Forem: Johan van Tongeren

I am an imposter. You too?

Johan van Tongeren — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 08:40:33 +0000

Do you recognize this situation?

I have completed a coding task. I am a senior developer and I've been doing this for the past 15 years. I've written ~~millions~~ hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

So, these lines of code perfectly meet requirements as described by the product owner. I functionally tested the code. The new page works flawlessly. I doublecheck it by doing some monkey testing and I try to break stuff. Nothing bad happens.

The code is written to spec, there are no linting errors. Pre-commit hooks with some code quality checks succeed.

I've written some unit tests and an E2E test and wondrously these new tests and the existing tests don't fail. Every checkbox on my todo-before-pull-request-list is checked.

I open GitHub and create a new pull request and ask my co-worker Charles for a review and wait for Charles to review my new addition to the codebase.

"Hopefully Charles doesn't think I am a bad developer...", my brain thinks.

Not that Charles is a dick or anything. Actually he's a great guy. Really considerate. He never yells at anybody or calls out co-workers. But still, this thought crossed my mind.

After a while I get a notification:

@Charles approved this pull request

And 2 seconds later:

Merged #1337 into master.

And then it happens: some weird feeling takes over. Your brain explodes of the sudden stream of thoughts like "Did Charles actually look at the code? Is something wrong with Charles? Is he having an off-day? Why did he not see this code is crap? Help! I can only write crap code!"

And one question always returns:

"When will they find out I'm a fraud? I've been fooling them for years now..."

Another example

Last year I was curious about my position in the job market. So I decided to go look around for new job opportunities. And I got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from people that were impressed by my history and skillset. The only thing I could think is:

"Wait until you hire me... you'll find out I really suck!"

I event went on a few job interviews and the companies were really enthusiastic about me. So much that they kept stalking me after I already declined their offers. Instead of thinking "wow, I am good" I thought:

"Shit, I must accidentally be saying the right words to make them so enthusiastic... It can't be my actual skills, because I suck... Why didn't they see that??"

What is happening?

It might sound like low self-esteem, but actually I have been struck by something that's known as The Imposter Syndrome. And if you recognize this, you're probably familiar or even suffering too.

Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one's accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck or interpret it as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.

If you've recognized yourself in the previous examples, you're probably thinking "I actually am an imposter!"

But what if I told you that a lot of very smart and/or successful people also have had thoughts like this? Like Serena Williams, David Bowie, Michelle Obama, and Albert Einstein?

You can even take an online test to see how high you score on the Clance Imposter Syndrome Scale.

Where does this come from?

It is called a "syndrome", but it's not a mental illness and not per definition related to things like depression or other mental conditions.

I think the most important cause of these thoughts is a combination of these factors:

You don't know what other people think. Others might seem very confident. But they probably have similar doubts.
It's hard to compare your own skills and abilities to others. Even more, if you master rare skills. It feels like others are always more skilled than you are. This is often not true.
Social media makes it look like the world is full of skilled people. But you probably only follow that hand full of people in the world that are actually as skilled or sometimes better than you are. There are still about 8 billion more people that are less skilled...
You stop listening to positive feedback. You might physically hear them, but you don't actually hear them. Either your mind immediately refutes them or is so numb that you actually filter them out. Like you don't see ads on websites anymore.

In my case, the last one was the worst. I had a lot of therapy since my burnout a few years ago, and one of the things I figured out was that I didn't accept and process positive feedback. This happened so automatically that I didn't even realize it.

Even worse, my mind immediately comes with a lot of "proof" to refute the positive feedback I get. For example, this happened when I was fueling up my extensively modified Volvo at a gas station and a car enthusiast came up to me:

"Omg, did you build that yourself? 😲 It's so awesome!! 😊"

Then this happens in my mind:

setTimeout(() => {    
    console.error("Ahhw thanks...");
    console.error("Wait what?");
    console.error("Is he blind?");
    console.error("He doesn't see that one crappy weld I effed up!");
    console.error("Look at that corner of the wrap that's peeling!");
    console.error("Everything I build is shit!");    
    console.error("I am not worthy!");
}, 100);

So after 100ms, my mind bent the compliment to a confrontation with my shortcomings (which only exist in my mind).

What can you do?

In my particular case, the Imposter Syndrome really went hand-in-hand with lowered self-esteem. These two are like twins, they look alike, but they are really different on the inside.

I am still struggling with these negative thoughts from day to day, but it greatly improved. Hopefully one of these following experiences can help you too if you recognized yourself in one of the previous examples.

1. Realize you're not alone.
Read about it. Google for "imposter syndrome". Or what you're feeling. Literally type in "I don't know what I'm doing at work" and you'll get numerous articles that relate and refute your feelings.

2. You're not wrong.
When somebody has commented on something you did does not mean you're wrong. It only means they do not agree with your view on something. They are entitled to their opinions, but so are you. A healthy discussion will result in a choice on what solution will be used, but even if the solution is not yours it does not mean it was a bad idea.

3. Talk about it.
This is one of the best advice I could give about anything that goes on inside your head, and it's certainly true in this situation. If you are insecure, validate if your thoughts are just. You will find that often, if not always, your thoughts are unfounded.

4. Never belittle yourself.
When talking (and even better: when thinking) do not belittle yourself. Never ever. Phrases like "If I can do it, everybody can do it!" are killing for your self-esteem and fuel for the Imposter devil on your shoulders. I've read about this a while ago and since then I try to practice it and I feel much better about myself since.

5. Actually listen to what people say.
This might be the hardest one. When somebody gives you some positive feedback on something, try to accept it. If you struggle with this, this will be the hardest to do. But remember, Rome wasn't built in one day. Big changes like this come in small steps. Realization is the first one. So if you notice you discard positive feedback don't think "See, I can't do this!" but remind yourself that you've noticed it. That's the first step. Knowing what happens. Next time you can try to stop the negative thoughts that follow. Even if they only get a little milder is a big step forward. Keep it up and keep practicing!

Conclusion

So, these fraudulent feelings are more common than you might have thought and I hope that if you have them too you've found some comfort in reading this and knowing you're not alone. I also hope I gave you some tools on how to start minimizing these feelings.

If you have any tips or just recognize yourself in the examples, please comment below and tell me about your experience!

Video

Before writing this blog I did some research and found this awesome video which explains the effect very well:

Being the first to start remote working

Johan van Tongeren — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 13:28:36 +0000

My girlfriend and I want to move to another city. Not a few miles to the next big city, not to the other side of Holland, but a country on the other side of Europe: Sweden. That's about 1600 kilometers (1000 miles). And it is also not fancy Stockholm we chose as our destination, but a region which is quite remote and desolate. Where there are more trees than bytes in the air.

My employer knows about our immigration plans. I don't want to leave them, and they don't want me to leave. I like my job and love my co-workers. And I like the Friday hamburgers, daily ping-pong matches, good coffee, banter, and drinks after work hours.

So why not keep working for MyOnlineStore and move to another country? That is the solution we came up with.

It is 2020. I am a web developer. Fully online focussed. There are few things that stand in the way of working remotely.

But will I not miss the hamburgers? And my co-workers and friends? Is a daily standup possible with one member of the team not in the same room? Will I fall asleep at my desk? Will I eat all the snacks in my house?

The first remote worker? 🤔

I hear you thinking: "The first remote worker? Me and my thousand co-workers have been doing this for years now!"

I am by far not the first to start working remotely, but I am the first one at MyOnlineStore. The company made a shift from being an oldskool 9-to-5 company to a more modern and true agile approach since a few new managers were hired last year.

So this story is about being the first person in a company who starts working remotely.

Before making the big move to Sweden and finding out it doesn’t work I wanted to try this cool new thing. A period of experiments started and I was the first to work from home (a few miles from the office) for more than an incidental day or the afternoon after a visit to the dentist.

Up until now, nobody worked from home for more than one or two days. Yes, I am the First Real Remote Worker.

Two major factors 🥓

So there are two issues we anticipated beforehand:

technical difficulties: can we find proper soft- and hardware?
the social aspect: when will I go mad?

I think the subject of hard- and software for conference calls has been covered enough, so this will not be a "best conference call software of 2020" kind of story. I do want to tell you about the little struggles we had and how we dealt with them.

The second issue was a lot more impactful for me, but we will get back to that later.

Software and hardware 🎥

We quickly found that the software we already use for communication in our team (Slack) has a big advantage: it offers the ability to click on a phone icon and call a single person or start a conference call.

The only downside of using slack’s video calling I noticed is that slack does not offer the possibility to see my teammates during a call when somebody is sharing his or her screen. We often do this, for example when discussing the backlog. The PO opens the backlog, shares the screen so I can see what they see and they also put that view up on the big screen in the conference room. This works fine, but I found that it's hard to discuss something when you can't see the people you're talking too. Also doing a demonstration of new functionality for the entire company sucks when you can't see your audience.

We are still working on these issues. Maybe we are going to use other software, maybe we'll hang a few webcams at strategic spots in the office and start streaming this, I don't know yet. It feels like we're 99% there and just need to improve on these small issues and make it feel 100% natural and seamless.

The ease of video/audio calls online surprised me a bit, being an oldtimer that had been scared by the crappiness of online conferencing years ago when the web wasn't as evolved as it is today.

Conclusion: hard- and software can't be a problem. As long as you have a decent internet connection you're set.

Loneliness 🥱

We found out that being remote in a close working team is not really that different from being in the office, but what happens if you live in isolation for weeks in a row?

I was kinda worried about this one, to be honest. I am not that kind of developer that thrives when locked up in a windowless basement with a red stapler.

I need people around me. I need to chat. I need to vent frustration from time to time. I need to show my newest lego kit. I like to have fun with my co-workers. I love staying late for Friday drinks.

So I am a socially dependent man. What will happen to me when not being surrounded by people? Will I start talking to myself? drooling?

I've been working remotely for 1,5 months now and it turns out that it's not that bad! I haven't gone mad and killed somebody. Yet.

I think this has to do with the close contact I have with my team. We run sprints of one week, where Fridays are used for a retrospective, refinement, etc. and these days are full of conference calls and consulting coworkers.

A co-worker and I have even developed a paper-rock-scissor-like sign language to play planning poker.

Also, I call him a lot. Mostly just to discuss some coding issues, but also sometimes just to have a chat about everyday stuff. We get along great and it is always fun to hang out, even if it is through a webcam.

Conclusion on this topic: It's not as hard as expected. I miss my precious Cheeshouse hamburgers, but that might be a good thing for my body.

Self-reliance and question quality 💪🏻

Working remotely also greatly enhance self-reliance. It doesn't matter how good the soft- and hardware are there will always be a small threshold to call a colleague to ask him or her something.

I experienced this a few days ago. Normally, to start the development environment of our component library, I have to enter yarn dev in my command line. But after pulling the master and getting the latest version, this resulted in an error.

Normally I'd ask my fellow frontender who's sitting 2 meters away from me in the office building "What happened to the start command for Bricks?" and he'll say "Ah yes, I changed that command. Forgot to tell you that, sorry!"

Now I opened the package.json file, looked up the appropriate command which has changed to yarn start:components. Problem solved. Didn't disturb my co-worker. Everybody's happy.

This is just a small example, mostly born from laziness, but I've noticed that I try to figure stuff out by myself more than I did before I started remote working. So this raises self-reliance and the quality of the questions that remain also increases.

Concentration 😳

I found that working alone greatly increased my ability to concentrate on my work. Not being interrupted by co-workers or other things that happen in a busy office building made a big change for me.

Our office building is in the city center of a small city, close to the police station and the fire department. Loud cars, blaring sirens, obnoxious motorcycles, we get them all. This distracts me always, despite the noise-canceling headphones and other measures I took.

My home office is at the back of our house and nothing visual happens there. I also live in a very small town, where it always is very quiet.

Apart from the increased output, I notice this when I miss my (lunch)break times. Only a notification for a new e-mail or a Slack message breaks this concentration.

When needed I also shut myself off for all these concentration-breakers, it was enough to quit the mail app and Slack. Doing this in an office building is hard without physically moving to another (empty) room.

One thing I think is very important is that I have the luxury of a separate room in my house, designated as a home office. The room has a big desk, a comfy office chair, a good view outside, a proper audio system and everything I need to make my work pleasant.

One concentration killer is other people in your house. We don't have kids, but sometimes we have kids/family over. So when I am working and my 4-year old niece wants to show me the drawing she made for me, it is very sour and saddening to tell her to not disturb me and leave me to work.

Luckily days with such distractions are quite rare. I guestimate that 95% of the workdays are without any distractions other than the mailman.

Slackshaming 👮🏻‍♂️

The big brother in my laptop. I think this is something very personal to me, but probably also something that some people can relate to. Maybe it is something caused by Dutch work ethics (which are very relentless), I don't know, but it's something that I struggle with.

There is a stigma around working alone or from home. People tend to think that Remotees work less hard than people in the office that are constantly watched by others. Take extra long walks with the dog, watch youtube all day or even take naps.

So what happens in my mind is "They must never think I am not working on my computer!"

So I keep one eye constantly focussed on Slack and its notifications. As soon as one of my teammates sends me a message or calls me, I must respond immediately. Otherwise, they will say "See! Proof! He's not doing anything! He's probably in his workshop welding stuff or working on his car! Booo!"

This is a downside of being remote for me. Despite knowing that these thoughts are unfounded. I know people trust that I do my work and deliver. I've proven that by completing sprints every time. There are no unexplained blanks in my weeks at home.

So this is something I need to work on personally. I have to get more confident that people trust me to do my work. I'll have to tell my colleagues that this is a struggle for me and ask them to tell me if there are any doubts about my commitment.

Conclusion 🏁

Remote working is great! As a conclusion a list of pros and cons:

Pros 😊

Working in a pleasant environment that is optimized for me
Increased productivity
Increased concentration
Listening to my music on speakers
No more 8-hour headphone days
A higher quality of questions and more self-reliance

Cons 😢

Glitches or bugs in software make for awkward situations sometimes
Lack of body language and other subtle stuff when you don't see the other person(s)
Tempted to eat more candy/snacks since they're at hand
I miss all the birthday celebrations with cake and other treats
No more delicious hamburgers at that one joint close to the office

How to not be a dinosaur.

Johan van Tongeren — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 13:24:34 +0000

This is the story of how I became an experienced senior frontend developer and how I had to start all over again. How it felt like I had to start all over. How to learn.

This story is mostly about learning React, but might apply to other frameworks as well. Heck, it might even apply to completely different areas of expertise.

What happened?

It is 2019 now and I am 37 years old. I have been working for 15+ years professionally as a web developer and web designer. After high school I went to design school and learned to be a designer. But I have also always been interested in coding. In the early 90's I was already writing code in GW-Basic. I can recall writing my first lines of code in the last grade of primary school. Later I learned HTML and even a little PHP 3. In design school I also learned Flash and OOP in Lingo. When my class got the task to code a simple dice-rolling program, I wrote the complete Monopoly game. Just because writing code was a never-ending path of discovery, wonder and dopamine.

This is not me. But it could have been if I had such an awesome mustache at the age of ten

In the years working as a developer I have seen the landscape around me change drastically. When I started designing and coding in the early 2000s, CSS, some javascript and later jQuery was all I needed to master being a frontender. I also added some backend code (PHP and even Coldfusion in a dark era) to be able to integrate the frontend code with the backend. So for years I could design a project, code it and integrate it. At one point I was named a full stack developer. Life was simple. Even simpler when post-processors like SCSS came to life. I was like "I got this, bro!"

Also not me.

So what changed?

So I was happily writing SCSS, JS and some PHP, but then around 2012 the world started to change around me. I saw more and more articles about fancy frameworks like AngularJS on Twitter. At some point it seemed like new frameworks were being released every day. I was naturally drawn to this, but couldn't keep up and got a little overwhelmed by the seeming complexity of some of these frameworks. And I also suffered a bit of metathesiophobia.

Still not me.

Then one day I attended a meetup where some guy enthusiastically demonstrated AngularJS. He made a list of hospital employees which could be clicked to unfold a list of their certifications and skills. A very simple page. And the amount of code that was shipped to make this simple page work was over 1mb.

So that was it for me. This new stuff was overly complex, scary and most of all: I could write this accordion list in less than 1kb of vanilla JS. Or maybe even without JS in CSS and HTML only… My common sense said: "Why the **** would you use something so complex for something so simple?!"

At that time I was the only frontend developer at MyOnlineStore. And I have always been the only frontend developer for all my previous employers. So there was nobody to convince me that it would be wise to embrace these new techniques.

Why I stood still for so long

In late 2015, when I was already late to the party I got sick. A severe burnout followed by a big relapse one year later while I was still recovering. When I felt a bit better after a while and came back to the MyOnlineStore offices everything had changed. There were two new frontend developers. With new repos, new code, new words, new everything!

It was 2017 already. I did not know where to start. I didn't dare to ask for help, because of my misplaced pride. I was writing code before some of my new colleagues were even born… and now I should go to these guys and admit I had no clue what I was doing?

But I tried… I tried to keep up with it for a few months and then I was like: "I don't get it! fuck this shit!"

"I have been doing design and development 50/50 for all of my career, so now it's time to say goodbye to one of these and focus on the other." And since I got so scared of The New Frontend World, I fled to the design department of MyOnlineStore. This was in early 2018.

Yes, this is me doing design

Unfortunately, after a year of doing (UX) design, I found out this was the wrong choice. After years of intensive therapy and running straight into a black hole that was another potential burnout, I came to the conclusion that design was not for me. I am able to design, but I can't handle the stress that goes with it. I felt like I had to answer and fight for all the design choices I made. And since my UX designing was mostly driven by instinct, this was really hard for me. On top of that, it all felt very personal. Maybe I can handle it today or in the near future, with all the things I have learned since, but not then. It fueled my insecurity enormously.

And then in late 2018, I decided to go back to frontend development. There I was, a frontend dinosaur in a modern world.

Yes this is me.

How to get up to speed?

Now I faced a big challenge. I didn't want to go extinct like a real dinosaur and stick to my old habits, so how do you get up to speed after being paused for a few years in a world that changed (and is still changing) so rapidly? The first thing to overcome was my aversion for The New Frontend World™️. I tried to look at React and all other new tools with a fresh and unbiased view.

While I was away in design world a lot has changed within our codebase, but also in The New Frontend World™️. The tools we used improved or were replaced with better alternatives. The tools and codebase became more solid and mature.

Then there was news: React Hooks was about to be released in React 16.8. This made code so much more readable that I started thinking "Hmm, maybe I can do this".

I don't want to go all geeky on the differences between hooks and classes and why hooks are so awesome, especially since there are many excellent articles written on this subject. If you would like to learn more about this, you should check them out.

For me personally the biggest thing was the improved simplicity of using hooks in function components compared to using class components. Where it felt like class components made me jump through hoops to keep track of state, hooks just let me use useState().

For example, in oldskool classes, I used to write this to increment a counter:

this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1 })

Where hooks let me do this:

setCount(count + 1)

I bet that if you are reading this you'll feel that the second version is simpler even if you have little (react) programming experience.

After this "challenge accepted!" point the hardest obstacle had to be overcame: how to handle the "I have to start all over again" feeling. I felt like I knew nothing. I was Jon Snow.

Dealin' with dem feelins...

Who had I been kidding all these years calling myself a senior developer? How embarrassing was it that I had to ask my 12 years younger colleague for help over and over again...

Some people will think "what's the big deal?", and I am happy for you if you do, but you have to understand that asking for help was a big issue for me. And a major cause for my burn out and the personality disorder that came with it.

So I did two things: I decided to start learning all these new tools and frameworks and more importantly I started to ask for help. But the most important thing I did: I told my colleagues how I was feeling and how insecure I was about everything. They were very supportive and this gave me the confidence to go for it.

One of the most supportive things they did is showing me that I did make progress. A lot, actually. They also showed me that not knowing everything is not the end of the world. As long as you keep trying and learning, things will work out in the end.

Soon, I also realized I did not have to start all over again at all. It might have felt like it, but I still had a big headstart with my years of experience in programming overall. It was just a new framework and new tools that I needed to learn, not learning how to speak and not the first tool I ever used.

It will take some time to learn all these new things. And that's okay. Good things take time. I should have realized this earlier since it's literally written on my body, but sadly it's not that obvious sometimes.

Yes, this is also me.

Okay great, challenge accepted! Where to begin?

First I made a list of all the tools we use. There were quite a few things for me to learn: Typescript, Babel, Webpack, React, Apollo, Redux, GraphQL, Yarn and many more. This list was somewhat overwhelming until I started to put them into two groups: things I needed to learn right from the start and things I could figure out later. It turned out the first list is not that big and a lot more do-able.

For example, I now know how to set up a project using Babel, although I have no idea about the inner workings. And that's okay, I will learn it someday. Until then it's perfectly fine to ask a colleague who does get it.

Bottom line is that it is okay to not know things. It's not the number of things you know that makes you a senior developer, it's the way you handle things that make you a senior. In my opinion.

I have always tried to take some time for personal growth once in a while, but this was only a few spare hours every now and then. However, for a few months our company MyOnlineStore is doing so-called Ship-it days where we developers can do whatever we want as long as it's somehow work-related. This is a great way for me to learn stuff I might not naturally learn during everyday work. When I work in our normal codebase I just run yarn dev, storybook starts and that's it. But on these ship-it days I create new repo's, install packages and configure everything myself. That is a great way to learn new things.

Conclusion

Take your time: good things take time.

Be yourself.

Be awesome.

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If you think working at MyOnlineStore would be something for you, here are our job openings (NL).

If you have questions about this blog check out what I do in my spare time or just want to get in touch, you can find me at Bad Decision Works Instagram

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Cheers 👋