tech industry focus imposter write didnt constantly

techsuch May 9, 2021 0 Comments

Being an imposter in the tech industryThe imposter syndrome is a common ‘syndrome’ faced by many, especially in thetech industry where changes are a constant, and lagging behind meant beingcertain death.Or so I had thought.Working professionally as a Front-End Developer, the need to constantly keepup with the latest technologies has become tiring. With the plethora of shinynew web frameworks coming out faster than I can even understand them, Istruggle with picking what to focus on.I remember applying for a developer position at a tech company once, andcompletely flopped the technical interview. I left the interview knowing Iwouldn’t have gotten the job, but more importantly, I felt terrible. Therewere technical questions I couldn’t answer as I didn’t know how to answerthem, or have no prior knowledge of the subject at all.The interviewers were kind enough to explain certain concepts, which I couldunderstand but not explain in detail. A lot of the questions asked were for apopular JS framework, which I didn’t have much experience in as the learningcurve for it was too steep.Even though I graduated with a Bachelor of Information Technology, and have acouple of years in the development field, I felt like an imposter. I didn’tknow how to get out of the imposter mindset, and it was only recently that atweet by Jen Myers when it all made sense.> Devs complain constantly about how hard CSS is and yet the people who are> good at it are constantly valued lower.— Jen Myers >It resonated with me. Working in a digital design studio, the focus on userexperience is naturally more than say knowing what Javascript Promises are, ordoing a Binary Search Tree Check. Yet, in the tech industry, the focus onbeing able to write JS code seems the triumph over say writing great HTML andCSS.I love CSS, I love playing with SVGs and animating them, or buildinginteractions that delight the user. Are these not as important as being ableto write JS? Are these tasks meant to be left to the designer just because itrequires more aesthetic ability? Are we not in the industry to solve problems?This devaluation of skills within the tech industry has to stop, and it has tostart with us respecting the value of work we produce as artisans in the webecosystem. We are here to solve problems, not compare who has more skills.* * *Mandy Michael has a great post ‘Is there any value in people who cannot writeJavaScript?’ which I very much agree on.

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