Are You Too Dumb To Code? A Chat About Imposter Syndrome

[Music] hey what's going on guys so I know the title are you too dumb to code is a little click baity for my taste but it's the topic of the video and I posted a long tweet about this yesterday and it got some great responses so I figured I'd make a video on it so from what I've seen over the years having the feeling that you're too dumb or not good enough to code is something that a lot of a lot of us feel at some point throughout our learning process in sometimes throughout our entire career and I've been doing this for over 15 years and I would say that at least once a week sometimes more I run into an issue or some kind of bug and I think to myself maybe I'm too stupid to be doing this and definitely too dumb to be teaching this for that matter and I'm going to talk a little bit about why I think it this is so prevalent in software development and then I'll share kind of my own experience with this so what I'm really talking about is impostor syndrome and if you don't know what that is it's when you feel like you don't belong in a certain field or profession sometimes despite any evidence of your competence and your achievements and it's a common experience especially in fields like software development where the the rapid pace of change and the constant need to learn and adapt can be really daunting and and not just software development but any any kind of Technology field because technology just grows so fast and I think that that's why many of us feel dumb or stupid at times uh if you think of a field or profession like say being a hairdresser and I don't mean to pick on hairdressers it's just my wife is a hairdresser so I'm I'm using that as an example because I've seen her do this profession for 18 years but I think that this is true for most Blue Collar jobs you you have to learn the trade right and that can be very difficult you go through school you learn to adapt you find your groove but once you do once you learn that fundamental knowledge the stuff that you have to learn from that point on is very very minimal relative to software development and the main reason being is there's just so much to it there's so much to technology and it's always changing and I don't know for sure but I don't think that there's many hairdressers that have an impostor syndrome and that's just one example of course now with tech you again you you have to constantly be learning it's impossible to know even CL close to everything even if you're talking about a single programming language there's always more to learn which means that there's a bunch of stuff that you're not going to know and that can sometimes cause you to to question yourself so I think that that's the first reason why we may feel this way it's just an abundance of information the second is because I think that a lot of us including myself pay attention to other developers and it seems like everyone else knows more than you do and I know not everyone feels this way but a lot do uh however a lot of the time the truth is that many of those people that you're looking at that you feel know a lot more than you do they feel the same way you do it's just you don't see their struggles and their screw-ups you know you don't see them going to the documentation a 100 times to look up the same stupid block of code or spending hours troubleshooting a seemingly simple uh issue the reality is coding involves uh a lot of trial and error searching for Solutions on online these days a lot of AI and chat GPT so every developer regardless of their experience level has been through these challenges and you can't really go by what you see on the surface and of course everyone has been doing this for different different amounts of time now I'm not saying that everyone has imposter syndrome in fact I've met quite a few devs that are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum that think they're smarter than everyone else and they can do no wrong I think we've all met people like that and it's not just developers as for me personally a lot of people think that because I teach and I create courses or because I've been doing this for so long that it comes easy to me and that's the furthest thing from the truth you know when I was in high school uh a was a really good grade for me so learning just doesn't come easy to me in fact I think that what makes me a really good teacher and why I've been successful in this area is because I understand how to explain things in a way for people like me that don't find it very easy to wrap their head around certain Concepts you know I think a lot of great natural-born programmers aren't always the best teachers because they can't relate to the newbies you know they can't they can't understand how to not understand if that makes sense so with that said you can imagine working in this field that I've questioned myself many times you know and it was bad in the beginning and as time went on it got better but I still think these thoughts pretty often but the main difference between thinking them now and back then is that now I I have the thought and I let it pass you know I don't dwell on it I don't let it affect me emotionally or drive me in any decision making it's just there and then it's gone and that's really the best advice that I can give you guys is to is to not let these thoughts control you and to also realize that many people around you feel the same exact way they just don't show it just like you don't walk around showing how much you're struggling you know although these days it is more accept able to say that you're struggling which is good I mean we shouldn't go around whining all day but I think that the fact that we're able to even talk about imposture syndrome is a good thing because at one point nobody talked about this stuff I think that it lets people know that they're not alone especially beginners and that's really the reason for me making this video and and posting tweets like that you know and I had a bunch of people thank me because when they see someone that has you know built a pretty big following in this Niche and has experience and and you know uh when they see people like that having the same issues it gives them hope and that's something that I love doing now to to genuinely answer the question can someone be too dumb to code in my opinion I'd say that it's not that they're too dumb it's that they aren't motivated enough to learn you know I have family members that that watch my videos and say they could never do that I could never understand this but they don't want to either it's not something they're interested in you know they're not driven toward technology so it's not that they're not smart enough it's it's just it's not for them you know and if you're truly interested in being a developer and you're willing to do the work there's no question in my mind that you can get there and it may take longer than the average person but you can get there and you're you're free to disagree I'm sure many of you will um this is just my own point of view not just from being a developer but from being a teacher and watching people learn and grow but that's it guys keep pushing you know you're going to hit roadblocks but you'll always find a way around them so that's it thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 65,313

Keywords: too dumb to code, too stupid to code, not smart enough to code, coding, software development

Id: 2vPVdZWhuM8

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023