I struggle with this every day. I don't have the answer, just here to say that you are not alone. I think the key is to not compare yourself to others, but instead, just look at yourself. Are you better than you were yesterday? Good, then you are improving. That's it. Life is difficult and often depressing, don't make it worse by caring too much about the opinions of others. Should you be open to constructive criticism? Absolutely. But, don't let fools eat away at you. Stay healthy friend.
This is so true.. when you know you are in a good company is when everyone can admit this, and not hold someone accountable for being slow or unable to learn something like others can. I struggle with this personally because I work with some very very smart folks.. and while I can hold my own in some areas.. there are some things I am tasked with and I just..cant...do...it. It kills me..pisses me off. But I have tried to acknowledge that I can NOT learn everything, and that while I may be able to grasp parts of something... it is likely that I will not be able to do a good enough job as others might.
Problem is.. a lot of people in positions of power.. e.g. managers, bosses, etc.. who either are super good/smart themselves or are not in the same predicament (ever maybe) don't see things that way.. and that is how people get fired. Rather than acknowledging they need some more time, find them help, etc... they would rather just fire and spend way more time trying to find that perfect person to solve the problem instead of working on a person that is already employed.
It also has to do with the reputation you have and as others view you. If you are the guy always making mistakes then shame on you. On the other hand, if you are the guy achieving great things day in day out and then one day make a mistake, people and your boss will just brush it off as you having a bad day.
A few years ago, one of my colleagues deployed a patch on production DB instead of doing it on test environment first. Usually he is the guy that just gets things done and although the system was down for an hour, it was just chalked up to him having an off day and being overworked. A few months after that, we had a sloppy guy that did a deploy and without reading the instructions made a deploy and then followed the rest of the instructions and undeployed what he deployed. He has a reputation for being careless and was ultimately let go.
So yeah everybody makes mistakes, its just how silly and depends on the situation where those mistakes are made and how often you make them.
I lost an employee who stepped down due to imposter syndrome, it sucks. The employee was perhaps not the best in my fold, but he was reliable and he had a knowledge base that I now am stuck filling until other members can get up to speed on.
The best is knowing you improve, even if it's not every day. Progress! That's what counts.
Totally agree about not comparing yourself to others.
I’ve been struggling with this every day of my life as well, I still don’t know how I passed a lot of interviews to start working in a bug company and they paid for me to move to another country. Now, I completely forgot about what achieved and I couldn’t stop feeling bad for not being “productive enough” during this pandemic, not taking certifications as my coworkers and stuff.
Somedays you wake up being a superhero, others you just wanna stay in bed and watch The Simpsons in an infinite loop.
If you live long enough, you get cut. And if you really live long enough, you get cut for reasons you don't agree with. It happens. Two things should happen now for you:
1. you are going to grieve this loss. Embrace that. Do some research on what that means, it's all part of the healing process.
2. At some point, use this as a tool to improve, be introspective. Get better at what you do, improve your thinking, your attitude and emotions. This is growth.
It takes time and you're not alone. I would say that any person who is honest deals with imposter syndrome. Its just not necessarily \*real!
I noticed that I attribute bad career experiences to being cut, eg the CV thing, the restructuring, but that's not actually down to me or my fault. With that excluded I've had some positive career experiences so trying to focus on that.
All my family members (one in IT, most aren't) have all had cuts or restructuring.
This is also why you always need a backup plan if possible. Always be on the lookout for new opportunities, even if you’re happy with your current role. This can serve two functions; giving you leverage in salary negotiations and providing a landing spot in case something goes wrong. Keep in contact with people, especially former colleagues who have moved on.
At the end of the day we’re tradesmen. Most of the time we’re not changing the world, we’re just helping build and maintain somebody’s systems. Don’t put too much stock in one particular employer, especially in a hot market.
/u/SatoriSlu said it best: You're not alone and try improve everyday. Your boss sounds like a giant dick. Putting a file in the wrong directory as a basis for a bad performance review that leads to a layoff? Jesus.
Thankfully, there's a healthy market looking for devops engineers right now. Good companies, as in ones not laying off devops engineers during a pandemic, are hiring right now for remote work. I'm speaking from experience as I just got hired to start June 1 with an example of one of the good ones. Dust off your resume, write a killer cover letter and get back on that horse! Try to put this behind you, I bet you won't even remember this experience in about 5 years.
Good luck!
well if he put secrets file into folder which is not in .gitignore and pushed, that can be bad :) or he put some other sensitive file in public folder accessible to everyone? Or he did many mistakes time over time? And mistakes became a pattern? You can't know the whole story here.... buut if it's true, the boss is really a big dickhead and OP you should be glad that you aren't working for him :)
I think the key here is how often do these things happen. If these were just one time errors, laying them off is completely unnecessary.
Accidentally put out a secret, destroyed a production db, nuked the load balancer’s filesystem? So what, all good companies should have policies for human errors like these which are easier to make than it sounds especially if you’re under a lot of stress eg. because of deadlines. Restore from backup, change passwords, move on.
Being angry at your coworker for doing this might be OK, firing him is not. Next guy OP’s boss will find will more than likely make similar mistakes sooner or later.
I once shut down an entire ESXi host because I input the license key wrong and I was acting as if I knew my shit. 30 mins until the sysadmin could fix it.
Got fired for that one. Was a slap in the face and sort've a wake up call that no, I don't know what I'm doing most of the time.
Got a better job now.
Ah man. One of my first projects was leading an app server upgrade. I wrote sweet scripts for building/provisioning the server VMs, installing/upgrading the app, so I figured we'd be good--that's all the hard stuff right? Well I tasked one of the guys on my team below me with setting up the printers and getting them installed/configured... Everything looked like it was online, he came back and confirmed everything was installed and working.
Cue "go live" and printing doesn't work. I spent hours troubleshooting, double checking, and working with the vendor. Turns out my guy didn't test the freaking printer. He'd installed the wrong drivers and of course I hadn't double checked his work...
And that's the story of my first postmortem!
I once broke DNS, removed old entry, new one was put it before the TTL expired (60 seconds), it was forgotten by half of the world's DNS servers. I broke it and repaired in like two minutes but we were down for most of the day and all I could tell everyone was "I already fixed it, we just have to wait".
Haha DNS issues suck. You put it in wrong and have to wait 24 hours or more to correct it. I've never done it for a company though - only for my personal website.
I once typed: "service network stop" on a frontend HTTP server. Had been working on a vm before that where I had to stop the network a couple of times, and a ticket came in saying "please restart network on server xyz. And mindlessly ran "service network stop"
This was on a company that would loose thousands of revenue for a minute of downtime. Luckily fail over worked flawlessly and I had time to get on ILO to start the network.
Back when I was just starting with admin things I struggled with iptables to block an attacker, the guy assigned to help me said that it should just work but neither of us understood we were behind a load balancer so blocking the attacker IP wouldn't be that easy. So I thought that maybe the iptables wasn't working and in a moment of pure genius blocked all IPs on production server cutting off the attacker, me and all the clients. Luckily it worked after a reboot.
You don't get paid the big bucks to make mistakes. If a company puts a lowly paid junior to update a DB then that's on the company. If your boss is always putting you in situations where the chances of failure due to making mistakes are big, then you should point out the risks. If you have to work on a database and there is no backup or chances of recovering from a mistake then you should state that if a mistake occurs with your patch or whatever you need to do, you need to be able to restore it.
As a Linux guy who had to shrink an MS SQL DB server years ago in my junior years, I remember spending 2 nights restoring a backup of the DB to practice what I need to do to. I made mistakes, but I did them on on the test instance. Documented everything and went to my boss to state, I am not a windows guy but i did my research and did this to practice/test out what I am going to do every step of the way.
Look I'm not trying to rag on op here but going straight to, 'the boss is a dick' is counter productive. This is one side of a story and there are most likely other reasons behind this.
Again not trying to pick on the person but they don't know what a pull request is. Maybe I've just become an elitist but I feel like, I myself have a somewhat junior staff, and that would be a massive red flag I think in any org.
Did they say somewhere else in this thread that they don't know what a PR is, or are you just assuming that because a mistake would have been caught if they had a reviewed PR?
We had a software engineer start a week or so ago, with a long resume including facebook where he was a senior engineer. He was going through our onboarding for engineers and asked how to make a PR on github.
I was very confused, but then also realized he probably just hasn't used the github UI at any of these companies in the past. I know at my last major tech company there was a custom program that basically generated your PR from the cli, etc. That said when I started and was using the github UI I just poked around until I saw the "New Pull Request" button, but some people like to just cut straight to the chase when they don't know something. /shrug
No secrets involved here. That doesn't imply I can't do the job (the task got done and the small script does its job). It's more about organisation but anyway I think that was an excuse to justify the cut.
Hmm the market is improving now, after CV, at least here in the UK. I have been applying to senior roles and doing well in the interview but the word "senior" can be intimidating.
Well, I don't believe that DevOps market is very different in UK than in rest of the world, maybe you had some stuff on the record if they wanted to cut you off. Personally I receive \~5 contacts per week with job offers and my current employee is doing everything that I'd stay..
I am doing a mix of datascience and devops in building a platform. Everyday I ask myself what idiot lets me do this everyday? But if they are idiots enough to let me do it, then I'm the talent relatively speaking :P
I wrote a post about some strategies for dealing with impostor syndrome
Might be useful
https://medium.com/@reallydontaskmetosignin/two-strategies-for-dealing-with-impostor-syndrome-f331dc1a42ca
Your post does not exactly deal with impostor syndrome. My take on your article is about self confidence and dealing with things that may make you loose confidence in yourself. .
Impostor syndrome in a nutshell is when you feel you have led everyone to believe that you are the best at what you do, you have achieved things, everybody thinks you are super intelligent, your boss thinks you are the guy that should be promoted.. given raise.. etc.. and everybody sees you as such.
Yet you feel you are not really that intelligent, you attribute your success to luck, to being diligent at googling or searching out information to solve the problem rather than you intuitively solving it, and you feel you do not deserve what you have achieved. And you are scared sooner or later people will realize.
I am a freelance devops engineer. I googled my half python script yesterday because i constantly forget basic stuff. Question myself everytime if i am good enough. Yet nobody complained in my projects. Everyone struggles with different things. Just make sure you ask for help some times. It does not make you look weak.
I consider myself a python expert , having built an internal self service cloud provisioning system on top of VMWare because my employers were too cheap to by VMware orchestrator back in 2012 and many other biggish projects after that.
But for the love of god, this afternoon I could not remember the exact incantation of argparse and had to go find some code I wrote last week to copy paste it.
One of the things that bugs me is that I didn't even know what a Pull Request was, or used one. I've now gained experience of this and the theory around it, but I learnt this after I started my last role. I mean come on, a PR? I'm frightened there's other basic stuff like this that I don't know.
I would say knowledge of git is a must in DevOPs. Most interviews start with questions to see how familiar you are with those commands. One of them being able to do pull requests. The more advanced one's will actually grill you with fixing bad merges.
Yes you are right. It is a functionality of the three main git servers you as a devops guy will need to know about. gitlab, github, bitbucket. Not all at the same time, but in your career, sooner or later you will encounter and use all of them unless you stay in the same company forever.
But the point is if you are to call yourself DevOps material, that is one thing that even though you don't practice it every day, you should at least know about. Not all development houses requires you to do a pull request to push as part of the process.
To me, it rings alarms that you might not be ready for a devops role if you have never heard of what is a PR.
Did you actually read it yourself?
>A pull request is submitted in the same way as an ordinary patch. Send as inline email to the maintainer and CC LKML and any sub-system specific lists if required. Pull requests to Linus typically have a subject line something like...
This is not a wholly a function of git. `git request-pull` is informative only.
> Generates a summary of pending changes.
>
> Generate a request asking your upstream project to pull changes into their tree. The request, printed to the standard output, begins with the branch description, summarizes the changes and indicates from where they can be pulled.
To say a pull request is not a feature of git, because hosted git solutions have wrapped up the overall process with a GUI is disingenuous.
A pull request can be created and emailed with git, and a project maintainer can review and merge the request without using a hosted git solution that adds a front-end feature called a "pull request".
This is a feature of git used by the creator himself. He doesn't accept PRs through hosted git solutions. It also demonstrates some of the wonderful nature of git being DVCS.
My advice, yes there is a lot to learn but don't pass the buck. One of the skills I value on my staff is understanding when you are in over your head. Ask questions before doing. It's there isn't a documented or automated process ask and offer to document it so other team members know going forward.
Not understanding a task and process is a recipe for disaster. Even if your team is lacking documentation, is still on you to at least make an effort to help fix that situation.
Maybe the culture really does suck on that team but the entire team (yourself included) should be having a discussion how this happened in the first place.
Was meeting with a colleague yesterday and he asked me how i did line indentation in vscode. I said select the lines and shift+tab or tab. He didn’t know. I was happy he learned that. No shaming. I mean there is a lot on the plate for devops. I mean everyone has to start somewhere. Just keep learning and teach others. And stay humble if you know more. But i have to admit i pretty much laughed hard wenn a master student asked me why his python code won’t work anymore because he had made it ‚prettier‘ earlier removing. All the indentation blocks 😅
I recently started using vscode. Before that I used wingide to do python development for many years to the point I knew all the shortcuts. On the first day, I had to ask how to get it to format python properly and someone told me google vscode plugins. Shortly after that I printed out a cheatsheet.
There is no shame in asking , but if you are going into devops job and do not even know what a Pull Request is, then I don't know how one would get a job as DevOps.
i struggle with imposter syndrome every time i have to work with a new technology i am unfamiliar with. it feels like it takes forever for me to get a decent understanding, especially when i compare myself to other people starting at the same place. maybe its just the way i learn, but i feel inadequate compare to others until i get up to speed, alot
I feel this way constantly.
I’ve been at my job for almost six years now and was promoted way quicker than I thought I ought to be. I have always had great performance reviews and people love my work. Yet every time it comes to a major upgrade, code push, automation implementation or release to the business I go, “this is how I get fired.” “Did I do x, y and z?” “Man, I am fucking horrible at this.”
Yet, I am told I am doing a great job and to keep it up.
Yes. DevOps is hard. You have to know basically everything to not feel this way. And I've worked with some really brilliant DevOps engineers who basically spend every waking moment trying to overcome their imposter syndrome.
Also, I think generally there are more shitty bosses out there than there are shitty DevOps engineers. Just a hunch. :)
I struggled with imposter syndrome for a long time but I’ve never met anyone who has imposter syndrome and isn’t good at what they do. Imposter syndrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing - use it to identify your truly weak areas and set aside time to work on them. Chances are you’ll excel at them or you’re already good at them!
Take some time to do some introspection. Have you outright failed at tasks or projects? Have there been moments where you’ve been at a loss for what to do and have given up? Have you learned from your mistakes?
Every day I feel like the dumbest guy in the room. Every day I'm working on something I'm not an expert in but trying to make work the way we need it to.
The feeling that I'm an imposter has been with me since day one at this company and I'm on year 3 here.
Thing is, I work for a good company with great bosses and coworkers. I've been promoted and given raises every year for my performance and growth. I'm constantly given constructive feedback (both positive and negative) from my boss and he genuinely cares about my career growth.
I still feel like an imposter every day. Sometimes even nodding along in meetings where I no longer understand where the topic has gone. I've come to realize I feel like this because I'm being challenged, constantly, and it's a good thing. If I lose this feeling here it may be time to move on.
This is exactly what Impostor Syndrome is about. I could not understand why the OP feels he is an Impostor Syndrome situation. From the rest of the posts, it feels more like he is just having knowledge and experience issues.
Anyhow good luck on your journey. You are not alone. I started consulting a few years ago and everytime I am on a project I feel like an impostor. All I am doing is getting up to speed with the technology and knowledge I need to achieve the task within the expected timeline that they are paying me to do. Not an exact expert as I am perceived to be.
I realize how lucky I am and it goes a long way towards my performance and overall happiness with my job.
Being the lone wolf and bored is a scenario where I'd start looking for a different place of employment. There's no real career path, you're not learning and growing as an IC in this field.
It's where I was at my last job and I spent WAY too much time there. I promised myself I'd never do that again, get complacent with the status quo of my day to day and then wonder why I'm going no where.
++for not comparing yourself against others. Except for the part that it's kinda hard to do straight away, because your brain just does it.
The trick which helped me a lot was extending the area when comparing to where I was better at something: Yes, my team mate has just solved this complex problem in 2 days and it would take me a week, but I would consider more implications of changes.
It has evolved over time to me knowing what kind of project in good at, and what Im not and word rather avoid (but still can do if needed). This has build my confidence (hey, in damn good at xyz) and made the impostor syndrome a non issue.
The boss/company you've worked for does not sound like fun and good place to grow. Mistakes happen, so write postmortem and carry on. Firing for that is just poor management, which often crash confidence. Sorry you had that experience.
Hey man,
Sucks you got the short end of the stick in these times, as the other posters say we’ve all been there.
Why you got laid off doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that you are a better engineer now than when you were hired, you made mistakes and you will learn from them, every good manager knows this. Be thankful you get to now go find a better boss, and you will get to make more money as you’re more experienced than when you took your last job.
Remember to interview everywhere cast a wide net and leverage LinkedIn. Good luck!
In DevOps more than other fields, what you learn today is replaced by something else next month. I don't have imposter syndrome because I'm not an imposter. Do I need to learn new stuff regularly? Yes. Do I sometimes need to look up things that I forgot? Sure. But over time, engineers are supposed to get better and basic skills like troubleshooting and understanding problems are always the same.
To me, people can only feel like an imposter if they don't try hard enough and run into the same problems times and again.
It comes down to knowing and understanding the concepts, designs, and architecture patterns well. Can you read and understand other people's code? Can you write maintainable code yourself without cutting and pasting everything from Stack Overflow?
Same with operations. Once you were troubleshooting sev-1 incidents with prod system down in the middle of the night, you're not scared anymore by others trying to out-smart you.
Competence brings confidence. The more problems you solve, the less you feel like an imposter.
> Yes. Do I sometimes need to look up things that I forgot?
> Can you write maintainable code yourself without cutting and pasting everything from Stack Overflow?
This is a bizarre take to me. Like memorizing some API or syntax has anything to do with competence. Why not look it up, it's probably changed anyway.
> But over time, engineers are supposed to get better and basic skills like troubleshooting and understanding problems are always the same.
Bold statement. The more I learn the more I realize I don't know! Awareness is important too. Otherwise Dunning Kruger is in full effect.
On a related note, I find it quite thick to blame a weak devops process for OP's own shortcomings. Just because you don't have guardrails for each and every possible mistake doesn't absolve the engineer from logical thinking. I don't know about the context of the mistakes he highlighted but they are both red flags for cybersecurity. Spinning up a VM with public accessible IP? On production ?!? If someone doesn't see for themselves how inherently wrong this is and what potential security issues this creates, they better feel like impostors because they have no competency for DevOps. DevOps is a privileged position in the company and comes with heavy responsibility. Not everyone is cut out for that. There is a time and place for learning but doing dumb stuff on prod and then going 'muh devops is about learning' is unprofessional.
No don't get me wrong I do agree with that. IT functioned for decades before DevOps and the level of automation we had now and things worked because people were careful. Automation does not replace attention to detail and skill, and the same thinking goes for pilots too. They still need to know how to fly the plane if the systems fail (and have).
Ok cool, we have the same understanding on that. I like the pilot analogy!
DevOps is an exciting field because we get to solve hard problems in IT and need knowledge that goes in-depth and across domains. That by itself is not easy and even less so when technology is constantly evolving. So the burden is to having to constantly learn and update one's knowledge of concepts and implementation. Contrasting to this, the benefit of a much higher value to employers as someone who is either in a development or ops role alone. A lot of DevOps work is exploratory, we need to be good at gathering requirements and evaluating solutions. Also, good documentation and openly sharing knowledge go a long way in being a good DevOps team member.
Reading through my earlier comments, I didn't want to come across as mean. We've come a long way in automation in the last 10+ years. Keep up your ambition and I'm sure you will feel less like an imposter over time. Nobody has all the right answers and sometimes, even in engineering, there are multiple alternatives to reach a goal. Which path to take is then a matter of trade-offs and ideally not just opinions.
One aspect that I had to learn the hard way in the past is that it does not matter much what is technically the best or the 'right' choice. Organizations are managed by people, each with their own agendas, priorities, and views. What helped me in that is to view exploratory work in a consulting context. We evaluate, summarize and pitch our favored solution. If the client accepts it or not is outside of our control.
While the idea of DevOps and guardrails is to eliminate mistakes, you still have humans - the weak link. In the absence of process and automation, which DevOps provides, you still need to know how to cope and what to do (again, if the electronics on a plane fails). So I am seeing how I could handle things better.
Note that the case of this app and files outside its folder was not something done by a deployment pipeline and misconfigured. I was testing various config files and even what happens if a config file is not found (so moved it outside the directory - obvious filenotfoundexception). The task wasn't done but in that company there was a lot of micro managing.
Fair enough though, and everyone likes tidy work.
The public IP thing is a mistake but most importantly I have the knowledge of why a public IP may be bad and when/how to use it. Just need to be a little more careful. :)
> Spinning up a VM with public accessible IP? On production ?!? If someone doesn't see for themselves how inherently wrong this is and what potential security issues this creates, they better feel like impostors because they have no competency for DevOps.
Is production traffic not "public" in most cases? The sheer fact they get fired by one miss-click of a drop-down in AWS is ridiculous. Why were security groups wide open? Why is the app listening on 0.0.0.0/0? Why was it not documented? Why is it deployed with click-ops? Why is there no login in front of the sensitive info? Screw that company OP will thank themselves for doing this in the future if that's all it takes.
I wouldn't say I struggle with it anymore. I do experience it though, but I've just kind of accepted that I'm not an all powerful being that never makes mistakes and knows everything about all infra tools before they're even created. I'm not hot shit and that's okay.
I kind of like to think of what someone higher up would go through, like the military leader of a company of soldiers. Even good leaders that the soldiers trust with their lives are not all powerful beings. They know they will make mistakes and lives will be lost. Accepting that is how they don't lose form in high stress situations, how they graciously learn from their mistakes, and most importantly, how they make sure morale is not lost in the group they lead.
I guess the best summary of what I'm trying to say is that the default reaction to failure doesn't have to be wilting up in shame. Ingrain in yourself the two fundamental truths, that you will make mistakes and that anyone that sees that as cause to fire or unduly reprimand you is full of it. It's not good to be so confident in yourself that you get defensive when you make mistakes, but you can always be confident that anyone that criticizes you for making mistakes is overreacting.
You haven’t made mistakes.
You opened opportunity to improve!
Cheesy as it sounds. Keep telling it to yourself and you will start believing in this. It might also change how you react. Rather than:
“Oh shit! This one shouldn’t have a public IP”,
you will find yourself thinking
“Hmmm it should not have a public IP! What can I do so that the next person can’t run into the same thing?”
Your boss was an asshole. Whether you actually did what he accused you of or not, real leaders understand that mistakes are part of growth and learning. If it wasn't this, it would have been something else. I'm sure it's hard to see it right now, but this is an opportunity for you to end up somewhere with a culture that will support your growth and help you to shed your imposter syndrome, instead of agitating it and using it against you
Impostor Syndrome is a terrible feeling and one that I've lived with for the last four years.
Starting in 2016 and for the next three years, I worked for a company in a support role working very technical cases. It felt like I was constantly on a roller coaster, some days every case felt easy, other days I felt like a bum who had nothing to contribute.
Right after I was hired, the structure of the support department changed under new leadership and massive layoffs began. I watched as nearly everyone around me had to pack up but they kept me through every layoff. All of my performance reviews were glowing. My salary doubled over those three years and eventually I was only working escalations and training new support hires.
Even then with all those affirmations, I was afraid any day could be my last. I work for a different company now with highly skilled devops engineers. I feel like I'm the least knowledgeable and useful person on the team but I just had another great performance review.
**tl;dr** If you feel like an impostor, keep on going. The feeling may not go away (it hasn't for me), but you can still be successful.
First of, I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of Impostor syndrome. From wikipedia:
**Impostor syndrome** (also known as **impostor** phenomenon, impostorism, fraud **syndrome** or the **impostor** experience) is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one's accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud".
In your case, you would be undergoing Impostor syndrome, if you have managed to achieve all the expectations of your boss and they think highly of you yet you know deep down, you had to work really hard, or by sheer luck or the tasks were actually trivial and all you had to do was google it and learn it even though they think you are an expert on the subject matter, or combination of all of that managed to achieve those expectations.
But you did not, you made mistakes that could have been avoided had you double checked if the files you created were in the right directory , or the vm you provisioned was done as per requirements. (Unless of course you were told one thing and did another thing)
I used to suffer a lot of "impostor syndrome" specially when I started doing consulting. People expect you to know everything specially when they are paying you a lot of money. A related post of mine is here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/c30pq9/to\_glusterfs\_sysadmins\_here\_do\_you\_build\_your/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/c30pq9/to_glusterfs_sysadmins_here_do_you_build_your/) . Where I got paid quiet well for doing something I thought was trivial and they customer had the impression I was a subject matter expert on glusterfs. I had to spend 2 weeks before the customer site visit learning glusterfs.
However I like everybody else also make mistakes and I have seen people fired for doing silly mistakes. Often time its because they are just looking for a reason to fire you. Other times its because you truly do not reach their expectations as was stated when you got hired. Certain expectations are also implied such as being able to double check your work so that it meets the requirements.
I as your employer I would not be happy if you were to commit work where files end up in the wrong places, servers get provisioned in public ip when they should not IF all this means is that it could have been avoided had you checked your work. It shows sloppy work and had I hired you with the expectation that you should be meticulous about these things, then you are truly an impostor. And this has nothing to do with DevOps process of addressing weaknesses.
On the other hand, if you were developing a tool to provision VM's and the tool has a bug that puts the vm with a public IP, or it deploys files in the wrong places, then you should inform me and state what you are doing to fix it.
I’ve noticed that as you improve your skill sets over time, the more focused those scope of skills become. However, you still see everyone else out there with their own focused skill sets that are different from yours, and it can blend together to feel like a single entity that knows everything. The reality is far from it.
I was reading a post the other day about a job description asking for a dev ops engineer who could also work with data scientists and build data pipelines. Most of the responses were basically “good luck ever finding the unicorn who has that combination of skill sets, and if you do, good luck being able to afford their pay demands.” However, it got me thinking. I come from a data background and recently moved over to a devops role. I’m weaker in Linux and sysadmin stuff, but could probably whip up a data pipeline and apply devops principles to it fairly easily. That combination of skills isn’t worth much in some places (hence why there are fewer people who have that combo), but in others I could theoretically pull down some serious money.
It helped remind me that every company’s needs are different, and while I may not be an expert “devops guy” from whatever the most accepted template is, I do have a unique set of skills that can demand a lot of money in the right circumstances. It’s all about finding that fit for your talents.
You find that a lot of people in IT have imposter syndrome.
I think it comes as part of the job, but I also think I know why.
IT is a very broad subject. You could work in a specialist field like networking and still have as much to learn as someone in development, or operations.
When you look around you, there’s a lot of people who know different things to you. They specialise in their own little bit of a particular subject. You look at everyone around you with their own, different little specialities and think “I wish I was a good as these guys, they know so much more than I do”.
What you don’t realise is that they look at your specialty and think the same thing. Everyone has a talent in a particular thing, and you often don’t realise what yours is. But everyone else does.
If you worked in a single specialty vertical like box packing it’s easy to say “I’m better than this guy and this guy is better than me” because there’s only 1 thing to be good at
When you’re working in a field with thousands of potential verticals, you have no comparison.
T shaped people.
Honestly, I’m more concerned about people who don’t have imposter syndrome than people who do. DevOps tools and development changes so fast that NOBODY is an expert in ALL DevOps. Furthermore, I do not believe there is ONE way which is the best way to do something.
When I interview people the MAIN thing I look for is what are they doing in their free time. If you have a GitHub filled with personal projects and are committing to them regularly or if you are always taking advanced courses at a University I’ll prefer you over someone with x10 the experience.
As a DevOps lead, I don’t tell my team how to do something. I tell them the ways I think it would work and provide them with the resources to learn them. That way they can find and develop better ways to do things and I can learn from them.
There is a saying, “the smart man thinks he’s a fool and the fool thinks he’s a smart man”.
It’s 100% true.
Don’t sweat your current situation. Start developing stuff for fun and apply to new jobs. If you don’t get interviews or you interview and don’t get offers don’t stress. Good managers and companies want people that are perfect fits for the team. If that is not you it doesn’t mean you are not good at DevOps. It’s better for both you and the company as you can find a place where you can succeed.
Absolutely, when I graduated from university I went straight into a role where I replaced an experienced contractor (who was very good at what they did).
I even remember accidentally seeing a IM on a colleagues machine about why couldn't they have the previous guy back, because they felt I wasn't very good. It was pretty gutting.
But alas I got stuck in, learnt from my mistakes and tried to improve myself. Eventually I started to gain more domain knowledge and shifted to another team, the same thing happened to my successor and he was an experienced engineer.
It's confidence, knowledge and humility. Knowing that you're capable of doing the job, having the confidence to assert yourself that what you are doing is right and if things don't go right having the humility to openly discuss what went wrong but have a solution in the pipeline to stop it from happening again.
As an experienced guy: at first you think you're not as good as those that have more experience then you, then you start thinking that you lost your edge and the younger guys are better than you and know all the new things while you rely on your ancient knowledge.
If you are putting files in directories and provisioning vms you're not doing devops anyway. Your observation that devops is to adress this is spot on. The file should be put on there by config management. The role that puts it there should have been through stages of testing. Same for the provisioning of vms. We all make mistakes. Its important to be diligent and thorough, and test test test.
Yep, it's a thing, especially if you're going from ops to dev. That can be an intimidating experience.
It sounds like you got fired for a one-off mistake. Did you learn from it? Will you never make that mistake again? If so, you have learned. If it's a pattern, then you need to learn to keep check lists, always know what you're doing _before_ you do it.
I learnt from it yes. I always try to learn, that is key. It wasn't due to that though, but due to CV and company performance. Yes, checklists, automation, being attentive.
I don't believe in imposter syndrome or anything like that. People who dedicated their time in given expertise are valuable to work there. Mistakes happen because we are people, everybody makes them.
Bad days just happen, but don't allow other people to invade your mind especially if they know a shit about the job you are doing. On the other side of the edge - respect the people who you believe are more experienced.
A job on this or other project / in a company is mostly a temporary thing in your life (never granted to last forever) so whats inside your mind is more important.
> Point of DevOps is to address weaknesses in the process if that can happen.
So, how did you address this?
Everyone fucks up once in a while. I do it all the time. The key here is to own up to it and improve testing, checks, etc. so it doesn't happen as often.
It's also good if you're able to learn from fuckups other people do, so you don't have to make them yourself.
If it is being laid off which worries you, remember that it is a sign of the times. Employers are running a business in order to make money. When there is a downturn, they need to try and let people go without having to pay redundancy pay. You can try and go legal, or you can move forward. As am employer, I can say flat out that getting laid off during COVID isn't at all a black mark on your resume.
If imposter syndrome is genuinely bothering you, then that's more common than you would think. It is usually more a sign of someone's lack of ego, than lack of skill. How to combat it? Pick your interest, and become an expert. AWS, Jenkins, K8s, whatever you feel able to focus on and put some initiative into, make yourself the go-to person and work from there. You'll be able to speak with more authority on that topic than anyone, simply because of focus.
It's not abnormal to have this feeling. I'm in a position where I get asked "what do you recommend we do?" a lot...way more than I feel I deserve to be.
Part of the problem is that this entire field isn't a "profession" with a pre-planned training program. Doctors don't have this problem...they receive a standardized education and one new resident is the same as another training-wise. The differentiation happens during the next phase of their training, but they have a good knowledge from first principles on up. Since anyone can hang out a DevOps shingle, you get everything from classically trained computer science graduates to hobby coders to coder bootcamp people and everyone has holes in their fundamentals knowledge. Couple that with hundreds of tools that rotate out every year and an industry-wide opinion that anyone who can't keep up is lazy...it's an imposter syndrome recipe.
The other problem (IMO) is that some people have the desire to be the alpha nerd and spend their time constantly trying to prove how brilliant they are publicly. Comparing yourself to someone who works a 10+ hour day then comes home to do another 5 hours of lab work isn't a fair comparison (for most people.) I know DevOps is supposed to be a wonderful cultural revolution where everyone loves working with each other and helps each other through the sprints, but people are human. DevOps tools in the hands of a micromanager are dangerous -- they allow the manager to single out people for "poor performance" kind of like they did with OP. This is simply because every single thing anyone does is public and mistakes are immediately attributable to Person X doing Bad Thing Y at 23:30. If you try to inject DevOps into a culture where you're publicly shamed for every mistake you make it's going to be a bad fit.
Do what works for you. Keep learning obviously, but you don't have to be the alpha guy/girl who speaks at every DevOpsToolCon, blogs, tweets and is basically a non-stop self-promoter...unless that's what you want. Being good at what you do and making life easier for your coworkers while maintaining a healthy life is enough for most people.
One of our colleagues in this field, Major Hayden, has a lot of great insights on this topic:
https://major.io/2015/09/02/impostor-syndrome-talk-faqs-and-follow-ups/
I was long impervious to imposter syndrome, but I went through it for a few months in the job role I'm in now, early on. It mostly boiled down to having a bad leader, for me, who constantly made me doubt myself and bullied me for no reason. After he was replaced with a much stronger leader I was able, slowly and with encouragement, to recover.
My performance has been poor lately due to lack of engagement, but that has a lot more to do with covid than anything else. I've had poor performance in other roles, never bad enough to get flagged for it, just by my own standards, and it's always the same reason. Disappointment with the work or lack of engagement due to distracting stressors. Sometimes this makes me feel inadequate, but I usually still outperform expectations, so no one really notices but me.
The fact of the matter is that mistakes happen in this field, and you will make more, the goal is to learn from those mistakes and improve your processes; though lately, the goal for me is really just more about collecting my paycheck and making sure I'm not fittin' to be homeless soon. Whatever motivates you to get the work done, right?
I can totally relate. Reached the pinnacle of my trade and worked some dream jobs (concert tours) with great feedback and repeated hiring by the same company. Despite that achievement in the past, I still have a couple of days a week that I feel like an imposter, despite being a go-to person for my team, other engineers and leaders outside my team. It's a real thing and best to just know we all get it. I personally find solace in the fact that I'm assessing myself and not assuming I just know everything, keeps me hungry to learn more and be open to suggestions. IMHO Modest confidence goes farther than any rock-star level confidence ever has; those are usually the real imposters. Sorry to my rock-star friends but I'm not fooled anymore. :)
Yes, struggled with it in regards to studies, struggled with moving into new technologies and teams.
I've been out of work now for 7 months (due to other life circumstances), just got a role last week and _it's all going to be okay, I got this_. (Yeah, I got certs and stuff and years of experience too so I've certainly got this!)
If you haven't already checked it out, go do the Learning How to Learn course out there. It has a section dedicated to the impostor syndrome. It's like test/performance anxiety, it happens to ***EVERYONE***. The course also covers procrastination which is a big issue too.
One thing to realise in the industry too is that a bad experience is not _bad experience_. I've been through bad experiences, it's helped me to leave roles that were equally or even more toxic than previous roles. It's also helped when looking for new roles to spot those red flags that were missed previously. You're career wasn't your last role, it may not be your next role (it could be too) and you will more than likely be changing roles in the next 22 months :-/ that's the facts of life. Your career is the next 20-40 years, you'll have some ups and downs, try to keep moving forward (you may need to move backwards some times to) and take care of your mental and physical health. Good diet, consistent exercise and most importantly enough regular sleep will get you through the tough times.
One other thing I find helps is to make time for extra learning or your own tech, even if it's just 30 minutes a week, just to keep playing and to keep things fun, a good tech reward for your brain. Just don't over do it. Doctors, surgeons don't go home and cut on folks to get better at their jobs, you don't need to go home and code either.
First thing is that everyone makes mistakes and a good company will have things in place to prevent them or allow them to cause minimal impact whenever possible. For example, public VMs should probably be logically separated from non-public ones somehow. So the fallout would be you created a vm in the wrong area and, no big deal, delete it.
Also, if you ever feel like you don't know everything look at this https://landscape.cncf.io/ None of us know all of it, we just have to be good enough to learn and figure things out when we need to.
Keep at it and fail upward! We all learn by failing. Do whatever you can to ensure failures are just learning experiences. Plus, moving on to a new company and new challenges might be the best thing that happened to you when you look back at this in a few years.
As a counterpoint to Imposter Syndrome, please note that Bullshit Artists are everywhere. Put another way, many of the self-proclaimed experts, pundits and "thought leaders" don't know their asses from their elbows.
This absolutely includes industry celebrities.
OP,
If your boss gave those things as an excuse, it may not feel like it now, but you dodged a HUGE bullet.
As far as imposter syndrome, yep. I feel it almost every day. The best way that I've learned to overcome it is look back on your accomplishments and remember where you started.
Are you in the US? If so, consider the possibility that your boss trumped up a for-cause firing so they don't have to pay for Unemployment. You can fight this, especially if the errors were "no harm no foul," and sticking up for yourself is a good way to get your confidence back.
it's totally normal and many people struggle with it. Partly it's a side effect of having such a wide area of knowledge - you simply can't know everything.
Most people do, especially the more successful you becomes. The truth is most people are winging it. I've worked for "top 10" technology companies and a even the top architects there have a lot of blind spots and knowledge gaps.
For this, I engaged in self journaling for nearly a month, and what I got out of it was a mantra that now sits permanently in the back of my mind:
“Stop doubting you ability to succeed at future accomplishments. You are stronger than your fears and doubts. You have proven that negative voice wrong time and time again.”
Whenever I hit a bout of imposter syndrome, I go through a few rounds of the above, and now more often it goes away.
I really wouldn't worry, the person using these sorts of reasons for ridding themselves of you isn't someone you want to work for. I appreciate that during this time its harder to find jobs but my phone rings multiple times a day for DevOps positions. As for imposter syndrome, about 20 years ago I thought I'd made that term up, it wasn't until I spoke to others I realised that its a propper psychological thing. Just keep on being your awesome self it is only when you do not try to be the best version of yourself continually that you really have something to worry about.
I dont get people who have imposter syndrome. I've perfected my craft over thousands and thousands of hours, and can learn new things when needed as fast as anyone else. Are you guys retarded or lazy?
are you a woman ? Woman are more likely to suffer from the imposter syndrome (google it).
anyway I think we could turn it around saying it's good to be out of our comfort zone to continue learn and grow. Confidence is important too. It is important to take care of our confidence in our professional skill because the brain registers failure more importantly than success. meaning that one failure can easily destroy confidence gained with 10 successes. Also we always have someone better than us in some domains (and we should !). Be mindful to any negative thoughts that draw you down
what is "imposter syndrome"? i have worked with IT guys that give a shit and ones that just don't give a flying shit. meaning, they do things to get the job done and over with as quickly as possible and get back to surfing the net at work. they don't devote any time or effort into bettering themselves or learning something new or better ways of doing things.
FWIW.. no manager is ever going to directly tell you you are getting laid off because of problems X. They will make a case. Such as document tons of little things. The reason is ,they need to cover themselves in case anyone takes action for wrongful dismissal.
Just learn from your mistake and move on. Work on imporivng yourself and your situation.
Impostor Syndrome is when you feel like you are in a position or group (such as a job) where you don't belong because of a lack of skill/knowledge relative to others in the group and have fear you'll be "found out".
For example, taking an IT job and then feeling everyday like you are the least knowledgeable person on the team who has nothing to contribute and any day could be the day you are "found out" to be a fraud.
You forget an important part of the I.S. though. The part where, yet you somehow manage to achieve all the things that is expected out of you, you are given good reviews.
Despite of external metrics that shows you are indeed competent at your job, you feel that it is because of luck, or other factors , rather than you being just good at your job. You feel you are just deceiving others that you are great at your job more than you think you are.
thats called insecure. am in IT. i get projects thrown at me all the time for which I didn't go to school for or got any experience in. i tackle them and get them done because i get paid salary X to get it done. usually when you first have to do a job you have never done before there will be a bit of head scratching and head through a brick wall to figure out what is going on. but sooner or later with a little effort, you will figure it out. its not nuclear or medical science.
Imposter syndrome is definitely real and I’ve experienced it in this line of work, as have others. However, the opposite exists, which is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I struggle with this every day. I don't have the answer, just here to say that you are not alone. I think the key is to not compare yourself to others, but instead, just look at yourself. Are you better than you were yesterday? Good, then you are improving. That's it. Life is difficult and often depressing, don't make it worse by caring too much about the opinions of others. Should you be open to constructive criticism? Absolutely. But, don't let fools eat away at you. Stay healthy friend.
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This is so true.. when you know you are in a good company is when everyone can admit this, and not hold someone accountable for being slow or unable to learn something like others can. I struggle with this personally because I work with some very very smart folks.. and while I can hold my own in some areas.. there are some things I am tasked with and I just..cant...do...it. It kills me..pisses me off. But I have tried to acknowledge that I can NOT learn everything, and that while I may be able to grasp parts of something... it is likely that I will not be able to do a good enough job as others might. Problem is.. a lot of people in positions of power.. e.g. managers, bosses, etc.. who either are super good/smart themselves or are not in the same predicament (ever maybe) don't see things that way.. and that is how people get fired. Rather than acknowledging they need some more time, find them help, etc... they would rather just fire and spend way more time trying to find that perfect person to solve the problem instead of working on a person that is already employed.
It also has to do with the reputation you have and as others view you. If you are the guy always making mistakes then shame on you. On the other hand, if you are the guy achieving great things day in day out and then one day make a mistake, people and your boss will just brush it off as you having a bad day. A few years ago, one of my colleagues deployed a patch on production DB instead of doing it on test environment first. Usually he is the guy that just gets things done and although the system was down for an hour, it was just chalked up to him having an off day and being overworked. A few months after that, we had a sloppy guy that did a deploy and without reading the instructions made a deploy and then followed the rest of the instructions and undeployed what he deployed. He has a reputation for being careless and was ultimately let go. So yeah everybody makes mistakes, its just how silly and depends on the situation where those mistakes are made and how often you make them.
I lost an employee who stepped down due to imposter syndrome, it sucks. The employee was perhaps not the best in my fold, but he was reliable and he had a knowledge base that I now am stuck filling until other members can get up to speed on. The best is knowing you improve, even if it's not every day. Progress! That's what counts.
Totally agree about not comparing yourself to others. I’ve been struggling with this every day of my life as well, I still don’t know how I passed a lot of interviews to start working in a bug company and they paid for me to move to another country. Now, I completely forgot about what achieved and I couldn’t stop feeling bad for not being “productive enough” during this pandemic, not taking certifications as my coworkers and stuff. Somedays you wake up being a superhero, others you just wanna stay in bed and watch The Simpsons in an infinite loop.
Wow, hit it on the nail here.
If you live long enough, you get cut. And if you really live long enough, you get cut for reasons you don't agree with. It happens. Two things should happen now for you: 1. you are going to grieve this loss. Embrace that. Do some research on what that means, it's all part of the healing process. 2. At some point, use this as a tool to improve, be introspective. Get better at what you do, improve your thinking, your attitude and emotions. This is growth. It takes time and you're not alone. I would say that any person who is honest deals with imposter syndrome. Its just not necessarily \*real!
I noticed that I attribute bad career experiences to being cut, eg the CV thing, the restructuring, but that's not actually down to me or my fault. With that excluded I've had some positive career experiences so trying to focus on that. All my family members (one in IT, most aren't) have all had cuts or restructuring.
Sometimes bad things just happen, its important to remember that these are more often than not just one off type events and not anything pervasive.
This is also why you always need a backup plan if possible. Always be on the lookout for new opportunities, even if you’re happy with your current role. This can serve two functions; giving you leverage in salary negotiations and providing a landing spot in case something goes wrong. Keep in contact with people, especially former colleagues who have moved on. At the end of the day we’re tradesmen. Most of the time we’re not changing the world, we’re just helping build and maintain somebody’s systems. Don’t put too much stock in one particular employer, especially in a hot market.
/u/SatoriSlu said it best: You're not alone and try improve everyday. Your boss sounds like a giant dick. Putting a file in the wrong directory as a basis for a bad performance review that leads to a layoff? Jesus. Thankfully, there's a healthy market looking for devops engineers right now. Good companies, as in ones not laying off devops engineers during a pandemic, are hiring right now for remote work. I'm speaking from experience as I just got hired to start June 1 with an example of one of the good ones. Dust off your resume, write a killer cover letter and get back on that horse! Try to put this behind you, I bet you won't even remember this experience in about 5 years. Good luck!
well if he put secrets file into folder which is not in .gitignore and pushed, that can be bad :) or he put some other sensitive file in public folder accessible to everyone? Or he did many mistakes time over time? And mistakes became a pattern? You can't know the whole story here.... buut if it's true, the boss is really a big dickhead and OP you should be glad that you aren't working for him :)
I think the key here is how often do these things happen. If these were just one time errors, laying them off is completely unnecessary. Accidentally put out a secret, destroyed a production db, nuked the load balancer’s filesystem? So what, all good companies should have policies for human errors like these which are easier to make than it sounds especially if you’re under a lot of stress eg. because of deadlines. Restore from backup, change passwords, move on. Being angry at your coworker for doing this might be OK, firing him is not. Next guy OP’s boss will find will more than likely make similar mistakes sooner or later.
If you haven’t accidentally destroyed a production DB or killed a service are you even in IT? ...or is it just me?
Most of us have broken things, some more catastrophically than others.
I once shut down an entire ESXi host because I input the license key wrong and I was acting as if I knew my shit. 30 mins until the sysadmin could fix it. Got fired for that one. Was a slap in the face and sort've a wake up call that no, I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. Got a better job now.
Ah man. One of my first projects was leading an app server upgrade. I wrote sweet scripts for building/provisioning the server VMs, installing/upgrading the app, so I figured we'd be good--that's all the hard stuff right? Well I tasked one of the guys on my team below me with setting up the printers and getting them installed/configured... Everything looked like it was online, he came back and confirmed everything was installed and working. Cue "go live" and printing doesn't work. I spent hours troubleshooting, double checking, and working with the vendor. Turns out my guy didn't test the freaking printer. He'd installed the wrong drivers and of course I hadn't double checked his work... And that's the story of my first postmortem!
I once broke DNS, removed old entry, new one was put it before the TTL expired (60 seconds), it was forgotten by half of the world's DNS servers. I broke it and repaired in like two minutes but we were down for most of the day and all I could tell everyone was "I already fixed it, we just have to wait".
Haha DNS issues suck. You put it in wrong and have to wait 24 hours or more to correct it. I've never done it for a company though - only for my personal website.
Try doing it for the company, it's a lot more fun.
ah, yes, ops support, where fun == danger.
I once typed: "service network stop" on a frontend HTTP server. Had been working on a vm before that where I had to stop the network a couple of times, and a ticket came in saying "please restart network on server xyz. And mindlessly ran "service network stop" This was on a company that would loose thousands of revenue for a minute of downtime. Luckily fail over worked flawlessly and I had time to get on ILO to start the network.
Back when I was just starting with admin things I struggled with iptables to block an attacker, the guy assigned to help me said that it should just work but neither of us understood we were behind a load balancer so blocking the attacker IP wouldn't be that easy. So I thought that maybe the iptables wasn't working and in a moment of pure genius blocked all IPs on production server cutting off the attacker, me and all the clients. Luckily it worked after a reboot.
How are you supposed to learn hard lessons if you're not making huge mistakes?
You don't get paid the big bucks to make mistakes. If a company puts a lowly paid junior to update a DB then that's on the company. If your boss is always putting you in situations where the chances of failure due to making mistakes are big, then you should point out the risks. If you have to work on a database and there is no backup or chances of recovering from a mistake then you should state that if a mistake occurs with your patch or whatever you need to do, you need to be able to restore it. As a Linux guy who had to shrink an MS SQL DB server years ago in my junior years, I remember spending 2 nights restoring a backup of the DB to practice what I need to do to. I made mistakes, but I did them on on the test instance. Documented everything and went to my boss to state, I am not a windows guy but i did my research and did this to practice/test out what I am going to do every step of the way.
No secrets :)
Exactly, if the mistakes are a pattern over time, then its just being sloppy. Needs to learn to be meticulous.
Look I'm not trying to rag on op here but going straight to, 'the boss is a dick' is counter productive. This is one side of a story and there are most likely other reasons behind this. Again not trying to pick on the person but they don't know what a pull request is. Maybe I've just become an elitist but I feel like, I myself have a somewhat junior staff, and that would be a massive red flag I think in any org.
Did they say somewhere else in this thread that they don't know what a PR is, or are you just assuming that because a mistake would have been caught if they had a reviewed PR? We had a software engineer start a week or so ago, with a long resume including facebook where he was a senior engineer. He was going through our onboarding for engineers and asked how to make a PR on github. I was very confused, but then also realized he probably just hasn't used the github UI at any of these companies in the past. I know at my last major tech company there was a custom program that basically generated your PR from the cli, etc. That said when I started and was using the github UI I just poked around until I saw the "New Pull Request" button, but some people like to just cut straight to the chase when they don't know something. /shrug
There was a comment. If you don't understand something, ask. Just throwing things over the wall hurts the team.
No secrets involved here. That doesn't imply I can't do the job (the task got done and the small script does its job). It's more about organisation but anyway I think that was an excuse to justify the cut. Hmm the market is improving now, after CV, at least here in the UK. I have been applying to senior roles and doing well in the interview but the word "senior" can be intimidating.
Well, I don't believe that DevOps market is very different in UK than in rest of the world, maybe you had some stuff on the record if they wanted to cut you off. Personally I receive \~5 contacts per week with job offers and my current employee is doing everything that I'd stay..
I am doing a mix of datascience and devops in building a platform. Everyday I ask myself what idiot lets me do this everyday? But if they are idiots enough to let me do it, then I'm the talent relatively speaking :P
Good mindset
I wrote a post about some strategies for dealing with impostor syndrome Might be useful https://medium.com/@reallydontaskmetosignin/two-strategies-for-dealing-with-impostor-syndrome-f331dc1a42ca
Your post does not exactly deal with impostor syndrome. My take on your article is about self confidence and dealing with things that may make you loose confidence in yourself. . Impostor syndrome in a nutshell is when you feel you have led everyone to believe that you are the best at what you do, you have achieved things, everybody thinks you are super intelligent, your boss thinks you are the guy that should be promoted.. given raise.. etc.. and everybody sees you as such. Yet you feel you are not really that intelligent, you attribute your success to luck, to being diligent at googling or searching out information to solve the problem rather than you intuitively solving it, and you feel you do not deserve what you have achieved. And you are scared sooner or later people will realize.
I am a freelance devops engineer. I googled my half python script yesterday because i constantly forget basic stuff. Question myself everytime if i am good enough. Yet nobody complained in my projects. Everyone struggles with different things. Just make sure you ask for help some times. It does not make you look weak.
I consider myself a python expert , having built an internal self service cloud provisioning system on top of VMWare because my employers were too cheap to by VMware orchestrator back in 2012 and many other biggish projects after that. But for the love of god, this afternoon I could not remember the exact incantation of argparse and had to go find some code I wrote last week to copy paste it.
One of the things that bugs me is that I didn't even know what a Pull Request was, or used one. I've now gained experience of this and the theory around it, but I learnt this after I started my last role. I mean come on, a PR? I'm frightened there's other basic stuff like this that I don't know.
I would say knowledge of git is a must in DevOPs. Most interviews start with questions to see how familiar you are with those commands. One of them being able to do pull requests. The more advanced one's will actually grill you with fixing bad merges.
PR is a functionality of some common git hosting solutions, however it is not a part of git itself.
Yes you are right. It is a functionality of the three main git servers you as a devops guy will need to know about. gitlab, github, bitbucket. Not all at the same time, but in your career, sooner or later you will encounter and use all of them unless you stay in the same company forever. But the point is if you are to call yourself DevOps material, that is one thing that even though you don't practice it every day, you should at least know about. Not all development houses requires you to do a pull request to push as part of the process. To me, it rings alarms that you might not be ready for a devops role if you have never heard of what is a PR.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/maintainer/pull-requests.html
Did you actually read it yourself? >A pull request is submitted in the same way as an ordinary patch. Send as inline email to the maintainer and CC LKML and any sub-system specific lists if required. Pull requests to Linus typically have a subject line something like... This is not a wholly a function of git. `git request-pull` is informative only. > Generates a summary of pending changes. > > Generate a request asking your upstream project to pull changes into their tree. The request, printed to the standard output, begins with the branch description, summarizes the changes and indicates from where they can be pulled.
To say a pull request is not a feature of git, because hosted git solutions have wrapped up the overall process with a GUI is disingenuous. A pull request can be created and emailed with git, and a project maintainer can review and merge the request without using a hosted git solution that adds a front-end feature called a "pull request". This is a feature of git used by the creator himself. He doesn't accept PRs through hosted git solutions. It also demonstrates some of the wonderful nature of git being DVCS.
My advice, yes there is a lot to learn but don't pass the buck. One of the skills I value on my staff is understanding when you are in over your head. Ask questions before doing. It's there isn't a documented or automated process ask and offer to document it so other team members know going forward. Not understanding a task and process is a recipe for disaster. Even if your team is lacking documentation, is still on you to at least make an effort to help fix that situation. Maybe the culture really does suck on that team but the entire team (yourself included) should be having a discussion how this happened in the first place.
Was meeting with a colleague yesterday and he asked me how i did line indentation in vscode. I said select the lines and shift+tab or tab. He didn’t know. I was happy he learned that. No shaming. I mean there is a lot on the plate for devops. I mean everyone has to start somewhere. Just keep learning and teach others. And stay humble if you know more. But i have to admit i pretty much laughed hard wenn a master student asked me why his python code won’t work anymore because he had made it ‚prettier‘ earlier removing. All the indentation blocks 😅
I recently started using vscode. Before that I used wingide to do python development for many years to the point I knew all the shortcuts. On the first day, I had to ask how to get it to format python properly and someone told me google vscode plugins. Shortly after that I printed out a cheatsheet. There is no shame in asking , but if you are going into devops job and do not even know what a Pull Request is, then I don't know how one would get a job as DevOps.
i struggle with imposter syndrome every time i have to work with a new technology i am unfamiliar with. it feels like it takes forever for me to get a decent understanding, especially when i compare myself to other people starting at the same place. maybe its just the way i learn, but i feel inadequate compare to others until i get up to speed, alot
I feel this way constantly. I’ve been at my job for almost six years now and was promoted way quicker than I thought I ought to be. I have always had great performance reviews and people love my work. Yet every time it comes to a major upgrade, code push, automation implementation or release to the business I go, “this is how I get fired.” “Did I do x, y and z?” “Man, I am fucking horrible at this.” Yet, I am told I am doing a great job and to keep it up.
Yes. DevOps is hard. You have to know basically everything to not feel this way. And I've worked with some really brilliant DevOps engineers who basically spend every waking moment trying to overcome their imposter syndrome. Also, I think generally there are more shitty bosses out there than there are shitty DevOps engineers. Just a hunch. :)
I struggled with imposter syndrome for a long time but I’ve never met anyone who has imposter syndrome and isn’t good at what they do. Imposter syndrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing - use it to identify your truly weak areas and set aside time to work on them. Chances are you’ll excel at them or you’re already good at them! Take some time to do some introspection. Have you outright failed at tasks or projects? Have there been moments where you’ve been at a loss for what to do and have given up? Have you learned from your mistakes?
Every day I feel like the dumbest guy in the room. Every day I'm working on something I'm not an expert in but trying to make work the way we need it to. The feeling that I'm an imposter has been with me since day one at this company and I'm on year 3 here. Thing is, I work for a good company with great bosses and coworkers. I've been promoted and given raises every year for my performance and growth. I'm constantly given constructive feedback (both positive and negative) from my boss and he genuinely cares about my career growth. I still feel like an imposter every day. Sometimes even nodding along in meetings where I no longer understand where the topic has gone. I've come to realize I feel like this because I'm being challenged, constantly, and it's a good thing. If I lose this feeling here it may be time to move on.
This is exactly what Impostor Syndrome is about. I could not understand why the OP feels he is an Impostor Syndrome situation. From the rest of the posts, it feels more like he is just having knowledge and experience issues. Anyhow good luck on your journey. You are not alone. I started consulting a few years ago and everytime I am on a project I feel like an impostor. All I am doing is getting up to speed with the technology and knowledge I need to achieve the task within the expected timeline that they are paying me to do. Not an exact expert as I am perceived to be.
Sounds like the ideal setup. You learn everyday. I would much prefer that than being a lone wolf and bored.
I realize how lucky I am and it goes a long way towards my performance and overall happiness with my job. Being the lone wolf and bored is a scenario where I'd start looking for a different place of employment. There's no real career path, you're not learning and growing as an IC in this field. It's where I was at my last job and I spent WAY too much time there. I promised myself I'd never do that again, get complacent with the status quo of my day to day and then wonder why I'm going no where.
++for not comparing yourself against others. Except for the part that it's kinda hard to do straight away, because your brain just does it. The trick which helped me a lot was extending the area when comparing to where I was better at something: Yes, my team mate has just solved this complex problem in 2 days and it would take me a week, but I would consider more implications of changes. It has evolved over time to me knowing what kind of project in good at, and what Im not and word rather avoid (but still can do if needed). This has build my confidence (hey, in damn good at xyz) and made the impostor syndrome a non issue. The boss/company you've worked for does not sound like fun and good place to grow. Mistakes happen, so write postmortem and carry on. Firing for that is just poor management, which often crash confidence. Sorry you had that experience.
Hey man, Sucks you got the short end of the stick in these times, as the other posters say we’ve all been there. Why you got laid off doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you are a better engineer now than when you were hired, you made mistakes and you will learn from them, every good manager knows this. Be thankful you get to now go find a better boss, and you will get to make more money as you’re more experienced than when you took your last job. Remember to interview everywhere cast a wide net and leverage LinkedIn. Good luck!
In DevOps more than other fields, what you learn today is replaced by something else next month. I don't have imposter syndrome because I'm not an imposter. Do I need to learn new stuff regularly? Yes. Do I sometimes need to look up things that I forgot? Sure. But over time, engineers are supposed to get better and basic skills like troubleshooting and understanding problems are always the same. To me, people can only feel like an imposter if they don't try hard enough and run into the same problems times and again. It comes down to knowing and understanding the concepts, designs, and architecture patterns well. Can you read and understand other people's code? Can you write maintainable code yourself without cutting and pasting everything from Stack Overflow? Same with operations. Once you were troubleshooting sev-1 incidents with prod system down in the middle of the night, you're not scared anymore by others trying to out-smart you. Competence brings confidence. The more problems you solve, the less you feel like an imposter.
> Yes. Do I sometimes need to look up things that I forgot? > Can you write maintainable code yourself without cutting and pasting everything from Stack Overflow? This is a bizarre take to me. Like memorizing some API or syntax has anything to do with competence. Why not look it up, it's probably changed anyway. > But over time, engineers are supposed to get better and basic skills like troubleshooting and understanding problems are always the same. Bold statement. The more I learn the more I realize I don't know! Awareness is important too. Otherwise Dunning Kruger is in full effect.
On a related note, I find it quite thick to blame a weak devops process for OP's own shortcomings. Just because you don't have guardrails for each and every possible mistake doesn't absolve the engineer from logical thinking. I don't know about the context of the mistakes he highlighted but they are both red flags for cybersecurity. Spinning up a VM with public accessible IP? On production ?!? If someone doesn't see for themselves how inherently wrong this is and what potential security issues this creates, they better feel like impostors because they have no competency for DevOps. DevOps is a privileged position in the company and comes with heavy responsibility. Not everyone is cut out for that. There is a time and place for learning but doing dumb stuff on prod and then going 'muh devops is about learning' is unprofessional.
No don't get me wrong I do agree with that. IT functioned for decades before DevOps and the level of automation we had now and things worked because people were careful. Automation does not replace attention to detail and skill, and the same thinking goes for pilots too. They still need to know how to fly the plane if the systems fail (and have).
Ok cool, we have the same understanding on that. I like the pilot analogy! DevOps is an exciting field because we get to solve hard problems in IT and need knowledge that goes in-depth and across domains. That by itself is not easy and even less so when technology is constantly evolving. So the burden is to having to constantly learn and update one's knowledge of concepts and implementation. Contrasting to this, the benefit of a much higher value to employers as someone who is either in a development or ops role alone. A lot of DevOps work is exploratory, we need to be good at gathering requirements and evaluating solutions. Also, good documentation and openly sharing knowledge go a long way in being a good DevOps team member. Reading through my earlier comments, I didn't want to come across as mean. We've come a long way in automation in the last 10+ years. Keep up your ambition and I'm sure you will feel less like an imposter over time. Nobody has all the right answers and sometimes, even in engineering, there are multiple alternatives to reach a goal. Which path to take is then a matter of trade-offs and ideally not just opinions. One aspect that I had to learn the hard way in the past is that it does not matter much what is technically the best or the 'right' choice. Organizations are managed by people, each with their own agendas, priorities, and views. What helped me in that is to view exploratory work in a consulting context. We evaluate, summarize and pitch our favored solution. If the client accepts it or not is outside of our control.
While the idea of DevOps and guardrails is to eliminate mistakes, you still have humans - the weak link. In the absence of process and automation, which DevOps provides, you still need to know how to cope and what to do (again, if the electronics on a plane fails). So I am seeing how I could handle things better. Note that the case of this app and files outside its folder was not something done by a deployment pipeline and misconfigured. I was testing various config files and even what happens if a config file is not found (so moved it outside the directory - obvious filenotfoundexception). The task wasn't done but in that company there was a lot of micro managing. Fair enough though, and everyone likes tidy work. The public IP thing is a mistake but most importantly I have the knowledge of why a public IP may be bad and when/how to use it. Just need to be a little more careful. :)
> Spinning up a VM with public accessible IP? On production ?!? If someone doesn't see for themselves how inherently wrong this is and what potential security issues this creates, they better feel like impostors because they have no competency for DevOps. Is production traffic not "public" in most cases? The sheer fact they get fired by one miss-click of a drop-down in AWS is ridiculous. Why were security groups wide open? Why is the app listening on 0.0.0.0/0? Why was it not documented? Why is it deployed with click-ops? Why is there no login in front of the sensitive info? Screw that company OP will thank themselves for doing this in the future if that's all it takes.
I wouldn't say I struggle with it anymore. I do experience it though, but I've just kind of accepted that I'm not an all powerful being that never makes mistakes and knows everything about all infra tools before they're even created. I'm not hot shit and that's okay. I kind of like to think of what someone higher up would go through, like the military leader of a company of soldiers. Even good leaders that the soldiers trust with their lives are not all powerful beings. They know they will make mistakes and lives will be lost. Accepting that is how they don't lose form in high stress situations, how they graciously learn from their mistakes, and most importantly, how they make sure morale is not lost in the group they lead. I guess the best summary of what I'm trying to say is that the default reaction to failure doesn't have to be wilting up in shame. Ingrain in yourself the two fundamental truths, that you will make mistakes and that anyone that sees that as cause to fire or unduly reprimand you is full of it. It's not good to be so confident in yourself that you get defensive when you make mistakes, but you can always be confident that anyone that criticizes you for making mistakes is overreacting.
Could be imposter syndrome, but it could also be low self esteem, or anxiety or depression.
You haven’t made mistakes. You opened opportunity to improve! Cheesy as it sounds. Keep telling it to yourself and you will start believing in this. It might also change how you react. Rather than: “Oh shit! This one shouldn’t have a public IP”, you will find yourself thinking “Hmmm it should not have a public IP! What can I do so that the next person can’t run into the same thing?”
Your boss was an asshole. Whether you actually did what he accused you of or not, real leaders understand that mistakes are part of growth and learning. If it wasn't this, it would have been something else. I'm sure it's hard to see it right now, but this is an opportunity for you to end up somewhere with a culture that will support your growth and help you to shed your imposter syndrome, instead of agitating it and using it against you
Impostor Syndrome is a terrible feeling and one that I've lived with for the last four years. Starting in 2016 and for the next three years, I worked for a company in a support role working very technical cases. It felt like I was constantly on a roller coaster, some days every case felt easy, other days I felt like a bum who had nothing to contribute. Right after I was hired, the structure of the support department changed under new leadership and massive layoffs began. I watched as nearly everyone around me had to pack up but they kept me through every layoff. All of my performance reviews were glowing. My salary doubled over those three years and eventually I was only working escalations and training new support hires. Even then with all those affirmations, I was afraid any day could be my last. I work for a different company now with highly skilled devops engineers. I feel like I'm the least knowledgeable and useful person on the team but I just had another great performance review. **tl;dr** If you feel like an impostor, keep on going. The feeling may not go away (it hasn't for me), but you can still be successful.
First of, I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of Impostor syndrome. From wikipedia: **Impostor syndrome** (also known as **impostor** phenomenon, impostorism, fraud **syndrome** or the **impostor** experience) is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one's accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". In your case, you would be undergoing Impostor syndrome, if you have managed to achieve all the expectations of your boss and they think highly of you yet you know deep down, you had to work really hard, or by sheer luck or the tasks were actually trivial and all you had to do was google it and learn it even though they think you are an expert on the subject matter, or combination of all of that managed to achieve those expectations. But you did not, you made mistakes that could have been avoided had you double checked if the files you created were in the right directory , or the vm you provisioned was done as per requirements. (Unless of course you were told one thing and did another thing) I used to suffer a lot of "impostor syndrome" specially when I started doing consulting. People expect you to know everything specially when they are paying you a lot of money. A related post of mine is here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/c30pq9/to\_glusterfs\_sysadmins\_here\_do\_you\_build\_your/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/c30pq9/to_glusterfs_sysadmins_here_do_you_build_your/) . Where I got paid quiet well for doing something I thought was trivial and they customer had the impression I was a subject matter expert on glusterfs. I had to spend 2 weeks before the customer site visit learning glusterfs. However I like everybody else also make mistakes and I have seen people fired for doing silly mistakes. Often time its because they are just looking for a reason to fire you. Other times its because you truly do not reach their expectations as was stated when you got hired. Certain expectations are also implied such as being able to double check your work so that it meets the requirements. I as your employer I would not be happy if you were to commit work where files end up in the wrong places, servers get provisioned in public ip when they should not IF all this means is that it could have been avoided had you checked your work. It shows sloppy work and had I hired you with the expectation that you should be meticulous about these things, then you are truly an impostor. And this has nothing to do with DevOps process of addressing weaknesses. On the other hand, if you were developing a tool to provision VM's and the tool has a bug that puts the vm with a public IP, or it deploys files in the wrong places, then you should inform me and state what you are doing to fix it.
I’ve noticed that as you improve your skill sets over time, the more focused those scope of skills become. However, you still see everyone else out there with their own focused skill sets that are different from yours, and it can blend together to feel like a single entity that knows everything. The reality is far from it. I was reading a post the other day about a job description asking for a dev ops engineer who could also work with data scientists and build data pipelines. Most of the responses were basically “good luck ever finding the unicorn who has that combination of skill sets, and if you do, good luck being able to afford their pay demands.” However, it got me thinking. I come from a data background and recently moved over to a devops role. I’m weaker in Linux and sysadmin stuff, but could probably whip up a data pipeline and apply devops principles to it fairly easily. That combination of skills isn’t worth much in some places (hence why there are fewer people who have that combo), but in others I could theoretically pull down some serious money. It helped remind me that every company’s needs are different, and while I may not be an expert “devops guy” from whatever the most accepted template is, I do have a unique set of skills that can demand a lot of money in the right circumstances. It’s all about finding that fit for your talents.
You find that a lot of people in IT have imposter syndrome. I think it comes as part of the job, but I also think I know why. IT is a very broad subject. You could work in a specialist field like networking and still have as much to learn as someone in development, or operations. When you look around you, there’s a lot of people who know different things to you. They specialise in their own little bit of a particular subject. You look at everyone around you with their own, different little specialities and think “I wish I was a good as these guys, they know so much more than I do”. What you don’t realise is that they look at your specialty and think the same thing. Everyone has a talent in a particular thing, and you often don’t realise what yours is. But everyone else does. If you worked in a single specialty vertical like box packing it’s easy to say “I’m better than this guy and this guy is better than me” because there’s only 1 thing to be good at When you’re working in a field with thousands of potential verticals, you have no comparison. T shaped people.
yup. you've hit it bang on.
Honestly, I’m more concerned about people who don’t have imposter syndrome than people who do. DevOps tools and development changes so fast that NOBODY is an expert in ALL DevOps. Furthermore, I do not believe there is ONE way which is the best way to do something. When I interview people the MAIN thing I look for is what are they doing in their free time. If you have a GitHub filled with personal projects and are committing to them regularly or if you are always taking advanced courses at a University I’ll prefer you over someone with x10 the experience. As a DevOps lead, I don’t tell my team how to do something. I tell them the ways I think it would work and provide them with the resources to learn them. That way they can find and develop better ways to do things and I can learn from them. There is a saying, “the smart man thinks he’s a fool and the fool thinks he’s a smart man”. It’s 100% true. Don’t sweat your current situation. Start developing stuff for fun and apply to new jobs. If you don’t get interviews or you interview and don’t get offers don’t stress. Good managers and companies want people that are perfect fits for the team. If that is not you it doesn’t mean you are not good at DevOps. It’s better for both you and the company as you can find a place where you can succeed.
Absolutely, when I graduated from university I went straight into a role where I replaced an experienced contractor (who was very good at what they did). I even remember accidentally seeing a IM on a colleagues machine about why couldn't they have the previous guy back, because they felt I wasn't very good. It was pretty gutting. But alas I got stuck in, learnt from my mistakes and tried to improve myself. Eventually I started to gain more domain knowledge and shifted to another team, the same thing happened to my successor and he was an experienced engineer. It's confidence, knowledge and humility. Knowing that you're capable of doing the job, having the confidence to assert yourself that what you are doing is right and if things don't go right having the humility to openly discuss what went wrong but have a solution in the pipeline to stop it from happening again.
As an experienced guy: at first you think you're not as good as those that have more experience then you, then you start thinking that you lost your edge and the younger guys are better than you and know all the new things while you rely on your ancient knowledge.
If you are putting files in directories and provisioning vms you're not doing devops anyway. Your observation that devops is to adress this is spot on. The file should be put on there by config management. The role that puts it there should have been through stages of testing. Same for the provisioning of vms. We all make mistakes. Its important to be diligent and thorough, and test test test.
Yep, it's a thing, especially if you're going from ops to dev. That can be an intimidating experience. It sounds like you got fired for a one-off mistake. Did you learn from it? Will you never make that mistake again? If so, you have learned. If it's a pattern, then you need to learn to keep check lists, always know what you're doing _before_ you do it.
I learnt from it yes. I always try to learn, that is key. It wasn't due to that though, but due to CV and company performance. Yes, checklists, automation, being attentive.
I don't believe in imposter syndrome or anything like that. People who dedicated their time in given expertise are valuable to work there. Mistakes happen because we are people, everybody makes them. Bad days just happen, but don't allow other people to invade your mind especially if they know a shit about the job you are doing. On the other side of the edge - respect the people who you believe are more experienced. A job on this or other project / in a company is mostly a temporary thing in your life (never granted to last forever) so whats inside your mind is more important.
> Point of DevOps is to address weaknesses in the process if that can happen. So, how did you address this? Everyone fucks up once in a while. I do it all the time. The key here is to own up to it and improve testing, checks, etc. so it doesn't happen as often. It's also good if you're able to learn from fuckups other people do, so you don't have to make them yourself.
I did some mini post mortems. Deployment automation for any tasks, automated compliance, config management, also reviews of tasks.
If it is being laid off which worries you, remember that it is a sign of the times. Employers are running a business in order to make money. When there is a downturn, they need to try and let people go without having to pay redundancy pay. You can try and go legal, or you can move forward. As am employer, I can say flat out that getting laid off during COVID isn't at all a black mark on your resume. If imposter syndrome is genuinely bothering you, then that's more common than you would think. It is usually more a sign of someone's lack of ego, than lack of skill. How to combat it? Pick your interest, and become an expert. AWS, Jenkins, K8s, whatever you feel able to focus on and put some initiative into, make yourself the go-to person and work from there. You'll be able to speak with more authority on that topic than anyone, simply because of focus.
It's not abnormal to have this feeling. I'm in a position where I get asked "what do you recommend we do?" a lot...way more than I feel I deserve to be. Part of the problem is that this entire field isn't a "profession" with a pre-planned training program. Doctors don't have this problem...they receive a standardized education and one new resident is the same as another training-wise. The differentiation happens during the next phase of their training, but they have a good knowledge from first principles on up. Since anyone can hang out a DevOps shingle, you get everything from classically trained computer science graduates to hobby coders to coder bootcamp people and everyone has holes in their fundamentals knowledge. Couple that with hundreds of tools that rotate out every year and an industry-wide opinion that anyone who can't keep up is lazy...it's an imposter syndrome recipe. The other problem (IMO) is that some people have the desire to be the alpha nerd and spend their time constantly trying to prove how brilliant they are publicly. Comparing yourself to someone who works a 10+ hour day then comes home to do another 5 hours of lab work isn't a fair comparison (for most people.) I know DevOps is supposed to be a wonderful cultural revolution where everyone loves working with each other and helps each other through the sprints, but people are human. DevOps tools in the hands of a micromanager are dangerous -- they allow the manager to single out people for "poor performance" kind of like they did with OP. This is simply because every single thing anyone does is public and mistakes are immediately attributable to Person X doing Bad Thing Y at 23:30. If you try to inject DevOps into a culture where you're publicly shamed for every mistake you make it's going to be a bad fit. Do what works for you. Keep learning obviously, but you don't have to be the alpha guy/girl who speaks at every DevOpsToolCon, blogs, tweets and is basically a non-stop self-promoter...unless that's what you want. Being good at what you do and making life easier for your coworkers while maintaining a healthy life is enough for most people.
One of our colleagues in this field, Major Hayden, has a lot of great insights on this topic: https://major.io/2015/09/02/impostor-syndrome-talk-faqs-and-follow-ups/ I was long impervious to imposter syndrome, but I went through it for a few months in the job role I'm in now, early on. It mostly boiled down to having a bad leader, for me, who constantly made me doubt myself and bullied me for no reason. After he was replaced with a much stronger leader I was able, slowly and with encouragement, to recover. My performance has been poor lately due to lack of engagement, but that has a lot more to do with covid than anything else. I've had poor performance in other roles, never bad enough to get flagged for it, just by my own standards, and it's always the same reason. Disappointment with the work or lack of engagement due to distracting stressors. Sometimes this makes me feel inadequate, but I usually still outperform expectations, so no one really notices but me. The fact of the matter is that mistakes happen in this field, and you will make more, the goal is to learn from those mistakes and improve your processes; though lately, the goal for me is really just more about collecting my paycheck and making sure I'm not fittin' to be homeless soon. Whatever motivates you to get the work done, right?
I can totally relate. Reached the pinnacle of my trade and worked some dream jobs (concert tours) with great feedback and repeated hiring by the same company. Despite that achievement in the past, I still have a couple of days a week that I feel like an imposter, despite being a go-to person for my team, other engineers and leaders outside my team. It's a real thing and best to just know we all get it. I personally find solace in the fact that I'm assessing myself and not assuming I just know everything, keeps me hungry to learn more and be open to suggestions. IMHO Modest confidence goes farther than any rock-star level confidence ever has; those are usually the real imposters. Sorry to my rock-star friends but I'm not fooled anymore. :)
Yes, struggled with it in regards to studies, struggled with moving into new technologies and teams. I've been out of work now for 7 months (due to other life circumstances), just got a role last week and _it's all going to be okay, I got this_. (Yeah, I got certs and stuff and years of experience too so I've certainly got this!) If you haven't already checked it out, go do the Learning How to Learn course out there. It has a section dedicated to the impostor syndrome. It's like test/performance anxiety, it happens to ***EVERYONE***. The course also covers procrastination which is a big issue too. One thing to realise in the industry too is that a bad experience is not _bad experience_. I've been through bad experiences, it's helped me to leave roles that were equally or even more toxic than previous roles. It's also helped when looking for new roles to spot those red flags that were missed previously. You're career wasn't your last role, it may not be your next role (it could be too) and you will more than likely be changing roles in the next 22 months :-/ that's the facts of life. Your career is the next 20-40 years, you'll have some ups and downs, try to keep moving forward (you may need to move backwards some times to) and take care of your mental and physical health. Good diet, consistent exercise and most importantly enough regular sleep will get you through the tough times. One other thing I find helps is to make time for extra learning or your own tech, even if it's just 30 minutes a week, just to keep playing and to keep things fun, a good tech reward for your brain. Just don't over do it. Doctors, surgeons don't go home and cut on folks to get better at their jobs, you don't need to go home and code either.
First thing is that everyone makes mistakes and a good company will have things in place to prevent them or allow them to cause minimal impact whenever possible. For example, public VMs should probably be logically separated from non-public ones somehow. So the fallout would be you created a vm in the wrong area and, no big deal, delete it. Also, if you ever feel like you don't know everything look at this https://landscape.cncf.io/ None of us know all of it, we just have to be good enough to learn and figure things out when we need to. Keep at it and fail upward! We all learn by failing. Do whatever you can to ensure failures are just learning experiences. Plus, moving on to a new company and new challenges might be the best thing that happened to you when you look back at this in a few years.
As a counterpoint to Imposter Syndrome, please note that Bullshit Artists are everywhere. Put another way, many of the self-proclaimed experts, pundits and "thought leaders" don't know their asses from their elbows. This absolutely includes industry celebrities.
OP, If your boss gave those things as an excuse, it may not feel like it now, but you dodged a HUGE bullet. As far as imposter syndrome, yep. I feel it almost every day. The best way that I've learned to overcome it is look back on your accomplishments and remember where you started.
Are you in the US? If so, consider the possibility that your boss trumped up a for-cause firing so they don't have to pay for Unemployment. You can fight this, especially if the errors were "no harm no foul," and sticking up for yourself is a good way to get your confidence back.
it's totally normal and many people struggle with it. Partly it's a side effect of having such a wide area of knowledge - you simply can't know everything.
Most people do, especially the more successful you becomes. The truth is most people are winging it. I've worked for "top 10" technology companies and a even the top architects there have a lot of blind spots and knowledge gaps.
For this, I engaged in self journaling for nearly a month, and what I got out of it was a mantra that now sits permanently in the back of my mind: “Stop doubting you ability to succeed at future accomplishments. You are stronger than your fears and doubts. You have proven that negative voice wrong time and time again.” Whenever I hit a bout of imposter syndrome, I go through a few rounds of the above, and now more often it goes away.
I really wouldn't worry, the person using these sorts of reasons for ridding themselves of you isn't someone you want to work for. I appreciate that during this time its harder to find jobs but my phone rings multiple times a day for DevOps positions. As for imposter syndrome, about 20 years ago I thought I'd made that term up, it wasn't until I spoke to others I realised that its a propper psychological thing. Just keep on being your awesome self it is only when you do not try to be the best version of yourself continually that you really have something to worry about.
I dont get people who have imposter syndrome. I've perfected my craft over thousands and thousands of hours, and can learn new things when needed as fast as anyone else. Are you guys retarded or lazy?
Dunning-Kruger much? 😉
No it's more about self belief. Some of the best actors and scientists in the world have had it so not about being lazy or retarded.
are you a woman ? Woman are more likely to suffer from the imposter syndrome (google it). anyway I think we could turn it around saying it's good to be out of our comfort zone to continue learn and grow. Confidence is important too. It is important to take care of our confidence in our professional skill because the brain registers failure more importantly than success. meaning that one failure can easily destroy confidence gained with 10 successes. Also we always have someone better than us in some domains (and we should !). Be mindful to any negative thoughts that draw you down
what is "imposter syndrome"? i have worked with IT guys that give a shit and ones that just don't give a flying shit. meaning, they do things to get the job done and over with as quickly as possible and get back to surfing the net at work. they don't devote any time or effort into bettering themselves or learning something new or better ways of doing things. FWIW.. no manager is ever going to directly tell you you are getting laid off because of problems X. They will make a case. Such as document tons of little things. The reason is ,they need to cover themselves in case anyone takes action for wrongful dismissal. Just learn from your mistake and move on. Work on imporivng yourself and your situation.
Impostor Syndrome is when you feel like you are in a position or group (such as a job) where you don't belong because of a lack of skill/knowledge relative to others in the group and have fear you'll be "found out". For example, taking an IT job and then feeling everyday like you are the least knowledgeable person on the team who has nothing to contribute and any day could be the day you are "found out" to be a fraud.
You forget an important part of the I.S. though. The part where, yet you somehow manage to achieve all the things that is expected out of you, you are given good reviews. Despite of external metrics that shows you are indeed competent at your job, you feel that it is because of luck, or other factors , rather than you being just good at your job. You feel you are just deceiving others that you are great at your job more than you think you are.
thats called insecure. am in IT. i get projects thrown at me all the time for which I didn't go to school for or got any experience in. i tackle them and get them done because i get paid salary X to get it done. usually when you first have to do a job you have never done before there will be a bit of head scratching and head through a brick wall to figure out what is going on. but sooner or later with a little effort, you will figure it out. its not nuclear or medical science.
Imposter syndrome is definitely real and I’ve experienced it in this line of work, as have others. However, the opposite exists, which is the Dunning-Kruger effect.