I earn more than junior me could imagine. I still feel like a fraud.
I turned down interviews at Meta, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft and Amazon. The voice in my head still tells me I don't belong.
As a junior engineer I worked for a local furniture company doing SEO and web development by day and fitting carpet by night. That was my first job in tech.
No big tech. Earning £16,000 a year and £100 a night to lay carpet.
If you’d told that version of me what I’d be earning a decade later, he wouldn’t have believed you. If you’d told him about the company names on his CV, the speaking gigs, the courses, the audience size, he’d have assumed you had the wrong Ryan.
He’d also have assumed that the Ryan in that future felt completely different on the inside.
He didn’t. I don’t. The numbers changed. The feeling didn’t.
The training I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it out.
The work doesn't get easier by waiting for the next title to fix it. It gets easier when you stop figuring it out alone.
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Most people in tech are operating on the assumption that the imposter syndrome stops at some point. Senior engineer. Staff engineer. FAANG offer. Big enough audience. Their own company. Pick the milestone. The belief underneath the milestone is that once you get there, the voice in your head telling you that you don’t really belong will finally shut up. I am here to tell you that it doesn’t. The voice doesn’t stop. It just finds something new to be loud about.
The £16,000 version of me
I worked for a local furniture company in my first “proper” tech job. SEO and web development by day, carpet fitting at night to make the numbers work. £100 a night was real money to me. The day job was a real job to my parents. I felt extraordinarily lucky to be doing either of them.
I remember sitting with a book on object-oriented programming and feeling completely lost. Objects, classes, inheritance, polymorphism. I read the same chapter three times and still couldn’t tell you what I’d just read. It felt like the kind of thing other people understood and I didn’t, and that there was something fundamental about being a real engineer that I was missing.
The story I told myself was simple. Real engineers understood this stuff. The people at the big companies, the ones writing the libraries I was using, they got it. I didn’t. Once I understood OOP, once I got a “proper” engineering job at a company you’d heard of, the feeling would stop. The feeling was the gap between me and the real engineers. Close the gap, lose the feeling.
That was the deal I made with myself. Get good enough and the discomfort goes away.
It didn’t stop. It moved.
Every day I was becoming a better programmer. I got the “proper” job. Then I got a better one. Then I worked at Yelp.
The first week at Yelp I sat in a room with engineers who were, by any honest measure, some of the sharpest people I’d ever met. I felt exactly the way I felt reading the OOP book. The room had changed. The feeling hadn’t. The gap I’d been trying to close had quietly moved further away the moment I caught up to where I thought it had been.
This is the bit nobody warns you about. You think you’re chasing competence. You’re actually chasing a feeling. And the feeling isn’t tied to your skill level, it’s tied to whoever you decide counts as a real engineer in that moment. The reference point keeps moving because you keep moving.
If junior-me could look at where I am now, he would be completely overwhelmed with pride:
6 x course creator on Dometrain with some of the biggest names in the industry.
Leading engineers at big American companies with a 100% manager satisfaction score for 3 years running.
Programming committee for LeadDev 2 years running.
Speaker at CTO Craft.
60,000 followers on LinkedIn and a combined 20,000 on newsletters.
Turning down interviews at places like Meta, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft and Amazon so I could dare to dream and eventually run my own business.
Worked at Yelp and met people I could only ever dream of being in the company of.
Read that list back as a stranger and you’d assume the person behind it has it figured out.
I don’t. I sit at my desk most weeks and feel like the carpet fitter who got lost reading about objects. The only thing that’s changed is what I’m comparing myself to.
The threshold you’re waiting for doesn’t exist
Most engineers organise their careers around the belief that there’s a threshold, and once you cross it, the feeling stops. Some people pick salary. Some people pick title. Some people pick the company logo. Some people pick the size of their audience or their bank account or their LinkedIn followers. The threshold is different for everyone. The structure of the belief is identical.
It works like this. You feel like a fraud now. You assume the people one rung up don’t. You assume that getting where they are will fix the feeling. So you push. You take the job you don’t really want for the title you think will help. You burn yourself out trying to close a gap that’s already closed. You sacrifice things that matter to you because you’ve convinced yourself the prestige on the other side will be worth it. You get there.
The feeling shows up too. It just brought new material.
The senior engineers you assume have it figured out are watching the staff engineers. The staff engineers are watching the principals. The principals are watching the people at the next company over who got promoted faster. Everyone is looking up and seeing the people they assume have stopped feeling it, and everyone is wrong. The people at the top of the ladder you’re climbing are not on holiday from imposter syndrome. They’ve just learned to do good work while feeling it.
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Your career is the amount of stress you can handle
I heard a line recently that has stuck with me. Your career, in the end, is a direct reflection of the amount of stress you can handle. I think that is one of the truest things I have ever heard about working in tech.
Every step up the ladder is not really a step up in skill. It is a step up in the volume of uncertainty, ambiguity and pressure you are willing to carry without flinching. The skill side mostly takes care of itself if you keep showing up. The stress side is the actual bottleneck. And the stress, more often than not, is the imposter feeling in working clothes.
Which means the thing you are training, whether you realise it or not, is your relationship with that feeling. Not your relationship with OOP, or system design, or one-to-ones. Those are the surface. The deeper skill is staying functional while the voice is loud.
This connects to something I wrote a couple of years ago about fear, and I still believe every word of it. Fear is not the enemy. Fear is information. The career-defining moments I have had all sit on the other side of a moment where I almost talked myself out of it. The interview I nearly cancelled. The first course I nearly didn’t record. The first newsletter I nearly didn’t send. Every time, it was not me trying to walk away. It was fear. Once you can tell the difference between you and the fear, you stop letting the fear make decisions for you. You start using it as a signal that the thing in front of you matters.
The imposter feeling is the same machinery in a different costume. You don’t beat it. You learn to recognise it, and then you do the work anyway.
Final Thoughts
The thing junior-me got wrong wasn’t that he was bad at OOP. He genuinely was. The thing he got wrong was thinking that being bad at OOP was the reason he felt like a fraud. It wasn’t. The feeling was looking for a reason and OOP was the reason it found. Once he got good at OOP, the feeling found a different reason. It has been finding reasons ever since.
If you are reading this and waiting for the next milestone to make the feeling stop, it isn’t coming. The senior title won’t do it. The bigger salary won’t do it. The job at the company you’ve been chasing won’t do it. The audience won’t do it. The business won’t do it.
So give yourself a damn chance. You have achieved so much just to be here reading this.
If you can let tomorrow be a good day, imagine how good next week can be. Imagine how good next year can be. The feeling is going to come along for the ride either way. You may as well bring it somewhere worth going.
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"The reference point keeps moving because you keep moving" is the line I'm sitting with. Most imposter-syndrome writing treats the feeling as a bug to fix at the next milestone. Reframing it as a constant (and the real skill as your tolerance for working while it's loud) is a much more useful frame. The carpet-fitter-reading-about-objects image is going to stick.