I recently had the opportunity to talk with one of my personal heroes, Ryan Bigg aka radar.

Ryan is a prolific software engineer who has made one or two contributions to Rails and basically built the open source project I maintain today.

Ryan Bigg

@ryanbigg

I was on the @devpathfm podcast, talking about @cultureamp's JEP, imposter syndrome and my path to becoming a senior developer. Have a listen here: devpath.fm/episodes/profe…

23:51 PM - 02 Jan 2019

We talked in-depth about Ryan's personal experiences with imposter syndrome, which he feels the effect of even today. Coming from a developer with over a decade of experience this quote stuck with me:

I have it [imposter syndrome], maybe not on a daily basis, but a weekly basis? Sure.

Ryan's honesty is so refreshing because it helps to clear the misconception that veteran engineers have this whole imposter syndrome thing figured out. In reality, pretty much everyone doubts their abilities or value at some point or another. And that doesn't make you a bad engineer; Ryan is living proof.

Another thing we spent quite a bit of time on was learning to work on a team. Ryan's job now is to provide leadership and mentorship to a cohort of junior developers at Culture Amp (which sounds like a really cool job), but there was a time when he didn't value the team dynamic.

Ryan admitted that even today, he struggles with being reactive. This is ironic because he is well respected as a mentor and teacher. It just goes to show, being aware of your struggles is conducive to succeeding.

If this kind of stuff interests you, please check out the full recording. It's also available on Spotify.

Regardless, let's try to follow Ryan's example and be honest about imposter syndrome and our shortcomings (feel free to share your own experiences with imposter syndrome 👇)