
I’m an Impostor - gscott
https://davidwalsh.name/impostor-syndrome
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xolubi
I used to feel this way for years, even till very recently. After I resigned
from my company in 2012 after a fallout with my partners, the highest
trafficked job search website in Nigeria - Jobberman - reached out to me to
take up the recently open position of CTO. The expectations brought on an
overwhelming feeling of being an impostor. There were a number of things I was
doing for the first time, and a number of situations I had never been in
prior. For instance:

\- I had built numerous medium traffic web applications in the past but had
never done MySQL replication.

\- I had not had the privilege of managing an application that averaged 4000
visitors at any given time.

\- As much as I had a good working knowledge of administering servers, I
wouldn't say I had up to a 100 hours in total of administering Linux machines.
I had been a Windows server guy for years, but had a couple of personal apps
running on Linux VMs

\- I had never done application performance monitoring

I could go on and on, but these thoughts exaggerated the negatives so much in
my head that as much as I knew I had work to do, and knew how to teach myself
to do it, I knew I didn't deserve the role. In the end, I did my best and
transformed the company's infrastructure but never did get to shake off the
feeling.

I can go on and on about why I did feel that way but I guess like the blog
post says, we can think always of more ways to cut ourselves down, than
otherwise.

Being more active on IRC has helped dispel this feeling over time. Self
realization when discussing with people you believe should know more than you
do also helps - less than two weeks ago, some developer friend of mine was
excitedly telling me how they recently learned of the format of IPv4
addresses, something I probably knew before I turned 12. Blogging more often
is something I intend to get back to as well. I used to be pretty active 7 - 5
years ago until I got "too busy".

I should add that this is my first lengthy comment on HN, as I never did feel
I was good enough to comment on this forum. :)

