a guy with impostor syndrome. So whoever set the schedule, nice job.
My name is Nickolas Means, but we are about to be really good friends, so please call me Nick. You can find me- AUDIENCE: Hi Nick! N.
M. : Hi. You can find me as @nmeans on Twitter if you're playing along on your laptop or your phone.
I'm an engineer at WellMatch health. I'm lucky enough to get to remote pair nearly 100% of the time from beautiful Austin, Texas with a lot of really smart people, fixing some of the hard problems that vex our health care system. I want to start by asking you to think a little bit.
What is your biggest fear at work? What's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you at your job? AUDIENCE: Get fired!
N. M. : I can tell you mine.
I've been a software developer for over a decade now. I did some PHP spaghetti for awhile. Moved into Ruby.
Been doing Ruby for, gosh, eight years now. I've worked as a solo developer. I've worked as a cylo developer where I was the only guy working on a product and I brought our team.
I've worked in a really good team environment which is what I'm in now. But I've had this persistent fear, the whole time I've been a software developer, that I was about to be fired. Now, how many times do you think I've been fired in my ten plus years of software development?
Brandon right. Three. No, zero.
I've never been fired. But it might happen any day now, or at least, that's what my brain persists in telling me all the time. It's just a matter of time until my boss figures out that I really have no idea what I'm talking about and I'm a terrible software developer and all my commits are crap.
And then I'm gonna get the pink slip. Which is not true, right? Because I've convinced a bunch of people to give me a job, and I've shipped good code, and I've been through pull requests processes.
My code's been reviewed. I pair now. So, I'm, I'm an OK developer?
This is the, the gist of impostor syndrome. It's a set of beliefs and behaviors that was first identified back in 1978 by Doctors Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes at Georgia State University. Dr Clance was on the psychological staff at Georgia State and Dr Imes was a research, a predoctoral researcher under her.
And they did a lot of interviews with graduate students. Female graduate students specifically. Now, these women had all gotten into very competitive graduate programs.
They had all been published in very prestigious psychological journals. But they still didn't think very much of themselves. There's actually a really great definition of impostor syndrome in this abstract.
Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the impostor phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise. So these women were all very prestigious, all very successful, but still thought that they had everybody around them fooled. And all the stuff that people told them about themselves was not true.
So if you've experienced these kind of feelings, where you think that people around you say nice things about you that aren't really true, let me tell you a little bit about yourself. A pretty good chance that you're an introvert. Pretty good chance you're a perfectionist.
At times you're a workaholic. At other times you are a procrastinator. You probably have a deep-seated and abiding fear of failure.
You probably get really uncomfortable when people pay you a compliment. You probably feel less competent than your peers. If that resonates any, there's good news.
You're not alone. As it turns out, impostor feelings are really pretty common. Dr Clance's research indicates that about 70% of people experience impostor syndrome at some point in their careers.
Now, that's not to say that everybody experiences impostor syndrome the same way. There's people like me, who have experienced it throughout their entire career as a persistent feeling, afraid that they were gonna be fired at any moment, and there's other people that maybe it only happens when they start a new job or they, they emerge from college into the workforce. But no matter where you are on the scale, there's things that you can do to lessen this reaction that you feel.
So there's two things I want to do in this talk. The first thing is I want to tell you how your brain trolls you. Cause there's a lot of stuff that goes on in your head that reinforces this impostorism, and this inability to accept your success.
And I want to tell you how to patch your brain. As it turns out, impostor syndrome in your head is sort of this infinite loop that goes around and around and around. And what we have to do is find places where we can hook into that loop and get out of that cycle.
And if we can do that, then we can start functioning a little bit better. But, before I do that, I want to tell you a story. It's about the first conference talk I ever gave.
And you folks didn't know this when you walked into the room, but you're lucky enough to be part of this grand experiment. Somebody decided it was a good idea to give me a speaking slot at RailsConf. I decided, on a whim, about an hour before the CFP closed that I was gonna put in this talk proposal.
And it's one that had already been rejected by a couple of conferences. So I tweaked it a little bit. I cleaned it up.
I made it a little bit better. And submitted it. And the RailsConf submission process is, like, custom-tailored for someone with impostor syndrome.
Because the first round is blind. So I don't have to worry about it that I don't have this great reputation in the community and nobody knows my name. And during this process, there's the chance for people reviewing your proposal to give you feedback.
So, Sarah Mae, bless her heart, read my early rough draft and gave me some great feedback. I tightened up my abstract quite a lot, and apparently it was enough to get me through the final selected, and I got a talk accepted. So I was hanging out with my wife and my three-year-old son when I got the email that my talk was accepted at RailsConf.
And I gasped, and I was speechless, and my wife thought somebody important had died. Finally, I got the words out to tell her what was happening. And I was very excited.
So when I put the proposal in, the whole time I'm waiting to see whether I got in or not, I'm envisioning. Our team has a Friday happy hour, and I'm envisioning getting to tell my team mates that I got a talk accepted at RailsConf. And I got to do that, and it was glorious.
But, then reality sets in. I don't know if any of you have ever spoken at a user group or something, but as it turns out, you don't actually have to write the talk before it gets accepted. So once your talk is accepted, you have to start writing it.
And it plunged me, immediately, into this worry, fear, panic and dread. I sat down, I tried to make an initial outline. Total creative block.
I couldn't come up with anything. I couldn't organize my thoughts to save my life. The funniest thing was my brain played this great trick on me.
It told me I didn't even have impostor syndrome bad enough to give a talk on impostor syndrome. So I, I pushed through it. And I, I, I took an impostor syndrome test, on which I scored very highly.
And I'll share that test with you guys later. So after that, I jumped into full-on overwork. Now, normally I am a huge procrastinator.
Normally, I sit and wait until the very last minute to do something. But I guess my brain thought this was important, because it jumped into overwork from day one. Like, three days after I found out my talk was accepted, my family was heading on vacation, and, you know, as you do, I loaded my Kindle up with psychological journal articles and brought books, and I spent most of my vacation reading about impostor syndrome.
Which is not what I'd planned to do. And then hopefully the next step in the cycle is success. Now, clearly the jury is still out on this.
But hopefully when you're done you won't feel like your time has been wasted in this room. And after that, I'm gonna feel some initial relief. A coworker asked me - I had this long list of things that I hope would happen after the talk.
And a coworker asked me, OK, so what do you really want to happen after this talk? Really, all I want out of this talk is to help somebody. If I accomplish that, that's all I want out of this.
So, if that happens, I'll feel some initial relief. But then, as we do, I will move into this step where I am focusing on all the little failures in this talk. I'm gonna focus on the jokes that I didn't get just right.
I'm gonna focus on the times I said uh, and um and stumbled over my points and the content areas that I wish I had covered better or phrased differently. And then I'm gonna move into sort of the meat of impostor syndrome. I'm gonna start denying my success.
I'm gonna start feeling like people saying nice things to me in the hallway are just doing it because they know I have impostor syndrome and need compliments. And that's, you know, that's what we do. We write off our success, and it robs you of your ability to enjoy your success.
So then, when the next opportunity comes up, you cycle right back into this thing, because you've never been successful in your life. At least in your own mind. This is the impostor cycle.
Again, this was, this was identified in Dr Clance's research, and it's, it's driven by the superstition that we have to go through this fear and doubt and overwork and panic to get anything done. So you go through it, you look back on it. You did OK.
The reason you did OK is because you went through this big process of being all panicky and fearful and procrastinating and overworking. So you develop this superstition that if you don't do that, if you don't go through that hell, you're not gonna be able to pull of whatever it is you're trying to pull off. And so it denies you the ability to ever absorb your success and feel like you actually are a capable, competent person.
There's a lot of stuff going on in your brain that causes this to happen. I alluded this to some of these earlier. A, one of the first ones is introversion.
There's probably a lot of introverts in this room. And the thing about introverts is we all spend a lot of time inside our own heads, right. We spend a lot of time replaying social interactions, wishing we hadn't been awkward, wishing we were better at small talk.
We meet this hero of ours at a conference. We go talk to him and we say something really stupid and put our foot in our mouth and we spend the next six hours thinking about that. So we spend a lot of time in self-criticism.
The next thing is perfectionism. And the, the two most highly-correlated personality attributes to impostor syndrome are introversion and perfectionism. So the thing about perfectionism is we have very high standards for ourselves, right.
We want to get the gold standard. So what happens when we hit silver plus, plus, plus? We have failed.
So, you have this inability to ever do as well as you think you ought to do. You have this inability to ever pull anything off to your own perfect standard. And then it goes into something even more sinister than that.
There's this need in perfectionism that emerges to always be the best. It's not enough to be good. You have to be the shining star.
And so you get into this, it, it can create some really weird things in your job. So, when a coworker, say, gets a lot of praise for pulling something off, I feel threatened by that. Which is stupid, right?
I know, intellectually, that I shouldn't. I know that there's more than enough credit to go around. It's not a zero-sum game.
But I still feel like, somehow, my coworker getting praise is taking something away from my shiny gold star. And so it sets you up to always have to be perfect. It's terrible.
And it feeds into workaholism, because it takes a lot of work to live up to that standard that we all think we need to live up to. A whole lot of work. Or, when we get into a situation where we know we can't, we procrastinate.
Now, I've been a world-champion procrastinator for the bulk of my career. And it wasn't until maybe a year ago that I realized how intertwined it was with impostor syndrome. Because what procrastination does for you, when you're a perfectionist, is it gives you a forcing function.
It lets you get something out the door that might not be as perfect as you want it to be. It gives you a time box. And what you can produce in that time box has to be good enough.
And it also gives you a way out of failure. Because, like I mentioned earlier, impostors often have a strong fear of failure. So if you procrastinate, if you wait until the very last minute to do something, and then you fail, well.
It's just cause you didn't spend enough time on it. It's not a reflection of you as a person. Which is the perfect segue into the next thing going on in your head, which is fear of failure.
As impostors, we are terrified for others to see us struggle. We are scared to death to, for anybody else to see that we might not be able to pull it off the first time we try. Because we feel like we're walking on eggshells.
We have this very thin facade, that if anybody can get through, anybody can see around, they're gonna realize what a complete and total failure we are. So anytime there's a crack in that armor, we're afraid that it's all gonna come tumbling down. So we develop this deep-seated fear of failure that makes it very hard to go and try to do new things.
It makes it hard to do anything you think you might look foolish doing. A perfect example of that is the dance floor. And one thing you will not see on the dance floor is this guy.
Much to the chagrin of my wife, by the way. She would really prefer me to get out on the dance floor with her. But, I'm so afraid that I'm gonna get out there and make a fool of myself that I just won't do it.
I won't risk that part of my personality because somehow it's gonna make people think less of me. I know it's kind of a contrived, trivial example, but it plays out on the rest of your professional life. It plays out when you're trying to learn something new, or you're trying to fight through a hard problem.
You're kind of afraid to admit that you don't know. This one is really the meat of impostor syndrome. This idea of denial of success.
One thing we're all really good at, as impostors, is deflecting objective evidence that we're actually competent and successful. We're very good at pushing those things away. We deflect compliments, we write off promotions.
We got new jobs because we're good interviewers, not because we're good developers. In fact, when I found out my talk was accepted, the first thought that came into my mind is, man, that's gonna be such a let-down tomorrow when I get the email that their CFP system screwed up and emailed everybody a letter of acceptance. So stupid, right?
But that's, the, these are the things that your brain does that traps you in this cycle. It gets into attribution theory in psychology. And that's the idea of where you attribute success and failure.
As impostors, we tend to contribute success to external factors. So, it's luck. And timing.
And knowing the right people. Whereas we take failure and we internalize it. It speaks to who we are as a person.
If we fail, it's completely a reflection on us. But if we succeed, it's not a reflection on us at all, it's a reflection of the situations we found ourselves in. We also have a little bit of fear of success going on.
There's this fear that being successful might ostracize you from your peers. I know I felt this in school a lot. I was the kid that knew the answer every time, and by about third grade I had developed a defense mechanism where I hardly ever raised my hand.
Cause I didn't want to be the kid that knew all the answers, cause that kid didn't have any friends. This is part of why people from marginalized groups suffer disproportionately more from impostor syndrome than the rest of us. The only marginalized group I'm a part of is guys without hair.
So, but I still have a very strong case of impostor syndrome. When you get into a marginalized group and you might be more successful than some of your peers, you're afraid it might cause you to be outcast from that peer group that's one of the only safe places you have. One of the only places you belong.
It's a scary thing. There's a couple things that make impostor syndrome more prevalent in technology than it is in other industries. One of those things is the vastness of the knowledge involved in being a technology worker.
Most of us have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's this idea that unskilled people may not really be able to gage their level of competence. They may feel like they're more competent than they are because they don't know their gaps.
We have the diametric opposite problem of that. We know every last one of our gaps. We know all the things that we don't know.
We know all the things that we need to improve about ourselves. And we know how much we don't know. And, DHH alluded to this in his keynote, actually, when he talked about the impostor plexus.
We spend a lot of time wondering if we're doing it right in software. But the definition of right is always moving around. It's very hard to track.
And so it sets us up for this feeling where we're never doing it right. We're always two steps behind. There's always something else we need to know to be able to be accepted in our field.
The other thing is peer scrutiny. Actors, scientists, college professors, musicians, artists, all have a hard time with impostor syndrome. And the thing all those professions have in common with us is this idea of peer scrutiny.
We are always one code review away from somebody telling us that our work is crap and we are crap. And it's, it's a scary place to be. So, to cope with that fear, your brain starts dutifully preparing you for someone telling you that your work is crap by telling you that you're crap ahead of time.
It's really helpful. The other thing we do is we compare the finished work of other people to our messy thought process. So you, you look at this library that you admire.
You look at the code. You look at the structure. You look at the way it's organized.
It's fantastic code. Then you look at your own code. But when you look at your own code, you have the back story of that code.
You know how it came to be. You know what a struggle it was. So you assume this guy wrote this entire text file, beautiful library in one pass.
But you know how the sausage was made on your code. And you know it wasn't a pretty process. So you're setting yourself up for failure in that comparison.
You're never gonna come out ahead when you compare your thought process to somebody else's finished code. So how does this work out in practice? There are a lot of things that impostors don't do, because of impostor syndrome.
We don't participate in conversations. We go to user groups. We tend to hide in the wings, right.
Because if we hide, then we don't have to put ourselves out there. We don't have to let anybody see us and figure out that we don't know what we're talking about and shouldn't be where we are. We don't ask questions.
It's hard for us to admit that we don't know something. We pretend like we know it. Fake it till you make it.
And then we come back later and frantically scramble to try to learn the things that we don't know. So we write crappy code. We blindly adhere to best practices.
We don't ask questions that would allow us to become somebody with a trained eye for code that actually knows how to apply those best practices well. And we all know that if you just blindly apply best practices, you're gonna end up with some code that's really pretty rough. But if you don't ask those questions, if you don't put yourself out there to admit that, yeah, you know what, I could learn to do this a little better, you don't grow.
Impostors don't teach others. We don't give user group talks. We don't give convention talks.
We don't help out at workshops. And the community is worse off for this. Brandon Hayes, in his talk this morning, alluded to the fact that everybody sitting in the audience has a talk that they could give.
There is something out there that you know an awful lot about. Maybe more about than anybody else. But if you're afraid to get up in front of people and share that knowledge, the community is lacking that knowledge.
The community is lacking your unique viewpoint. So impostor syndrome robs our community of some voices that would otherwise be very helpful and very insightful. Another thing impostors don't do is contribute to open source.
I remember when I was a PHP developer in the first year of my software development career. I said something really stupid on the WordPress mailing list. It was something along the lines of WordPress isn't supported on Microsoft stack.
Or something, I don't know, something dumb. And I got my rear end handed to me for it. And ever since that happened, I have been very hesitant to do anything of any significance in the open source world.
And I have a feeling that there's a lot of people in the audience that that's true for, as well. Maybe you got bit one time. Maybe you're just afraid of getting bit by trying to contribute to open source.
But it's, it's something that impostors don't do, because we're afraid of that rejection. We're afraid of that failure. The other thing impostors don't do is they don't change jobs.
I mentioned I was a solo developer for the first chunk of my career. I was in that job for five years. And it was, it was a bit of a cushy position.
I'll admit that. But by being a solo developer, I deprived myself of the chance of learning from other developers. And by the time I left that job, I was not making anything close to a market salary.
But, as impostors, we kind of feel lucky to have the job we have and to have the people that are around us fooled. It seems like an awful lot of work to go take a new job and have to fool a new group of people, right? So we just sit where we are.
So, clearly, these are not things that we want to happen in our community. So how do we patch our brains to get out of this cycle? Like I mentioned earlier, impostor syndrome, that cycle, it's kind of an infinite loop in your head.
And you just have to find the places that you can hook into it so that you can get out of it. The good news is, is that for starters, knowing is half the battle. If you just understand that this thing that you feel, this pervasive sense of incompetence that you feel actually has a name.
It's called impostor syndrome. You know how it's affecting your thoughts. You know how it's affecting your head.
That's the first start of the road to recovery. I mentioned earlier, I've got an impostor survey, I'll give you the link at the end of the talk. It's derived from research from Dr Clance.
And it'll give you a numeric score. It'll help you sort of sort through some of the thoughts in your head and figure out if it's something that you're dealing with. So once you know what impostor syndrome is, the next thing is mindfulness.
You have to start paying attention. And, I apologize, cause I know this is super cheesy, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I want you to turn to somebody next to you in the audience and pay them a compliment.
If it's somebody you know well, make it as specific a compliment as you can. I'll wait. AUDIENCE: [chatter] N.
M. : All right. All right, come on.
Reeling it back in here. I wondered if this would happen on the last day of the conference, and it did. So, think back to when the person sitting next to you paid you that compliment.
How did you react? Was your initial instinct to accept that compliment and take it at face value as true? Or was it to try to write it off.
To try to find some way deflect it. Cause that's what we do as impostors, right? If somebody comes up and says hey, nice job.
Oh, man, I was really lucky. It was an easy topic to talk about. That sort of thing.
We tend to write it off. So you have to pay attention to how you accept compliments. You have to work to accept them gracefully.
If you don't know how to do that, just say thank you. All you have to say. It's very hard work, and I am still terrible at it.
The other thing you have to do, that you can do to help you find how this is happening in your head is to listen to yourself talk. See if you do a lot of self-deprecation. When you make a mistake in the code, you say, oh man, I'm an idiot.
Or do you do, oh, I forgot a semi-colon. Not that we ever do that because we're Rubyists and we don't write JavaScript or anything. The next thing you have to do is accept your success.
Accept your success. Trust reality, not your feelings. Brandon Hayes is a friend of mine from Austin, said this probably as eloquently as I've heard it said.
He was talking about leaving a previous job and coworkers paying him compliments and saying nice things about him. And he said, you know, at some point, I had to stop the thought process in my head. And I had to try to find these things that people were saying about me inside myself.
I had to find them as true. And it's hard. It's hard.
You have to try to accept that compliments are true. You have to accept that nice things that people say about you are true, rather than immediately writing them off. Another way to practice that is to give more compliments.
I mentioned sort of this idea of a zero-sum game, where it's, you have to be the shining star and you're worried about what happens when people on your team get compliments. Well, give more compliments. Notice the genuineness with which you deliver a compliment.
If you notice how genuine you're being, start assuming other people are being that genuine as well. And they're not just deluded into thinking you're something you're not. You have to own your success.
And even if your success involved a lot of luck and timing, you still had to be smart enough to use that luck and timing to your benefit. So even if you try to write it off as luck and timing, you still had something to do with it. You also need to be kind to yourself.
Forgive your mistakes. If you notice yourself being very self-critical, interrupt yourself. Notice what you did well, in addition to what you feel like you need to improve on.
My wife's a middle-school English teacher. And in her classroom, she practices something that she calls the compliment sandwich. When she has to deliver some bad news to a student or tell them how they need to improve their writing or, or something like that, she tells them first something they did really well.
Then she delivers the improvement, and then she tells them something else they did really well. Well, if you start doing this inside your own head, what'll happen is you'll have to find something you did well. Then you can indulge in that self-criticism that feels so good to us.
And then you tell yourself something else you did well. And over time, you'll notice that you start to notice your success more than the things that you wish you'd done better. Another technique you can use is to ratchet your freak-out.
And I use this one a lot this, giving this talk. I mentioned that I moved into that fear and doubt and, cycle, pretty early on. Well, I made an agreement with myself that I was not gonna freak out until a week before the conference.
And it actually worked pretty well. So, normally when I do something like this, I would freak out a long time in advance. I would start worrying about it and feeling like I wasn't gonna pull it off.
But I made an agreement with myself that I wasn't gonna do that. And I sat on it for awhile. And a week before the conference.
It actually worked. When it would come up, I would push it back down and say, you get to freak out a week before the conference. You don't get to freak out now.
And then the week before the conference got here and, boy did I freak out. I stayed up till two in the morning most nights not doing much of anything, but feeling better because I was doing something. Like I was making progress on my talk.
It was very much a coping mechanism. I wasn't accomplishing anything. But instead of doing that for a whole month, I only did it for a week.
And the magic of this, is it lets you be successful without freaking out for a month. And so you start to break down that superstition that you have to do a lot of freaking out before you can be successful. You start to chink away at that bit by bit, until finally you become convinced that it's not as necessary, maybe, as you believe it is.
Another thing is embrace vulnerability. Allow yourself to admit you don't know things and ask questions. If you don't know who that is in the background of that slide, it's Renee Brown.
If you haven't seen her TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability, put that very high on your to-do list. I saw it probably two years ago, and it was the start of my journey out of impostor syndrome. Because it was the first time I'd really ever embraced the message that it was OK if I wasn't perfect.
It was OK if I didn't know everything all the time. When you start embracing vulnerability, it frees you up to be yourself, and to be OK with that. To be OK with not knowing everything.
And once you're comfortable with who you are, it gives you a much more solid foundation to build upon and to improve. Like, instead of trying to build on top of this shaky facade, you're building on who you actually are and what you actually know. In the process of embracing vulnerability, something you absolutely need to try is pair programming.
I don't have a lot of time, but I will be more than happy to pair with any of you if I can find the time. Just ping me on Twitter. I'm lucky enough to be on a team that does pair programming 100% of the time.
And what you find, a coworker said this to me right as I was walking in to give this talk. What you find, is that knowledge becomes collective. Not something that you have to bring to the table individually.
So it's OK if you don't know everything. Your pair probably does. And there's no penalty for them knowing things and you not.
But it also makes you be vulnerable enough to work with somebody. Because if you're pair programming with somebody, there is no hiding. And it's really the first dose of having an accurate basis of comparison for my work that I ever had.
Working with somebody, seeing how they worked, seeing how I worked. Seeing how we did a lot of the same things and approached problems the same ways, convinced me that maybe I wasn't that bad a developer after all. But most importantly, you gotta keep going.
You have to keep going. The hell of impostor syndrome is that you are never fully recovered from it. This pattern of thought is so deeply ingrained in your head that is very hard to escape from.
So what you're working towards is becoming what I like to call a high-functioning impostor. I've alluded to the fact that I have been my own walking case study in the development of this talk. So, clearly I am not out of the woods.
Clearly, I still experience most of these things on a very regular basis. The difference is, I can work through it enough to be able to get up and give a talk, or to, to ship code and know it's actually decent code. And everybody can do this.
It's not that hard. You just have to start working through it and continue working through it and not giving up when it's hard and continue pushing against it. The last thing I want to leave you with is this.
I talked about Dunning-Kruger effect earlier. The thing that you need to remember about impostor syndrome is you have a lot of very smart people around you saying very nice things about you. If you believe that these people are full of crap, then you're saying that they're not smart enough to see through you.
They're not good enough at reading code to tell that your code is terrible. And these are also the people that serve as your basis of comparison. So you're looking around at all these people that are very smart, and these are the people that you feel like you might be inferior to.
Well, you're saying these people that you, that you consider to be smarter than you are not smart enough to see through this facade. They are. And they're not, because there's no facade there.
So the fact that you experience impostor syndrome pretty much means that you have no reason to experience impostor syndrome. It means you know enough about your skill and your craft to see your shortcomings and you just need to focus more on the things that you know and the value that you bring to the table. Give yourself credit for that and focus less on the things that you still have to learn.
Because you have a long career ahead of you. You don't have to know it all now. Thanks.
