Imposter Syndrome

I am not an imposter.

A small amount of history. My first Ruby / Rails / Dev gig was for Advantage Interactive working on lcn.com They are still my domain registration provider and if you look really really hard probably none of my work is left on that site anymore. But times change. The company re-located in 2008 and I found myself needing to look for something else. We gotta eat and we’ve got kittens to feed too.

I got an interview for a company that sold e-commerce solutions to a number of clients and having worked with OSCommerce for a years with PHP and a grounding on a domain registration and web hosting service which had a cart and payment processing and the like I thought it was a good fit. As soon as I got there I was paired up with another developer and set to work on an address book application as a coding challenge. I did my homework and I specifically used the new kid on the block ‘nested routes’ yup know the ’ole /products/1/attributes/17903 malarky.

resources :products do
  resources :attributes
end

Ok, I probably thought I was being pretty smart. What I didn’t expect was that my pair was pretty patronising, he didn’t like this solution for the address book which had a parent object and a multiple child objects so ideal for this scenario. He started to prompt me to find a different solution and he said very slowly so I could hear him clearly “…maybe use a session…?”. He meant instead of using /products/1/attributes/17903. That I should store the product_id in a session when accessing the child object. Effectively.

# set product_id in session
session[:product_id] = 1
# visit
GET /attributes/17903
# and then grab record 
Attribute.where(product_id: session[:product_id], id: params[:id])

To me this is crazy, why in the hell would you use state to manage this. That’s not what a session is for, a session is for having a pretty good try at faking state with HTTP which is basically stateless. So we can maintain logging into a system across multiple requests for example. I just didn’t get his reasoning and we butted heads. “Why would we do that?”. Which on reflection he read as “Why would we do that because I am desperately out of my depth, dude”. He was insistent.

We moved on from the code interview which I had clearly failed in his eyes because I clearly didn’t understand what a session was. I know what a session is. We entered a big room with an oval table, and I was met with another developer. They slouched across the table and told me a bit about the company and that they were migrating a ton of clients over to Rails. I asked “Why Ruby?”, because I wanted to know their reasoning for migrating at this time. If you are going to up and move everything at some significant cost then there has to be a motivation right, something they can’t resolve and can only be resolved longer-term by moving everything over? They misunderstood my question and started telling me how great Ruby was. Dudes I have been working with Ruby full-time for 3 years. I’m not an idiot. But they treated me like one. And eventually said “You’re clearly not a Developer”. Honestly, I was at this point angry because you can’t argue with people who have made up their mind without really taking the time to understand who I was and what experience I had. They didn’t even ask me what I’d been working on.

This is the first time I’d been made to feel bad for not knowing stuff that I do actually know. It’s hard to express yourself when you’re up against confident (or indeed arrogant) people, outward confidence in a meeting room from a lesser experienced person can trump years of experience and that’s crazy. I had clearly not made it to the next stage and I wasn’t likely to work with them anyway given the vibe I got from them.

I continued to look around for work. I had multiple recruiters put me forward for things. I did a code test for Reevoo and got a callback from the recruiter saying that they were impressed with my test and they’d like to move forward, except. “We heard you had a bad interview with insert company>”. What? There are times when you are paranoid that people might not like you or might be talking behind your back, and often you’re imagining it. But no…people had actually been talking behind my back. A recruiter completely unconnected to the company I had interviewed for had information on me and a black mark had been put against my name. How does that work? Who the actual, WTF??? I explained my experience to the recruiter and we went back and forth many times on it. I had to move on sadly and look elsewhere. Not because I was a bad developer but someone had made their mind up and told others they should question my ability even if you had a pleasing code test. Is this what they call Gatekeeping, did they think they were better or that I was just a pretender to the throne?

It’s difficult not to be bitter about such things, I remember all of this pretty clearly and it was a difficult time. Fortunately going the Recruiter route is not the only way. I had to find work pretty quickly and I wasn’t going to continue working in Stevenage with a 3 hour each way journey. Fortunately I met Zach, via a forum and joined PledgeMusic about a month later for 9 years and 11 months. ( we didn’t make it to 10 :( ) and from that first day I never felt like I wasn’t good enough, like everyone else I’ve written bad code, broken things, managed full-time work and at least 6 long-term freelance clients and had some huge successes in that time.

So no I am not an imposter. And if someone thinks you are? well we shouldn’t waste too much time worrying what other people think, unless they are your actual boss.