My Job is Killing Me
It was a sunny morning in February. As I woke up with expectations of starting a standard workday, I made my coffee, fried myself an egg, and logged on for my meetings. However, that morning felt different. An unusual tightness in my throat greeted me, as if a lump were stuck there.
“Hmm, it’s probably nothing to worry about,” I thought. “It must be sore from all the partying and chatting over the weekend.” But it wasn’t. The sensation persisted for weeks, and it soon reached a point where I had difficulty speaking.
I booked an appointment with an ENT to seek help for my discomfort. At the appointment, he diagnosed it as seasonal allergies, wrote me a prescription, and I followed his instructions. I was skeptical about his assessment because I had been experiencing these issues before the seasonal changes, but I’m not the doctor, so who was I to disagree? In hindsight, I should have followed my gut. Weeks of taking the medication had no effect on my issue.
I’m a hypochondriac, so by this time, I had convinced myself that I had throat cancer and was on the brink of death. My dramatic self began making peace with my life and mentally arranging my estate. Fortunately, my sister, who is a doctor, helped me get a second opinion. The second ENT was thorough. He took the time to show me the inside of my throat and explained what I was suffering from. It wasn’t cancer; it was severe inflammation with a root cause: Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) 😑.
“GERD? I’m only 33,” was my exclamation upon hearing the prognosis. The doctor chuckled and said, “The disease can be caused by a multitude of factors: genetics, poor eating habits, anxiety, and more.”
As soon as he mentioned “anxiety” I knew that was the culprit.
2023 has been a trying year for me. Housing hunting, wedding planning, career changes, and life in general placed tremendous stress on me. My fears of failure manifested as anxiety, which took a literal toll on my body. My greatest fear was failing at my new job.
I started a new position at a different company after spending over five years in my previous role. It wasn’t an easy decision, but I knew it was necessary. My passion for my last role had faded, and it was reflected in my work. I felt like I wasn’t performing to the best of my abilities, and it wouldn’t have been fair to myself or the company to continue.
Change is a daunting experience. The unknown, uncertainty, the departure from comfort, and the emotions tied to change can be overwhelming. I experienced all of these with my new role.
It was a bright and warm Monday morning when I signed into my first team meeting. “Good morning, team. Let’s welcome Ashcir on his first day”, the team greeted me cordially before diving into the day’s work. The floodgates were opened, and I found myself drowning in acronyms and terminologies. I paddled to keep myself afloat barely able to catch my breath.
The standard for new employees is to spend the first few days on onboarding, which includes setting up your computer, reviewing training materials, consulting with HR, and more. By the end of the week, I was assigned my first task: fixing a bug within the system.
For those uninitiated in the software industry, a bug represents unintended behavior in the system. It can range from something as innocuous as a spelling mistake on a website to something as catastrophic as taking down an entire platform. Fortunately, my bug was on the less dangerous side of the spectrum.
Despite the relatively harmless nature of the issue, it filled me with anxiety. One of the challenges in software work is keeping up with the constant changes in technology and learning new domains. My new job required me to adjust to both. I transitioned from working with cash and securities in finance to working on artificial intelligence in healthcare. Additionally, my new company used a different tech stack, which I had to learn in order to tackle the bug.
We software engineers store our code in repositories, think of them as file cabinets where each drawer contains pieces of functionality that make the system work. If the file cabinet is well-organized, finding your files is seamless, but if it’s not, the experience can be tedious.
Now, let’s take our metaphor a step further. Inside the cabinet, each file represents a piece of the system, much like a puzzle piece. Your job is to find the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. Sounds easy, right? But what if you have no idea what the complete picture looks like? Suddenly, it becomes more challenging. Moreover, if you remove the wrong piece, you risk damaging the entire puzzle.
That’s exactly what my first bug felt like. I had no idea what the overall picture looked like, and the instructions might as well have been in a different language.
My anxiety peaked.
Thoughts like, “Will my teammates think I’m incompetent?” or “Maybe I’m not smart enough to work here,” and “I’m a fraud, and I’m going to get fired” coursed through my mind daily. My body remained in a constant state of tension and fear, affecting both my sleep and my health.
I had flashbacks of my experience with computer science during high school. I had a condescending teacher who made some us feel the subject was for the elite, and out of reach for the majority of us. This negative experience drove me away from pursuing it in during undergrad because I feared I’d fail it and devalue myself worth as a person. I’ve lived with my fear of failure since a child, and work through it on a daily basis.
These flashbacks compounded my imposter syndrome. Not having studied computer science in college made me feel like I entered the industry at a disadvantage. During my first job, I spent countless hours outside of work self-learning the fundamentals required for software engineering: data structures, algorithms, software design, databases, and more. I didn’t grasp some of these concepts as effortlessly as my peers, which fueled my self-doubt. Nevertheless, I persevered, hoping that hard work would extinguish these doubts.
It has been eight years since I started working in the industry, and I’ve witnessed my growth from a novice engineer with basic knowledge of Java to someone capable of developing full-stack web applications. Yet, that persistent feeling of inadequacy continues to linger.
It’s ok to make mistakes
Close your eyes and envision a time from your childhood when you were learning a new skill, whether it was physical, like learning to ride a bicycle, or mental, like learning to read. Now, remember if you got it correct on your initial try. I’m willing to bet you didn’t, right? We made mistakes while learning new skills, and that didn’t deter us from trying over and over again. Yet somehow, we forgot that fact as we aged.
Being at my last job for six years made me too comfortable with solving repeated problems, and it atrophied my problem-solving abilities. I forgot about the discomfort of making mistakes while learning new skills.
Within my new role, I had to relearn the grace I needed to give myself to make mistakes. Making mistakes did not mean I was inept or incompetent; it meant that I was learning, developing, and growing. It was the main reason why I accepted the new role in the first place.
It took me some time to remember this lesson, but I’m thankful I did.
It’s ok to ask for help
Revisit your memories of making mistakes while learning new skills. Did you learn those new skills on your own? Again, it’s highly unlikely that you did.
We, as humans, are social creatures, and we have progressed as a society not by working in silos but by sharing information. Yet, as adults, we often forget to ask for help due to pride or shame. We create a false perception that we should know everything just because we’re older, when in fact, it’s the opposite. We grow old when we stop learning and lose our curiosity about life.
“No man is an island” — John Donne
It’s okay to ask for help. Eradicate the shame associated with not knowing the answer to everything. It’s better to learn and grow than to pretend to be knowledgeable out of foolish pride.
It also took me a while to remember this lesson, but I’m thankful that I did.
I wrote this piece with two primary motivations in mind. Firstly, it served as catharsis for my burdened mind, a way to release the weight of imposter syndrome that has lingered within me. Secondly, I wanted to extend a helping hand to others who might be grappling with similar feelings.
I understand that I’m not the only person who has experienced imposter syndrome in the software engineering world. By sharing my personal journey, I aim to reassure others that they are not alone in this struggle and to offer solutions that have proven effective in my own battle against imposter syndrome.
Remember: be kind to yourself, give yourself time to learn. It’s okay to make mistakes; progress isn’t always linear. Try your best, but don’t be ashamed to ask for help when you need it.
Find peace in knowing that you’re doing the best you can. Stay positive and keep moving forward. The universe knows what it’s doing and will work out what’s best for you.
