Phil Choi tells early-career programmers to stop measuring themselves against colleagues and focus on being useful with what you have. He recalls a coworker who spun up AWS instances and scraped real-estate listings, which triggered his imposter syndrome. He became a senior developer after 30.
Questions this video answers
After the age of 30.
Chapters
When you're starting your career as a programmer, you often compare yourself to the programmers who are more experienced or some kind of prodigy. You often wonder, how can that guy or girl be so much better than me? Then you will question yourself and compare yourself to others and wonder, will I ever become as good as these people? But the question you should ask yourself is, how can I be useful to the company even with my skill level now as a senior developer or tech lead, he or she will never think this junior or mid level developers so horrible, they will always find a way to use them. You got hired as a junior developer role, so why wouldn't the company use you to do the work when they're paying you the money? My name is Phil. I became a senior developer after the age of 30. If this video becomes of use to you, please share and comment on a time where you felt like you weren't good enough for the job and compared yourself to the developers that have more experience. You need to understand it's all in your head and one day you'll be as good as them if you're not already. So. There are plenty of times where I felt like I wasn't a good enough developer. I mean even now, like I'm always so impressed by like all everyone in like the Discord community and you know, sometimes you kind of feel like, oh, I've never like studied that before. Like I could be more experienced in some things, but some people are like working on really cool things that I wish I was working on. And you know, people probably think the same thing anyways. But like one time, like you know, like where I was comparing myself to others or this like imposter syndrome like really hit my head was at my first job, like I brought this. I was like one of the first hires there. And then I brought up, I brought another friend to the company and I'm glad it was him because he was a really hard worker. And I remember there was a senior developer, but he was like, he was like our CTO advisor and he was working at an office next to us and he would always teach us like little things. Like he'd teach us like how to like hit the APIs from the government and like run like these, you know, servers and all this kind of stuff. But I remember one night, everyone, I had to go, I had to go like tutor English one night or something. And this guy, he was like working all night and he even went home and worked right? And he was a super, super hard worker and I really appreciated him. It Pushed me to work hard too. And I think the next morning he came and he had, like, really dark circles under his eyes and he was like. And we got like a bunch of aws, Amazon, like free, free credits. And he was like, yeah, we need to scrape, like, all the real estate listings from this website. So he learned how to, like, spin up all these instances and create these, like, bots and all these, all these things, like, scrape all that data. So I was like, whoa, I wish I did that, you know? But he was like, so, like, he had so much more experience than me or anything. He just had the time because I was at the time, I was like, preoccupied with something. But I wish I had chance to do that. And then people would, like, look at me with that admiration or something. But, like, it's not like, obviously, like, there's other times where he felt like I was doing some other stuff, right? Like, like mapping some stuff or something like that. I don't know. But I just feel like everyone feels that way about each other, but it's just like a missed opportunity to be able to do that, right? Or like, programming is so vast. There's so many jobs to do. Like, yeah, like, I want to be working on this. I want to. Like, I'm comparing myself to this. Or like, I have to work on this part, like the front end or like, connecting the APIs. I can't work on, like, animations right now. Like, even though I wish I did. Right? Yeah, that's like some kind of things. Like, I. Like, you should never really compare yourself or the. Compare the body of work that you're doing with someone else, because they're gonna wish they're doing the things you are, and I'm gonna wish I'm doing the things they are, right? Like, I think this happens a lot. Like, when I'm working on front a lot, I'm always like, okay, I really want to do back end stuff. And then when I'm working on back end stuff, I'm always thinking I want to work on front end stuff. So it's just like fomo, right? You, you, you have fear of missing out on the things like you're not doing. But everyone's feeling that way. So honestly, and it's not even real because, you know, they feel the same way and no one's thinking about that about you. Just be utilizable, you know, do your part, do your responsibilities, do the things that you need to do, and, you know you'll keep that wagon moving if you try to do everything. It's gonna. I mean, you're gonna be the one pushing, and it's, like, not really moving. So it's a teamwork. Everyone needs to do their part and keep going. So just like, point being, everyone wants to do everything, but you can't do everything. One person is not like company or one person is not going to be men. But just be happy with the body of work you do, and you'll have your opportunities and chances to do whatever you want. And just remember, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Coding saves lives.
