Impostors and Strangers
Status Report
T-minus a week until beginning my new position. I feel woefully unprepared, so this post is going to trend into getting things off my chest.
Bridging the Gap
So often in life, we have a gap between our understanding and our thoughts, feelings, and lived experience. This is endemic to the human experience -- knowing better but...well, whatever that but may be. Knowing better but being worried regardless, in my case, in this case.
To outline a few things I understand and the perspectives I, honestly, need to shift away from in order to feel more confident going forward.
I understand that no one is actually fully or often adequately prepared to start a new gig, especially in an industry where duties and needed knowledge often vary so much between organizations regardless of role. This doesn't prevent me from feeling like I don't (somehow, preemptively) and won't (anxiety) know what I'm doing.
I understand that no one earnestly expects you to know what you're doing right off the bat, that onboarding and learning periods are the name of the game. Learning in a sufficiently complex organization is 'drinking from the hose' and all that, and in a spot where it's simpler (or the infrastructure and such are simpler, in my case) there's still a curve. This doesn't prevent me from worrying that early in the process things will go pear-shaped and I won't be able to recover. This is compounded by some in-office work, which feels, under the gaze of the Other in prosaic space, like an increased opportunity to be 'found out'. Impostor syndrome rearing its head, in case it wasn't clear already.
I understand that tech roles of the sort I occupy aren't about pure technical knowledge, let alone retention, but instead about critical thinking, learning, and other skills. Regardless, I worry that I don't have a good enough working technical knowledge and that I might not have the scaffolding to exercise those other skills on the level I'm expected to. Worse, I'm not going to be the junior this time, and the expectations are different -- including expectations to teach and be more 'senior' than other dev, as thorny as that term is in industry currently.
I understand that, going back to in-office work, everyone got messed up by lockdown and its aftermath pretty bad and that it holds true more than ever what Robert Anton Wilson said: "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." If there were sane human beings, they aren't or are less so now, slightly deranged and damaged, by a worldwide years-long trauma we're not out of yet. Health concerns of going into the office, considerations of whether to mask, and more aside, I worry that most people don't recognize our present condition. Regardless, my social skills weren't top-tier before the isolation of lockdown and the strangeness of all the time after, and they definitely are worse for it. Not much gets done on office days, supposedly, which tracks with my experience and most anecdotes these days, but the focus on socializing and team building that that time entails is another locus of worry and potential failure.
How do I bridge the gap? How do I shift perspective to be able to move forward more effectively? I think the first step is to name it. So here's me, getting real, naming (some of) it.
Glad that this blog is not indexed, and I might edit (to revise or add to) or take down this post accordingly depending on how helpful that naming ends up being.