I Am Not a Programmer
Imposter Syndrome Abides
“I am NOT a programmer”. I said that in an interview once. To be fair it was not a programming job, it was a QA job for…well, I don’t even remember what company. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure what the interviewer said to prompt that response from me. My sense is that we were getting in the weeds about what the job entailed and that there was an implication that I might be asked to look at (or God forbid write) code. To which, my response was “…well, I’m not a programmer”.
That was over 15 years ago. Since then, the recession in 2008 happened and there were no QA jobs to be found, so I was dragged kicking and screaming into becoming a programmer, and most days I do feel like a programmer. You know the routine…its up and down. You have those days where nothing seems to work, and you feel cursed. In the deepest darkest recesses of my mind, a monster says “…you know you should not be doing this…you know you are not a programmer”.
This monster is sitting behind me as I comb through StackOverflow and Google. I beg for help in Slack. Hoping that someone with a sharper brain might loan me just a smidgen of their grey matter to solve this puzzle that is code. Surely not every programmer feels like this. Don’t tell me that they do because its a lie. The MIT Grads…the Stanford Grads…they don’t feel this way. At least not the good ones. That is what the monster tells me. Zuck never felt this way. Yeah, he faced problems, but he slowly and methodically worked through his code until it just worked. It was a therapeutic and ultimately refreshing process for him. Its just pain for me.
Pulled down a rabbit hole and three hours later you are no closer to a solution than you were when you started.
You are not a programmer.
MySQL is broken. That's fine, I’ll just uninstall and reinstall it. Half a day gone. You will never get those four hours back.
You are not a programmer.
Run Rails Console real quick to query a model.
/Users/marklocklear/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.8/lib/ruby/2.2.0/irb/completion.rb:9:in `require’: dlopen(/Users/marklocklear/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.8/lib/ruby/2.2.0/x86_64-darwin17/readline.bundle, 9): Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/readline/lib/libreadline.7.dylib (LoadError)WTF? It worked yesterday. I haven't changed anything. Google the error. Oh good…its all over StackOverflow. Easy fix. Nope, that didn’t work. F#@$!!!! Why!?!?!? Oh…it must be RVM…reinstall that version of Ruby. Ask a colleague. You are running RVM? You should be running rbenv. F#@$!!!!
You are not a programmer.
Apply for a six-figure remote job.
Could I bother you with a small coding challenge? Nothing too complicated, shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes.
Two hours and 10 lines of code later I complete the challenge.
Given that the majority of the code is about that two-digits-at-the-end thing, can you come up with a cleaner/shorter/more elegant way to do that? You don’t need to worry about performance for this.
Another hour racking my brain for a cleaner/shorter/more elegant way to parse a phone number. F’ it, all I can do is rearrange the furniture to save a few lines of code. It's down to seven lines now.
Hm, that’s not much better, and also doesn’t return the correct results.
We’re going to pass.
Don’t take it personally. My job is to make sure we’d be a great fit on every level. The worst outcome for both of us would be that you take the job and we find out we don’t enjoy working together. That would be such a waste of time.
In my estimation, we wouldn’t be a good fit.
You are not a programmer.
So, now is the part where I am supposed to list all the apps and SQL queries I have written. All the servers I have spun up…and updated and migrated. All the interesting problems I have solved and projects I have led.
But the monster does not care. He just sits back and smiles…
…and waits.
Because he knows sooner or later, I will learn a new framework or dev ops tool. Meet a cantankerous colleague or break an install. And doubt will creep in, and that is when he will come for a visit. He will shackle his chain to my arm and I will visit again with my old friend.
But that's OK.
I am a programmer.
