BUSTED! When you realize you're an imposter! - Unity GameDev devlog

hey what's up I'm Jason and I'm an imposter or at least that's how I felt before and that's what I want to talk about today I'm gonna talk about imposter syndrome I want to talk about how to tell if you're really an imposter or if you just have this syndrome that most of us have and I also want to talk about how to know if you're ready for your first game job so if you've been thinking about getting a game job maybe you've been learning and getting a little bit better and you're not quite sure stick around because we'll talk about that at the end before we dive into things though I just want to ask you to please like and subscribe and if you don't do those just share the video and said in fact don't do the other two just hit share share it everywhere and the world to get out and everybody will know that we're not all imposters maybe we'll see so first I think I need to describe what impostor syndrome is and we can start with a simple definition that might pop up over here under my hand or under my finger or somewhere it'll pop up somewhere Thank You Josh but I'm gonna just explain it in my own words and for me impostor syndrome is that feeling that you get when you either start at a new place or just walk into a room with a bunch of people and you're pretty sure that they're all dramatically smarter than you you feel like you're maybe not the smartest person in the room or not even close or that you don't really know what everybody else knows that everybody else has this this knowledge and they know these things that you have no idea about and that everybody thinks that you know things that you just don't know and it's this fear of being found out that people you know people find out hey he doesn't know this thing or she doesn't know that one thing or whatever these things are and it's this fear that it's not just one thing that it's like everything so it happens to all developers that I that I've run into at least so really quickly just if you're having this impostor syndrome you're not alone it's very common thing and it happens pretty much everywhere but it happens in cycles at least that happens for me in cycles and I've seen it for other people in cycles and usually it goes like this we start off in our game job our first programming job and you go in there thinking like okay cool this is gonna be awesome I'm gonna be an amazing programmer I'm gonna do all kinds of cool stuff and you get in there and you look around and you realize like you don't know any of the stuff that's going on like you know might know how to code you might know a little bit you've done a game or something or you've made me made a little project or did some projects in school but you get in there on at least on the first job and if you're not by yourself if you're around other developers who are doing things you're going to feel most likely very overwhelmed like how do they know all of these things how is it that you know they tell me to do this one little task like it's a simple little thing but it's like a mind-blowing you know like I'm a monstrosity of an idea for me like it's something that I could never do you know but they're just like oh yeah I just go add this thing or go create this new system or go add this cash in later and you're like I don't even know what that is right it's the feeling that you start to get or wouldn't you when you watch other people talk about their tasks now ideally when you start with a new job you're not getting these crazy tasks you're getting the the smaller stuff like go fix this little text here go change this little bug here and trying to learn along the way but you might be seeing the other people doing these bigger tasks too and then that just kind of builds into it because you're like I know what I'm doing and what I'm doing is relatively simple but the thing that they're doing sounds insane there's no way right like that's that's kind of where it starts but then over time you get more comfortable right you're you're at this place whatever the job is whatever the project you're working on is and you start to learn more about it you get a little bit more domain knowledge you get a little bit better at the systems and you learn from the people that are doing with some of the things and you'll start to feel a lot more confident and a lot of the time the imposter syndrome will start to dissipate a little bit and you'll feel like okay now I know how to code a little bit and I figured out that I can learn some of these other things that I didn't know so now I pretty much know how to do everything there's just little things that I need to learn how to do and that's kind of where people end up I'd say in the middle of their career so you start off very very afraid usually and then build up to a point of I'd say usually overconfidence right you get to the point where the imposter syndrome is gone you now know that you can do just about anything and it just take a little bit of time and a little bit of searching you'll be able to figure it out no issue tear it up and it'll be great right and that sticks around for a long time I had the same problem I had the same exact thing where I started off thinking hey I don't know anything hopefully nobody finds out before before and fires me or something right and then I learned and learned and learned and I got comfortable got to the point where I could do the job fine I could add things but I wasn't good I thought I was good because I could get things done I could get tasks done I could you know make the project work or make the thing do what it needed to do but I wasn't doing it quickly I wasn't doing it in a good way I wasn't doing it in a maintainable clean way and it wasn't preventing myself from creating new bugs was doing a lot of bad things I just knew that I could make anything happen I just didn't know I couldn't make it all happen right so the impostor syndrome then just kind of fades away disappeared for me and I've seen this happen for a lot of people it's you know usually around like three to five years in start to feel really really confident maybe a little bit overconfident and not realize all of the things you don't know and this happens more so if you're in a single place so if you're not going from company to company you're not changing companies and you're not interacting with developers enough to be constantly learning then this is where I see this happen a lot in it there are some environments where you could stay the same place and constantly be learning and constantly be growing like mob programming setups I really love those and there are lots of other places where that can happen but most of the time this is where the that that ego comes from it's the whole I got things done it's all good I don't need to know anymore and then things change right then you change organizations you switch jobs you know you get bored of this project it's time to start a new one and it's a brand new project from scratch and you've never done that before or it's a new type of game a new engine or something else and you're completely lost and the whole cycle kind of resets you go right back into that imposter syndrome where you're like I thought it I knew how to do everything but now there are a bunch of things that I don't know how to do and I keep finding out all this information about all these other things that I don't know how to do and I keep hearing about things at conferences and talks and YouTube videos that I don't know how to do and like what am I gonna do how do I catch up everybody's gonna find out again that hey maybe I should just go back to just doing the the simple thing just the easy repeatable stuff that I was able to do before and not grow not try to learn new things because I can do that and I won't get caught right and that's that's a trap you want to avoid right don't fall into this whole fear of new things or fear of switching jobs or fear of taking on new tasks because somebody's gonna find out you're going to find out that well first you're probably a lot better at the thing that you you're you're probably not nearly as much of an impostor as you think you are I guess is a good way to put it and the only way to get better is to keep doing new things and keep learning this new stuff so if you just push yourself into a corner and hide you're never gonna get better at it you're never gonna grow and you're just screwing yourself so don't do that instead there are a couple things that I would recommend you do so let's just cover those and the first is to just talk to people so I think the number one thing that kills developers careers and growth is not talking to other developers just coding in a vacuum with just yourself and Stack Overflow and that's it right you use you figure out what the problem is you get the the requirement from the product manager or whoever it is you figure out how to add that in how that would kind of squeeze into your app and then you move on to the next thing and you never talk to anybody about how you're gonna do it what your design idea are how you want to implement it new things that they're doing or anything else outside of that one little project it's a really good way to limit your growth and limit your knowledge and kind of lock yourself in and really turn you into somewhat of an impostor when you jump to another career because or jump to another place because you'll never know more than just that one thing so don't do that make sure that you're actually talking to people and now if you can't just get out and jump on new projects or you can't share your own work then get into some user groups and meetups and stuff and just go out and see what other people are doing learn from their projects learn from the mistakes that they're making and the problems that they're having the easiest way for me to learn is just watching other people stumble and fail and have problems because I can see what they did how they tried to solve it what didn't work and then figure out what did work and what works best and then how they've been able to address from and then I also get the benefit of seeing the results of their experiments right they try something and like they try some new framework or some new system I can can follow along and see how that's going and whether or not I should try that and what kind of things I should watch out for so definitely recommend that talking to people is by far the biggest thing but you can also just you know watch a lot of videos you could find something that you're very interested in like a specific subject that you feel your weekend and just take courses on that I do that all the time myself just to dig in deeper on things that I'm not super comfortable with and the most important thing I'd say beyond these two like do both of those but take the feedback and the things that you get from these seriously so if you watch people do stuff and you watch them fail and you want or you watch them succeed with something see what it is that they did and see how you can actually experiment with it don't just like absorb a ton of information write down notes and never use them and forget about them find things that you can actually experiment with yourself and try them out and see how they work if they don't work fine roll them back get rid of them delete them undo them but if they do work you can slowly start to move forward with them and that's why I like to do them as smaller experiments so just like you find a cool pattern drop it in somewhere see if it's gonna work maybe play with it a little bit and then if it doesn't feel right pull it right back out don't just implement things just to implement them but don't just absorb info and ignore it because that's another thing that a lot of people do is they'll just like learn learn learn learn learn but not really get the info not really learn it because they're not actually using the stuff so make sure that you actually experiment with and try the things that you're learning about and then when it comes to imposter syndrome in general just accept that it's a thing right like it is a real thing that almost every developer knows about and talks about and deals with so if you're feeling like you're an imposter and you're trying even a little bit don't worry too much about it they don't don't let it get you down and don't let it make you hide that's the one biggest thing thing don't don't let it make you hide off in a corner and be afraid to talk to people or show anybody anything because people might find out let people find out let people find your weaknesses and your strengths and let them point out your weaknesses you can grow there and let them learn from your strengths right share this knowledge share what you have and can make it a two-way street with other developers that you work with too and just remember that you're not alone everybody has this now let's talk about getting a game job so are you ready for your first game job and this was actually a question that a couple of people have asked me recently and the answer I'd say varies dramatically but I think I can give you a really quick easy way to know so if I give you the task of go create this small mobile game maybe it's like balls I like that game nice simple one where you pull and you smack some balls and if I give you the task of hey go recreate that with all of the features if you can do that on your own without outside assistance maybe with searching with some plugins or whatever but if you can do that and you can build it all on your own and deploy it out then yeah you're definitely ready for at least some sort of a game dev job it may not be ready to go work at a triple-a Studio on you know the next biggest game but you're certainly ready to work at a lot of game studios I wouldn't recommend going in as the only developer on a project because at that point you really want to be working with other developers where you can learn from them and grow you don't want to just be trying to grow and learn on your own kind of like what we've been talking about the whole time but you definitely can get a job doing that like if you're at that point you could definitely get a job doing game development or doing app development so don't be afraid to try don't be afraid to go out there and to end this off I just wanted to point out I think that my wife reminded me about and asked me if I was going to mention which is that um when you're applying for jobs don't don't um self exclude yourself by the requirements section read the actual description so what I used to just tell people was that the job requirements are a lie and it's because they are it usually seems like it's just people coming up with a list of things because they know they need a list of things so they will come up with things just to put on the list just to make it a list that's it it usually is a bunch of right like it's just not accurate so what you should do instead is look at the job description look at what you'd actually be doing and think to yourself like do I think I could do this I think I could do most of this if I think I could do most of this then apply for the job ignore most of the job requirements obviously if there are crazy requirements that you know and it's a ton of crazy requirements that you're nowhere near then fine don't but if you meet half the requirements apply just just apply because know that those requirements are probably crap but when you apply apply with a portfolio apply with a link so give them something that they can click on they can go see exactly what you've done where you're at and the best of what you can do that will help you a lot in getting the job but the one thing that will definitely kill you from getting the job or stop iya is fear of even applying so just make sure that you apply remember that job descriptions and especially job requirements are almost always a lie it's almost always just a list of things that we would love to maybe do in the future like I see it all the time it's just all of these things and a third of them or half of them on thing or like stuff that we're not actually doing stuff that we've maybe Loosli talked about that somebody dropped in there and they just keep adding stuff to the list so make sure that you apply and if you can make those mobile games on your own you should be qualified to get in at least in a junior position and start making games and start learning stuff if you can do that and a whole lot more than you are more than ready and you should be working on some sort of a game so get out there and do it if you have questions about this stuff please let me know just drop them down below anyway thank you thanks also to everybody on patreon and everybody who does like and share all right let's go you

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 34,735

Keywords: game development, game dev, unity 3d, unity game dev, unity game devlog, indie game devlog, game devlog, unity devlog, game dev log, devlog, unity, gamedev, devblog, programming, unity3d, c#, imposter, imposter syndrome, unity3d college, #unitytips, indie devlog, indie game dev log, unity 2d, indie game dev, dev, unity tutorial, code monkey, game development unity, brackeys, thomas brush, indie gamedev, how to make a game, jabrils, computer programming, coding, beginner

Id: sgvVZvqHB1g

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PhilippTheProgrammer]

There are two kinds of software developers: Those with imposter syndrome (who haven't yet realized that everyone in the business is just faking it) and those with inflated egos (who believe they are just faking it half as often as everyone else).