 two minutes until we kick off the last track of the mentoring session of the day. The mentoring track will continue tomorrow in the same room. After this, at 7 p.m., there will be the AWS boss here in this room. So if you stay here, that's what you'll be hearing about. And now I would like to introduce Jeremy Kitchen. Here to tell us about imposter syndrome. Hi folks, I'm Jeremy Kitchen. I'm on the engineering team at Stripe. My first experience with Stripe was as a customer of a UK hosting provider who was using Stripe Checkout for their online or for their US credit card processing. I was on the website paying my bill. The Stripe Checkout form pops up. And if you've never seen it before, it has really well polished. It has very nice transitions between screens. There's auto advancing on form fields, all sorts of fun, happy things. This was my first experience with it, so I was like, wow, this is really cool. By the time I was done paying, I was like, wow, that was kind of a fun thing to do. A couple months later, I was paying my bill again, and it had forgotten about me, so I had to punch in my information again. The first thing I asked you for is your email address. So I type in my email address, and as I finish typing it out, it switches the form. It says, hey, check your phone. We just sent you a text message. My phone dings, and I got a text message. It gave me this code to type in. I type in the code, and suddenly it's like, okay, here we've got all your information again. Just click and pay, and again. So I didn't have to retype all of my information. And that was kind of mind blowing. I was like, that was a really great experience, and that's when I knew that I wanted to work for Stripe. Because the attention to detail, the thought that went into that user experience, I'm like, I have to know who wrote that. I have to learn from them. So fast forward a little bit later, and I'm looking for a job, and Stripe has always kind of been in the back of my mind, and I'm like, okay, Stripe's over there. I'll throw out some resumes, talk to some people. Finally, I work up the courage to just say, you know what, hey, I'm going to give them my resume, because what's the worst that can happen, right? Just say no. So I give them the resume, and suddenly I'm getting called in for an interview, and then I'm getting an offer, and then next thing you know, I'm working there. And this is the, I haven't been so excited about something for a long time to start working for Stripe. I was really, really happy. So I get there on my first day, I'm getting hurted through the process, and, you know, getting your laptop, getting your HR, filling out your forms, and all that sort of thing. On my second day, I had a little bit of free time between all the spin-up sessions to talk with my mentor to kind of figure out, like, first projects, what I was going to be working on for the first couple of days, first couple of weeks. By the end of the week, I had a lot of free time and not a whole lot of guidance. Meanwhile, everything around me is still going on, and there's lots of emails happening. Stripe has a very active Slack channel, or a very active list of Slack channels, so there's lots of communication going on. And people are talking in a language that is very different from anything I've heard, not only because Stripe has kind of their own internal, some of their own internal words, but there's a lot of academic people who work at Stripe, like a lot of MIT grads and stuff, so they're talking very academic things. I don't come from an academic background, so I kind of felt a little overwhelmed by it all. And I wasn't feeling super confident. In the past, my job has basically been keep everything running. From an ops background, that's what I do. And so there's this pressure, there's always been this pressure to know a little bit about everything so that you can fix it, so when it breaks, you get it back up and running quickly. But what that really means is you actually have to know everything about everything, because you need to not only be able to fix it, but you need to be able to do it at three o'clock in the morning when you're tired and the site's down and customers are crazy or going crazy and support's going crazy, and people want everything to get back up. So there's this internal pressure of like, okay, well I need to really get up and running quickly because I need to learn all this stuff. Stripe is the biggest company I've ever worked for, and there's just too much to try to take on. And that's not a failure of Stripe. It's simply just a fact that there's just more than one person can take on and definitely not on their first day or their first week. But since I've got all this pressure from my history, I start having a lot of anxiety. I really feel like I'm not picking up things as quickly as I should. I've done a couple of things, and one of them broke and I had to get reverted, and so I'm like, okay, that's a huge failure, but the person who reverted it was just like, okay, it was kind of annoying, but to me it was like this giant massive failure, right? Because what if it was something big? And especially because it was my first week, like I want to prove myself. I want to be able to show that I know what I'm doing. And so there's a lot more things that I'm finding out during this first week, first couple of weeks that I don't know because there's just still so much more that I can possibly know. Also in the past, I've been on an on-call rotation, so when you're on call, you're the person who's getting woke up at 3 in the morning. But also, I've generally been on a small team, and coming in and getting on call is kind of relieving somebody else from having to, not necessarily a single person, but relieving the rest of the team. It takes a little pressure off because there's one more person in the rotation. So I've always felt like I needed to get up and running quickly so that I can get on call quickly so I can get in there and start contributing to the team. But since I'm having all these struggles with trying to get up and running, my brain starts thinking, maybe I'm just not cut out for this, maybe I can't do this, maybe I'm not good enough. And that right there is imposter syndrome. When you feel like you don't belong somewhere, or that you're not good enough, or that you aren't there because you deserve it, because you worked hard, because you got, or because you got lucky, or you deceived somebody. Somehow you managed to sneak through the interview process, and nobody noticed that, like, hey, he doesn't really know what he's doing, but he can write a foreloop or whatever. He can do fizzbuzz. And that feeling can really take a huge toll on a person, because it snaps away from your confidence. Everything about modern software development is automated testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And what that does is it instills confidence in your work. You can very, and with that confidence, you can then rapidly iterate on processes. You know that the work you're doing is doing what you want it to do, and you know that it's not breaking something else. But when you don't have that confidence, you have to second guess everything you're doing, because it's like, okay, well, is this going to break something for somebody? Or who's doing this? Who's thinking about this? And without that confidence, or when imposter syndrome is taking that confidence away from you, then you have a lot of trouble getting any work done. It also instills every decision you make with fear and doubt. Is this the right approach? Am I doing this properly? If I screw this up, is it going to shine light? Because remember, you're still feeling like you're just kind of hiding and hopefully nobody finds you. So it's even more risky to do something, because then it'll just kind of point out very directly. I don't belong here. It also makes it really hard to take new risks. You have to see something all the way through to the end as a success before you're willing to take it on. So you end up just hopping from one possible solution to another without really trying to do anything, without trying to take any steps toward it, because there's this doubt that it's not the right approach. So you have to know quickly whether it's going to work or not. And so all of this reinforces the notion that you don't belong, that you're not good enough. Because people who are good enough wouldn't struggle with this. They would just have gotten it done, right? So it can also make it really difficult to recognize your own accomplishments. And anything you can recognize as an accomplishment will simply get chalked up as luck, or someone else did most of the work, or, you know, it wasn't even really that hard. So if you can't accomplish anything, then all that's left is failure. And since anything you perceive as a failure serves to reinforce the idea that you're an imposter, it just kind of starts feeding on itself. And eventually, everything kind of comes to halt, and you can't really do anything. Now, how many of you have felt this way in the past? Take a look around the room, and look at all the hands that are in the air. So what can we do about this? The hardest part about imposter syndrome, and there's no just magic wand that you can wave to make it all go away. There's no BuzzFeed article with the one trick that they don't want you to know, right? Because it's rooted in this natural risk aversion that serves as a great survival trait, you know, the whole look before you leap thing. But imposter syndrome will take that and turn it up to 11. And there's a huge difference between being careful and being completely paralyzed by fear, and especially fear that is self-reinforcing. That's when it becomes a problem, and that's when it becomes imposter syndrome. So if you're feeling imposter syndrome, what can you do about it? If you're experiencing it, the first thing to do is recognize it. And this was actually touched on a little bit during the last talk, and yeah, this was touched on during the last talk. So the first thing is to recognize it. Because if you call it out, if you notice it, you can give it a name if you need to, that helps you start noticing it more and you can start recognizing it, you can start dealing with it. From there, I think one of the best things you can do is talk to somebody about it. Talk to your manager or coworker or friend. Someone who will listen to you, who can validate your feelings and your thoughts. Of course, that's way easier said than done. Because if you're experiencing imposter syndrome, the last thing you want to do is go to your manager and be like, hey, I'm having struggles. Is this imposter syndrome? Your manager's like, no, you actually kind of suck. Sorry. Right? And so that's the worst possible scenario, and that's all you see. So you can't ask. And this also feeds on itself. Because the more you push off asking for help, you start seeing that, like, oh, yeah, last week I was feeling this way, I wanted to get some help and I forgot, or I didn't. And so that's a failure. And so the next time it happens, it's another failure and it starts adding to these piles of failures. So as part of working on this talk, I thought about how can we make this step easier? Because really talking to someone is extremely helpful. And one of the things I thought of was instead of saying, hey, I need some help, maybe say, hey, I can help. Try to offer assistance to others who might be experiencing imposter syndrome. Just kind of as a, you know, hey, I'm here as a resource. Because if I guarantee someone will come up to you and say, hey, you know, I've been having these problems. And what that does is it can help, it can give you someone that you can now talk to about your own imposter syndrome, about your struggles. But it also, even if you don't necessarily want to immediately talk to them about your struggles, just hearing their story can help validate your own feelings, which can in itself help a lot and lower some of the anxiety around it. Because now it's like, okay, well, there's somebody else doing this, right? And if there are a bunch of people in the community or in the, like on the team of people at work or something like that who all offer themselves up as available to help, then you kind of blend into the crowd. You don't stand out as the person who's like, hey, I'm willing to help with imposter syndrome and everybody is local, what do you have it or something? So it can make it, it can make it easier to start talking about it. And when more people start talking about imposter syndrome, then it just becomes normal to talk about it. And what that does is then it lowers the vulnerability required to speak up, to ask for help, to have that conversation with someone. And hopefully, or my hope is that if enough people, if the barrier to entry gets so low that people can start talking about it early, that they can get the help they need before it becomes a serious problem. So when I give this talk back, it's right back in December, this was pretty much the end of the talk. Obviously, I needed to grow it a little bit more. But what happened after that is the microphone went around the room and like not completely unexpected, just kind of like someone had a question, I threw out the mic and then it's kind of went around. Everybody shared their experiences, strategies they've had, stories they've heard. Obviously, that was a much smaller audience. And we also had a much more, much stronger shared bond in that we'd all gone through the same experience of starting at Stripe and then continuing to work there. So having that happen here is not, I don't know how that would work. So I'm not going to try to like do anything like that. But I do encourage you to, to like after this or when you go back to work or in your communities, try to have these discussions. So in that spirit, I'd like to share with you some of the things that I've been doing with the hope that doing so will help you with your own struggles. I don't expect what I say to be applicable to everybody in the room. And that's why I encourage you to do your own research and have your own discussion. Since I was struggling with imposter syndrome primarily at work, I thought the first or the person who could help me the most would be my manager. Of course, getting the courage to ask my manager was very difficult. But once I did, it actually became just really like not a big deal. And now we talk about it on a regular basis. And one of the things I would do is bring up during our weekly one on one kind of like a level like what's my imposter syndrome level this week. And I think the first time I did that it was at a 12. And what that does is it gives us something to talk about like why is that I was 12? Was it because there was a bad interaction with a co-worker or is there a problem that I'm struggling with that I can't seem to get past and I'm kind of afraid to ask for help? Or is there something else going on? But when it's not a 12, when it's like a 3 or a 4, we still talk about it because we want to know like what's working. Either is there like the work that I'm doing is more is easier or more fulfilling or something or collaborating more with people so that we can try to figure out like what works best for me both to deal with the imposter syndrome and also how to just get more productivity out of me. It does really help that I have a manager that I can trust that I can talk about or talk to about things. And I realize that not everybody has that. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly the best approach to like talk to your manager or to bring the subject up with your manager but I bet there's people in this room who would be willing to help you if you had questions or if you had some concerns and I'm one of them, I'm willing to try but I don't have like the right answer. Also I've done a lot of research just to give this talk and it's kind of interesting that just doing that research, you know, there were solutions that worked for me and some that didn't. Not solutions. I don't want to say that but ideas and strategies have worked for me and some that didn't. So just doing the research for this talk was really powerful. Also since I've been talking to a lot of people about the talk both here at work when I announced that I was doing the talk at work, I immediately got tons of people who were saying like, oh, hell, that's a really great idea. I'm very interested in your talk and then they started, we just broke the ice, we just had this conversation. And in fact, the whole idea for this conversation came out or for this talk came out of a conversation with a co-worker over burritos in San Francisco during my last week onboarding a stripe. We were talking about ways that stripes could make this easier for new people because it's actually a very prevalent problem that's striped. And experts have come in and said, wow, you guys have it really bad. And so we're like, well, how can we make that better? And one of the things she said was, why don't we just do a training session for new stripes? And we'll talk about like, hey, this is what imposter syndrome looks like and how it might affect you. And we're here to help and let's kind of, you know, we try to tackle the problem early. And so at the same time, I was getting nagged on Twitter about, hey, submit a talk for scale. And I was like, OK, well, what do I want to talk about at scale? Because I've always wanted to talk at scale, but I never quite had an idea. And it took me a little while and I realized that, wait a minute, I could talk about imposter syndrome at scale. But then I immediately shot it down because I'm like, you know, I'm not qualified to talk about imposter syndrome. I don't have the answers. How can I get up in front of you and talk about imposter syndrome? I'm not good enough to give that talk. And then I had a title and I was like, OK, now I have to do it. Because why not, right? Another thing I've been doing is there's a book from Meng Tan from Google who called Search Inside Yourself. It's about mindful meditation and also talks a lot about living mindfully, which I kind of interpret as equal parts, acting with absolute intent and being fully aware of your emotions. And it's really, really hard to do, both like the sitting thing and also just kind of like as you're out in the world, as you're living your life, just being aware of the things of how you're feeling and how your mood is. One of the effects this has had though is I do tend to notice my emotions a lot more. And if I'm having a negative emotion, I try to stop to analyze, like, where is this coming from? Why am I having this? And imposter syndrome is generally manifest for me as like anxiety. So I'll be like, OK, what is this? Is this imposter syndrome or is this like something like I'm about to like push a button that could stop the servers or maybe be able to work just fine? Who knows? So where this has really come in handy is after I started talking about doing this talk amongst my coworkers, I immediately started receiving feedback. One of those things was a link from a coworker about a talk by Allison Kapsher called Effective Learning for Programmers. In this talk, she brings up research by Terrell Dweck about fixed and growth mindsets. She even mentions imposter syndrome as like very related to this. So the idea with fixed and growth mindsets is with a fixed mindset, it's very like you're smart and therefore you're able to do things. Whereas with a growth mindset, it's you've worked very hard and you're very so you're able to do things. And the main difference is with a fixed mindset, you can't get better. But with a growth mindset, it's just a matter of just working harder or not necessarily harder, but working at it. Just continue perseverance and not really, really registered with me. I thought, wow, this is really fascinating. Unfortunately, I didn't finish walking watching the talk because as I was watching it, I was like, OK, well, my talk is basically or what I want to say is basically this now. And I don't want to just get up here and go like, go watch this talk, go read this book because I also didn't want to just repeat her whole talk. So I kind of put it off to the side for a little bit and see if there's maybe something else. Because maybe that's just one of the things and it just happened to be the first one I ran across and there might be some other things. So fast forward about a month, I'm having a particularly rough day in the self-confidence realm and I remembered that mindset thing. And I think it was something like I thought the word like I'm not good enough or I'm not smart enough and that took me back to that talk and it took me back to the mindset thing. And then I was like, wait, there was a book. And so immediately, immediately I went and bought the book and started reading it. And it has been really, really amazing, almost to the point where I thought about trotting this talk because I'm like, I'm not talking about imposter syndrome. I'm talking about mindset. But I don't know if that's completely true or whatever. And it's still relevant because it's still relevant because the journey is still there. You know, like I could say, read this book. But if you don't know the whole story behind it, maybe you can't relate to it as much. Or it might be harder to guess. I'm going to skip that. So there are passages in the book which are nearly word for word thoughts that I've had. So it really resonated with me and that's where I'm currently out for my progress. I haven't had a whole lot of time at work to put the techniques and the thoughts or the things from the book to good use at work because I've been traveling for two weeks and there was like a whole Christmas break thing before that so there's about a week. But I have been putting some of it to good use here and I've gotten a lot more out of my interactions with people here since reading that book. And so I highly recommend that book. The TLDR version of that is still go watch this video, go read this book. But I feel like without the other stuff you wouldn't necessarily have the context to understand why it registered or why it had so much impact. Yes. It's called mindset, the new psychology of success. Yeah. I was thinking about having a slide with a bunch of stuff but I'll post it later just because I wasn't sure how to like, do I just have a whole thing up there the whole time or what? So I feel like without knowing about the other parts of my journey you may not have the context to know like why it registered so much with me. Because I really do feel like I heard that message a month prior to actually receiving like internalizing it. So as always, your miles may vary and the important thing is to recognize imposter syndrome to call it out because you can't fix a problem you don't know what you have. And if you're struggling with it, ask for help. If you notice someone else struggling with it, offer to help them, try to reach out to them, do what you can to help them. As a community, we can help by making this normal to talk about. By reducing the vulnerability required to ask for help to discuss this, we can, people will hopefully start asking for help sooner. And when they ask for help sooner, they'll be able to get the help they need much more easily than when they're very, very have a lot more impact. Do you have any questions or if you want to share some of your own experiences or strategies? Just kind of opening it up for this. I'll be sharing how big you want me to. OK. I will bring a mic around to people who want to talk. Whatever you want to do. I'll sit on that. OK. So I'm a fellow imposter syndrome poster child. I went through most of high school being very, very into computers and then I decided that I just really wasn't good enough to be a software engineer because I wasn't that good at math and so I went to school and got a double major in philosophy in the history of math and science which really good degree. I've really enjoyed and I've learned a lot and I've grown a lot. But looking back I'm like, wow, I lost an opportunity to do a really good composite education which is a little sad but be that as may. But the number one thing that happened was I got out into the world and I realized that I was never going to stop loving and wanting to work in computers. So I started working in computers and the more I worked with people the more I realized that I was better than I thought but I still was definitely not really good. Like they're those really good people and I had an epiphany moment and I think my epiphany moment and the way I reached my epiphany moment is what might help some people. It's the first time I wanted to make a modification to someone's code who I really idolized and that was, anyone here familiar with Mox and Marlon Spike? He writes really good code and he wrote a piece of software called Knock Knock which is a port knocking implementation. It's really, really good and this last year I decided that the thing it really needed was system d support because it doesn't have it. So I decided to go and write system d support and the first thing I did was I popped open source code and there are no comments. There's nothing. I was absolutely adrift and I'm like, oh well it's just because he's really, really smart and he really knows what he does. Everyone will occasionally just throw something out there and it might not be their best way. It's still good. I mean Knock Knocks are really good piece of software but it was the moment when I realized that, you know, I can write a piece of software and modify a piece of software like this guy who's just amazing. So I encourage you, find one of the lesser projects of someone you absolutely idolize. You know, maybe not their Magnum Opus. You know, maybe if I looked at, maybe if I looked at Signal right now, I would feel a little bit worse. But find something and look at it and you try and modify it and see if you can't do better than them because you probably can. So that's my story. Cool, thanks. While I'm walking the mic over I'd just like to echo that one of the things that I've found the most helpful has been, I noticed that my own imposter syndrome comes out as comparing myself to others going, wow, such a passion so is just better at this than I'll ever be. And then when you talk to them enough about it, you sometimes realize they've got it too. They're comparing themselves to somebody else and then you go, wait, maybe this maybe this doesn't make sense. Anyways, who am I handing the mic to? You. Hi, is there anything that you like changed like at work like what you worked on? Like did you have it like did anything like kind of help boost your ego other than just talking to you know, coworkers and your boss, but actually like did you change anything that you worked on? That's a really good question. So the question is did I change anything I worked on to try to get like an ego boost or something like that? I think I flail around to try to find some projects that I could get easy wins on or maybe not easy wins, but I could just start making some progress on. And I think there's there was just a lot of resistance to that internally or in my own self about that. So I didn't have a whole lot of success with that with the after reading the mindset book. I think I would actually try to find something that is a lot more challenging and try to tackle that because then it's a really big win. But I just haven't had the opportunity yet because it's been kind of a crazy month. Just because I've been traveling and work and stuff like that. Hey. So I started working with Jeremy like a year ago at a different company. And I want to say that like the first three four weeks there, I had like massive imposter syndrome compared to him. But one of the things that helped me the most was there was so many things that I felt like I should know that like I had just been hired at this job. And there are these things that like, oh, I'm just supposed to know that. I don't want to ask the question of something I don't know because then I'm going to look dumb and simply just getting like forcing myself to just whether or not whether or not I look dumb, I'm going to ask the question anyways, nobody ever cared. But that was such like an improvement to my ability to work and then, you know, get over these feelings. That was my share. And one thing that you can do to help the people around you who might suffer from imposter syndrome is give them positive feedback when they do something you think is awesome. It can be really easy to just not say anything. But then they can imagine that maybe you're like criticizing it and just too polite. So give people that feedback. So I think this might be more of a comment rather than a question. But I do some studying in the more mental aspect of things and from hearing about this and from kind of researching imposter syndrome and stuff. It kind of reminds me of BPD and the sense of like borderline personality disorder. But it's on my question. So this is a question then. So my question is when researching did that kind of come up like in a search sort of, you know, BPD or imposter syndrome? So the question, oh, you're on a mic though. So I don't know. The question is, and during my research, did BPD ever come up about this? And the answer is no. I might, I'll take a look at that though and see if there's anything that kind of resonates with me about that. Now borderline personality disorder. Well, just from like what people were saying, how it was like you kind of feel like everyone else is doing better than you. Even when you're doing something really good or you feel like, oh, I'm worthless. This is like I shouldn't deserve this job with BPD. People do still feel that on a level like that. Okay. Thank you. That sounds really interesting. I'm definitely going to take a look at that. Hi, I'll go ahead and give a try at sharing a little bit about imposter syndrome too. So about three years ago, I got out of the Navy. What I did was I built bombs and I decided I didn't want to blow people up anymore. So I need to get a real job. So trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life and it has to come with a career switch, right? So my skill set is really, really different now than it was then. So I get hired by a major corporation in management because managing people is kind of the same whether you're building bombs or putting food in cans as it turns out. And I remember my first week being just terrified because I was like, they're going to know. I don't know about this industry. They're going to know. They're going to know. And then like slowly, I realized, well, actually, I think I kind of know a little bit more than I realized. Like this is working out and you start once you start getting those little victories, those little pieces that start coming together and it's hard to recognize them because you're like overcome with fear the whole time. And it's really important to stop and catch those. And I remember like my specific imposter syndrome moment with technology was the first time one of my bosses found out that I had this huge interest in like software development. So he's like, I got a project for you. You're going to be the product manager for our business application upgrade. And suddenly I'm sitting in the room with people that I want to be doing their jobs. I want to be part of their team. Like this is the stepping stone for me right now. And I'm terrified because they're going to know. They're going to know that I want to be where they're at, but I don't have their skill set. They're going to know I'm going to say something wrong and look like an idiot. Kind of like on the IRC, the first time you get on IRC and you ask a dumb question and everyone's been in that one. So I wanted there's hope out there for you, even if you feel that way because after two months of that project, that same place, they offered me a job immediately. They said, we want you to come work for us as a project manager just based on what was going on there. So I just wanted to share that with the group and say there is actually, even though you're terrified the whole time, there is light at the end of the tunnel and it's not a train. They're probably, they're probably also just as terrified by the way. Oh, God. So, so for, I guess I'll do sharing first and then a strategy that I actually learned from my company. So at my last company, student fresh out of college, like nothing was expected of me, no problem. And I got, I got lucky and ended up, like reducing incident time by 80 percent for 20 percent of incidents, which is like hardcore metric. Like, yes, this is awesome, measurable success. Woo, right. And then leverage that to get hired at a video game company. Lifelong dream, awesome, sweet and get like going through the interview process like there's no way I'm going to get this. Oh, God, I'm working here. And kind of the whole, basically at that point, you know, you've already had one job, you're no longer a student, or a student fresh out of college first job. You're expected to have, you got your two years of experience and you're expected to know what you're doing by now. And then you're sitting across from an engineer who's been doing this about the same time and they, you know, contribute to five open source projects and basically define part of the engine. It's like, oh, shit. Oh, shit. So for me personally, one thing that helped was kind of and this might sound terrible. It just worked for me. May not work for everyone else was kind of I want. I'm now considering myself a software engineer in training, right? I'm not part of the official engineering organization. Technically data analysts, even though I write software, like this is where I'm at and I am going towards that growth. And yes, I'm not as good as that guy, but that's that's OK. They've had different experiences than I have and I'll be damned if I'm not going to get there. And then strategies that we were taught by funny, the head of project management at the company was like, I'm dealing with imposter syndrome. This is how I deal with it. She mentioned tracking what you've done and what you've accomplished and sharing that with your manager and be like, is this good? And the manager be like, yes. And that doing that for myself that she had taught me is like, yes, super, super big. So just a couple of strategies. So thank you. Hi, so I guess I'm truly an imposter in here because I am an English teacher and not in the tech field of any sort. But I want to let you know that in even as an English teacher and this is my first year teaching, I am going through the same struggles, the same type of imposter symptoms and syndrome and feeling like an outsider within my own department. And there was a couple of things and I guess I'll sort of do it now. But Amy Cuddy, who did this wonderful TED talk about how body language shapes and I can even feel it right now because a minute ago I was sort of recluse up and closed off and feeling very nervous. But now as I stand and as I stand with a better posture, I get more confident and I feel more confident. And you said earlier, exactly, the Peter Pan victory. So all of that. And so earlier you were talking about being aware of your emotions. Well, it's the same with your body language and being aware of your body language and how you portray yourself to the world because how you portray yourself is also how people react to you. So if I were to sit here and stand with myself closed off, it's unlikely that anybody would want to approach and even talk to me and talk to me about their troubles. So if I were to, of course, you know, become more aware of my body and as you can see, my voice isn't as shaky as I stand and as I talk to you and you're standing up there with your victory Peter Pan pose as I have done many times in front of my class. It's something that I would really encourage you and encourage this audience to look into would be Amy Cuddy's how body language shapes us, which is a wonderful TED talk and you can find it on, you know, TED.com or something like that. But yeah, there you go. Thank you. So I've been dealing with imposter syndrome for years and it wasn't until I actually found an open source project where I felt like I had a mentorship. I'm actually part of the finance project, which is a very large Python project that has a huge umbrella of applications underneath it. And I found mentorship there under a bunch of other people that have the exact same syndrome that felt the exact same way and they helped me guide through it. I'm now the maintainer of one of the largest request response libraries in Python called Webop. You've probably touched it without knowing it. If you've used OpenStack, if you've read it, you've touched it. And it's scary, but that's what helped me get over my imposter syndrome. It's helped me grow because I see people using my source code. I see people using my stuff and I'm getting out there and, you know, this to me is still scary. I'm standing in a room full of people as you can probably tell. But to me, that is a big thing, is the open source community as a whole has helped me tremendously grow. And I think it can do a lot for other people, too. Find a project where you're interested, where your interests lie, that you believe that you can make a difference and make a difference. Even if it's not, you know, English teacher, find something you're interested in. Like, there's got to be projects out there to make education better for the world. Like, there you go. So, that to me was a huge help, is knowing that, yes, there's all the people out there that have been hugely successful. You know, Chris McDonnell made Supervisor, which many of you probably run in Docker. You know, he's helped, he's been through this, too. He's helped me get those contributions out. He's told me my code sucks and helped me make it better and get it there. So now it is good and now I can help make all the people successful, too. So please, go do open source. I think it will help. Yeah, I was thinking back when you were talking about my career and I think imposter syndrome is quite common, you know? And I think as you get farther along, what I've determined is that companies I haven't had it at are companies that after a while I regretted being there because I felt like when I showed up and I had imposter syndrome, there was a very high bar of talent and I had a bunch to learn. So you start getting that muscle you're comfortable to it and it's not something you totally fear. Because if you move into a company and you immediately have no imposter syndrome, something's probably, you know, the caliber of people around you is probably not the level you want to be at. So that's my perspective. Jeremy, will you share some of the ways that we talked about when you are talking to somebody who you're starstruck by, they're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this person is talking to me. How do you handle that? I think someone else actually touched on that pretty well. Tried to listen more than talk because you don't need to necessarily prove your worth to them. Just ask questions, show interest, and they'll talk and then you can have a conversation. I'm actually, it's very difficult for me to talk to somebody who I find very, or I am very starstruck by just because I feel imposter syndrome myself. It's something I've been working on but listening helps a lot. And before I hand off the mic just to add on to that, just remember that they're people. Just if it helps when you're having conversations with just random strangers, imagine that they're really famous in some subculture that you've never heard of and go, yeah, I can talk to people who might or might not be famous and just treat them like the people that they are rather than some glorified thing up on a pedestal that doesn't have any flaws. I would like to say that everybody in this, it's a very competitive world out there and everybody faces imposter syndrome at some time or the other. And while it's very good to be open to feedback from your colleagues, it's also important to filter it out. So sometimes when people that you work with on a daily basis give you feedback, it's very easy to assume that they're right. And if they give you feedback and say, oh, you're not good at this, you're automatically assuming that you have done something wrong and you're going back and trying to fix it. So it's important to step back and not react to it immediately. I felt that it's helped me out. I used to react very quickly to whatever people said and say, oh, something's wrong, I have to go fix it. But now I take a step back and I see that sometimes they may not be right all the time. So it is important to do that to make sure that your confidence is not low. Can you hear me? Actually, I wanna piggyback on what you were saying here. Like everybody else, I've myself had the imposter syndrome. I've had a few careers and it's always there. I think a lot of it sometimes is how we were raised. Parents don't go to school to learn to be parents. Some of it is learned. Some of it too, I think we're in the tech industry and it's an awesome industry. I'm slowly learning to program and do some of the stuff that engineers do. But in the years that I've worked with teams, it always amazes me that some of the most brilliant people that I work with have such what people say it's low self-esteem. And of course, a lot of people in the tech industry are introverts, so maybe there's a connection there. But what I have noticed a lot and I think this is not only LA, it's really across the country. There's a culture of, or in many places, you'll find a culture of putting on a pedestal certain very brilliant people. And that's great, they're brilliant, it's awesome. But I think that all of us sometimes without taking away our own accountability to work towards whatever we need to work at, we also need to help ourselves in really managing that culture that is really kind of unreasonable. Because I see people who have worked really, really hard at what they know and they're really, really good. But because they're not that that person getting the attention, they're pushed to the side. And if they're the kind of person that's having this imposter syndrome, you can imagine how that builds on. So I think as a community, we all need to work at managing that aspect of where we all just are star struck, but there's really so much more to it. So to your point, you don't wanna always just believe whatever feedback you have. You gotta learn to give yourself credit for where you came from and what you've done. And everyone is so different. Everyone has something so different to offer. I'm glad to be here with everyone tonight because I feel like I've been dealing with this most of my life because I've worked in a lot of small businesses and even a few bigger ones and it's always seemed like you go there and you know what you're doing and then you go there and you try to fit into the culture, you try to mold yourself. And at some point, you finally get it and you're like, okay, I finally get the, I finally get what's going on. Then the job changes or something else happens. And then you go back to another place and it starts all over again. And that can be a little personally jarring at times. So I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that. If anyone's got input on that, more recent case of something going on is like, I've been dealing with imposter syndrome where I'm at now and I've been dealing with that for a couple of years and I've been trying to get over it. And now I find that like there's a competing goal of like dealing with the imposter syndrome versus like changing priorities and changing goals. It's like, okay, I was good at something or at least I was being told like, hey, I'm great at this. Like don't worry so much. Now I'm being told I'm not as good so much. So I was like, what do you deal with that? What do you deal with that shift and expectations in that situation? So that, I really connect with that because when I was at my last job, there were a lot of new people coming in and they were bringing in these new ideas and new technologies and that sort of thing. And I felt like I was just struggling to keep up with what I was already doing and that they want to come in and bring some new things. And since I have an ops person, I have to know all these new things. So I started feeling imposter syndrome even later on, like after I had already established myself. And so I really, I really feel that. Yeah, there have been a lot of changes lately. So it's, yeah, I can totally agree with that. I just want to kind of piggyback on what you said about the book Mindset. I was actually gifted that book from a CEO that I met on a plane. And I was going to a conference. I was on my way to the conference. And we were having a great conversation. He asked me about what I was doing at the time. And I remember saying, I wasn't really completely fulfilled because I'm just not that kind of person. And that kind of person was to be, like be able to explain or teach technical things over email, right, in tech support. And I think our whole conversation was going real great until I said I'm just not that type of person. And he asked for my, we traded info and two weeks later I got Mindset. And he said, he said, you're kicking ass, you're doing a great job, read this book, it's gonna help. And it took me a while to get through it because there's a lot of examples of different growth, like growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. And it explains a lot how you can be a growth mindset in a lot of things and a fixed mindset in a lot of things. And how you also have people around you that have growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. And I was able to distinguish when I feel that I'm naturally good at things and when I'm not naturally good at things or at least I haven't been put in that situation enough times to feel like I'm a natural. So I really like the fact that you mentioned that book because now I've given that book to my younger brother who now lives with me in San Francisco who oftentimes says, I can't do that because it's just not me. And he's pushing through that book too but it really, really helped a lot I think to read that book. And then you start to kind of see how people themselves are either growth mindset or fixed mindset with that certain topic or situation and then you can try to teach them and help them in a growth mindset way as well. So. So I think we've got enough time for I guess these three last questions or comments that I've seen people's hands for and pretty soon we're gonna have to hand over the room to the AWS boss. But anyways, here goes. Just one really useful resource I've had is it's an interview of Ira Glass. It's him talking about how he got to where he is and it's just Google search Ira Glass tastes and it's just about you not being as good as your ambitions and you seeing the gap between where you are currently and what you want to be doing. And it's really, really helpful. I just put that on, I kind of put it on repeat and it's like his voice is so nice anyways so I can't like, it's not bad. So it's really useful if you don't, if you're feeling this, it's a three minute video. Really, really good. Oh, Ira Glass tastes, just Google that. It's the first video. Ira, G-L-A-S-S and then space tastes or space between Ira and Glass too, but. I had a small idea but in all small ideas maybe it's helpful. I find that I hope it's okay to plug Stack Overflow during my lunch hours. I'm a C++ guy. I find people that have questions that I can answer. You get feedback, you know you know it. You gave the answer. It's in a sense casually peer reviewed and that's great to say, nope, I really do know it. I'm giving answers and they're helpful to others. That was my two cents. I definitely started, well I've been dealing with this for a long time and it came to a head in the last six months at the company that I work for and I saw this talk in my CTO it was like you need to go to that. Like we have talked about this very recently. But yeah, so I work at a very small company. I'm the lead developer and very small. We have four programmers. So there's a CTO, me and two junior devs that picked up programming last year or two. So I'm very high up on the spectrum of skill at our company but constantly feeling just like I'm not good enough. And part of it is the CTO is straight genius, like insanely brilliant guy. But yeah, I started having this issue and for me in the last year I didn't recognize it initially which made it more of an issue and it naturally spirals. And it got to the point of like I've never really struggled with a lot of anxiety or like things like that in my life. And like six months ago I started having like crushing anxiety. You know, the point of like having panic attacks, struggling with depression and things I'd really never seen before. And talking through that with him I started recognizing some of these like distortions that I was putting on things where I was talking about a situation and then he would be like that's not at all how it is. Like that's no, that's not true. And the thing that was really dangerous that moment was he's dependent on my performance and you know for the company to succeed, for him to succeed in his job. So in my mind I added a distortion of he's just lying to me to make me feel better so I can perform. Which is really dangerous because all of a sudden I added a distortion to me so he couldn't help me because anything he said that was positive in my mind I was like, oh he's just trying to make me feel better so I can get past this and continue performing. But yeah, one of the things that was really helpful was like one of the things that talking through it with him, I mean I'm blessed with, he's very open minded and very helpful and very, you know, listened as well but he pointed out that I wasn't recognizing any wins. Which I think is a common thing with Impala. It's like you don't recognize your own wins. You don't see those things as successes and you're always thinking about the failures. And what we did is in our quarterly reviews he started pointing out wins. And that was something that was really helpful for me like the first time, you know after we had initially talked about it the next time we had a review and we sat down and talked he was like, all right, so what were your wins? Tell me about what your wins were. And I was like, I don't know, like I worked most of the time, like I didn't really have anything and then he started pulling things out and as he talked about things it was like, oh shit, yeah I guess I did something. But even that and I don't know a formalized way but as a strategy that was something very helpful for me is like ask somebody that you know, ask somebody that you work with, like I don't think it would be viewed as super prideful but like legitimately tell them like in your mind what have I won recently? What are things where I've experienced wins recently? And you might be really surprised with what comes back and I found that super helpful. Very good. And also you can spin the thing that feels like fishing for compliments into just being a good employee by asking what do you think my most meaningful win for your priorities has been? And just spin it around just a little so that you're being good, you're doing what you should be doing but still ask what they think their successes are. So I'm sure that you'll have a chance to keep talking about this if you want to go out into the atrium there but I think we do need to hand over the room. Thank you so much for the talk. Thank you.