 I love standing between you guys and lunch that's awesome so I've already got the warnings flying so hopefully I don't go too long so in case you're like who the heck am I right this is my second DevOps days I did attend last year and I really loved it so I'm really excited that they actually brought me back to do a talk so who the heck am I my name is Angela Dugan I'm kind of all over Twitter and conferences and I thank you so I tend to speak at a lot of local events some personal things about me that you may know if you follow me on Twitter's I love Halloween I have chickens yes I live in Oak Park and we raise chickens and I have an awesome husband who supports me now this talk is on imposter syndrome and the reason I bring that up is because like you look at the bottom right and you see all these things that I do right so Microsoft MVP I've got all these certifications so you would think that I was like hey I'm a pretty smart person right like look at all this stuff that I've done look at all these cool things that I do but this is not necessarily how I see myself right so so how many people how many people in the room have at least heard of imposter syndrome and maybe you have an idea what it is so quite a few good good good there might be and hopefully there's more by the end of the talk so I don't necessarily expect everyone to raise their hand for this how many people are willing to admit that this is something they definitely feel not quite all the same hands but that's okay right and honestly that's actually more than I usually get when I do this talk which makes me really happy that people are there's not as big of a stigma around us I think they're there used to be and I think part of it is because so many people are starting to talk about it so again kind of all this stuff right and I think about like who do I feel like most days right and it's it's more like this right I feel like I feel like this person I feel like kind of a phony like somehow all those certifications and all those things that I do are just kind of a mask to hide how I really feel about about who I am and what I know and what I contribute and I used to work at Microsoft as you can imagine working at a place like that can be pretty daunting right you literally work with some of the smartest people on the planet and I remember I'd been there for probably four or five years and I work with someone named Scott Hansen but not everyone's gonna know who that is I think he's a little more popular in the dev circles but he's pretty amazing right he's one of those people that can get up on a stage totally own it he's smart he's funny he somehow manages to be cool and work at Microsoft so he's he's kind of the unicorn right so I was reading his blog and I ran across this post and I was like huh really Scott really and I started to read through it and essentially someone had written had written to him and said hey you know I'm having kind of a crisis of conscience here I feel like I'm stuck I feel like I can't I can't push through and kind of make progress in my career and I don't know what to do and that's when my ears perked up because I was like dude that is totally me and I feel like that describes a lot of people at some point in their career maybe not all the time it's certainly at some point and then he responded so so the guy kind of goes through like here's all my qualifications right that laundry list of everything they've done right CS degrees and worked at Microsoft and blah blah blah and Scott's response was pretty amazing right like you're not alone I'm like what seriously like really and it actually was was kind of comforting that it wasn't just me that someone who projects all this charisma and confidence also has those feelings sometimes too and so you know he specifically called out this thing called imposter syndrome and I got really curious I started looking it up now this is not meant to be a psychology talk I have a CS degree I don't have a degree in psychology I'm not an expert on any of these by any means but I was definitely curious I wanted to dig into it a little more and I'd find these websites where they had quizzes right you know all those quizzes you take on the internet totally legit behavioral science stuff right totally but but some of these things really did start to hit home right and I started seeing some questions like you know hey when people praise you for things you've accomplished you're like oh man don't say that because now you're gonna expect me to do better next time right like you're constantly kind of building up this this image that you have to live up to right I'm afraid that that people are gonna find out I'm not really as capable as they think I am right I really do a project or task as well as I'd like to do it right this goes beyond perfectionism but someone this morning used a quote that if I do the longer version of this talk I often bring up which is that perfection is the enemy of good right sometimes we get in these you know that they talk about analysis paralysis and that's part of it you're so concerned with things being perfect that you spend all this time you don't really focus on on just being good and then comparing yourselves to others right that can be really toxic depending on where you're working imagine working at a place like Microsoft and constantly comparing yourself to everyone around you it gets really hard to feel good about yourself and to feel like like you're really enough and I feel like that's the word that comes up a lot when you hear about imposter syndrome is it's feeling like you're not enough somehow so then I found some even more scientific charts and diagrams from Buzzfeed but they're pretty amazing and I wanted to share them because if you're still sitting there going yeah I'm not buying this I really don't know that this this affects me or that this is something that's even relevant to what we do here but this is just a few of them that I picked out that I thought were particularly good right so think about when you receive a compliment what is your immediate response right is it that's probably someone who's lying to me or they're just being nice they have no idea what they're talking about like my mom is gonna be like oh honey that imposter syndrome talk was so good cuz she's my mom right and and she does she does that kind of stuff and you're always like oh she doesn't know she's not technology right think about getting thrown into a new job right be a consultant I feel like you're kind of if this is how you feel this can almost feel like masochism right because you're constantly being thrown into new jobs so that first day how are you feeling right are you feeling like my boss is gonna realize this was a huge mistake sending me here I totally do not belong here right or maybe it's my boss is gonna realize it's a huge mistake I totally don't belong here right thoughts you have whenever you need to succeed at a job right that's that's the killer like hey we're putting you on this project cuz it needs to go really well like this needs to be a home run and you're like oh jeez right and you start thinking well fuck shit maybe you'd not take it down a notch right and maybe the third one is well that was fun while it lasted cuz I am totally losing my job after this right like you know it I've seen enough people laughing that I have to assume that some of this resonates right maybe you didn't call it that maybe you're like oh I'm posture syndrome that sounds like something you need medication for right that is totally not me right it's it's not though this isn't a disease right this isn't something that you need to be to be cured of right let's talk just about a couple more and then we're gonna move on cuz some of these were just too good to not include right things you beat yourself up for and I know for me as someone who does a lot of conference speaking I am constantly beating myself up about stuff and these are really true for me right so if you kind of look at that that smallest slice right things you beat yourself up for stuff completely out of your control right like it was too cold in the room the projection system didn't work I know we're getting a lot of feedback on the mic stuff that you really you can't do anything about we look at that slightly bigger piece stuff everyone else has literally already forgotten about this happens to be all the time where I'm like yeah I remember that one talk I gave like 18 years ago on source control and I kept it like nobody remembers that but you right but you'll beat yourself up because it wasn't perfect and then the biggest one stuff no one else even noticed right but it's in your little Rolodex right of things that you're like oh man that was awful so bad and like no one even noticed so how you tend to feel about yourself right a hot crazy truck fire mess of a person who disappoints important people right and again I'm not saying I feel like this all the time but this definitely crops up right it's one of those things that kind of comes up and nags at me and and really the reality of this is that everybody thinks you're just cool and fine right you're the one you've kind of internalized this and you're feeling it and you might be like hey I don't understand like why are you guys why are you even saying this you're up there giving this talk right clearly you don't have issues with confidence and blah blah blah anyone who knows me can tell you that is totally not true and I was panicking about this talk until the minute I got up here because I'm so afraid that I'm going to disappoint you guys hopefully I've not so far so types of people who can have imposter syndrome literally anybody in this room right it could be anybody I used to think well it must be just certain people in certain types of roles or or you know things like that so those those four statements that I talked about earlier disappointing people I never do things good enough that was actually came from a test again super scientific test but it was still interesting and so I was really curious because I'm like well how bad is my imposter syndrome you know like so I took the test there was something like 40 questions if you're interested actually have a link to it in the presentation that you guys can grab if you want to take it and see how you do and so I'm all about grades like hey how did I do did I get an A I don't know what that means is a high score good and so I took the test and it essentially kind of broke down to a certain certain ranges right and essentially 61 to 80 was the second to highest bucket right and it was responding you know the people frequently have imposter syndrome they weren't quite in the top notch but they were close right and I took the score and I got a 77 and I'm like I don't know how is that this I can see you right on the grading scale I don't know but then I was really curious because I was like well how does that stack up against how the people that I know have scored right and so I sent it around put on Facebook put it on Twitter I had a lot more responses in this but I just got lazy and didn't feel like putting more stuff on the slide but it essentially came down to like most of the people I know had struggled with it right so then I then I get kids honestly say like I don't feel alone anymore right this isn't something that I struggle with alone and something else that was interesting is it ranged all careers it ranged ages genders like the bold ones are women the non-bold ones are men I didn't really find any pattern right it seemed to be pretty pervasive and it was really interesting because just sending the quiz out you know I said hey I won't use your name so I'm not going to share any of that information and I started getting messages from people saying like just taking that quiz turned my stomach it made me so nervous and it made me anxious because it started making me remember things like about work right situations that have been bad and and I have to say like the same thing happened to me you know I started taking this quiz and I started kind of thinking about thinking back to things and I started to realize it's not necessarily just internal either right some of this is actually happening because of the environments we're in or because of the people that we work with and so specifically I think about things like you know when I did work at Microsoft I think because there were certain expectations that you literally did know everything you'd go to a client right they'd start peppering you with questions I wouldn't necessarily know all the answers because I'm not like you know I'm not Wikipedia here and every once in a while I would get that bad feedback right like how I don't bring Angela back she doesn't know anything and I'm like I spent three hours answering questions until I finally ran out of stuff that I could tell you but those are the types of things that start to kind of trigger it in people right not everyone is going to internalize things but that's part of the reason I bring it up when I first started talking about imposter syndrome it was about a year and a half ago I kind of mostly focused internally right like how do we see it in ourselves and how do we not fix it right because again I don't think it's something you need to fix but how do we internally kind of deal with it and handle it and then I started to realize it's just as much about the people around us right and how you can kind of recognize how it affects people and the reason this is a big deal is because I started looking up actual scientific stats and I have some some references in here if you're curious there's some actual stats on this right where they kind of talked to people and just said hey how often are you feeling these things and you know I think about even my last DevOps stage so last year was my first year here and I remember I remember walking in and feeling like okay I haven't really written code in a while I'm really more of kind of a process person right now like I do agile coaching I do I do like if I do any kind of implementation stuff it's with TFS and no one here is talking about this stuff and I just felt like who the heck am I like why would anyone want me even here I felt like I did not belong and yet I started sitting through the talks and I was like holy cow these talks are absolutely they're about culture and they're not just about you know all the DevOps tools and things I don't necessarily understand and I remember when the open spaces thing came up I was like huh I've given this imposter syndrome talk like once maybe I'll do it as an open space because that's less intimidating right that's not too bad like probably no one will show up so it'll be fine that's always my thought no one will show up it'll be fine so I so I pitched the open space and and it got accepted I was like oh crap now I actually have to do it right and so I was like that's fine that's not many people are gonna show up there's a lot of other really good ones no one will come to mind and we ran out of chairs I was so overwhelmed I was like I assumed that I was gonna come to the DevOps conference and everyone's just gonna be like we're totally confident everybody knows exactly what they're doing because I think that's the assumption I take with me everywhere I go right like if you think about a bubble of what everybody knows I always feel like I'm like way over here with this tiny little bubble and everyone else in the world has got this huge bubble over here nowhere related to mine and I couldn't possibly have anything to offer and having that experience last year was pretty amazing and it's backed up by the stats which is that you know from what people are seeing right there's no exact numbers and people argue left and right as to what the reality is here but up to 70% of people have felt these effects and if you think about what you saw on those slides think about how stifling those effects could be right you could have if you think about 70% of your people if you have 10 people on your team there's a good chance that you know seven of the 10 people at some point while you're working on a project while you're sitting in meetings maybe while you're out having lunch have felt like they're not enough to really be able to contribute they don't feel like they're worthy of speaking up and kind of sharing their opinions and that can be kind of a scary thing right this the whole point right one of my favorite things that comes out of it has come out of these DevOps conferences is it's all about collaboration how do we improve and how do we work together to build on each other's strengths but that kind of assumes that everyone is openly sharing right and that everyone is willing to participate and bring everything that they know to the table they're not afraid of disappointing people they're not afraid of having negative feedback if they say the wrong thing if they throw out a crazy idea that maybe really isn't so crazy but it just doesn't align with what people want to work on and then you think about it in general right and I mean I think about I think about when I started back in you know the early 90s right back in college I was doing mainframe stuff I wasn't even doing client server and I think about how much things have changed since then and I feel like it just keeps expanding faster and faster every single year you think about the new types of tools that come up the new processes that come up like you know several years ago if someone would have described a container to me and I would have been like that I what that's not even a thing like you can't do that like you think about the amazing things that we can do but you think about how much you really need to grasp sometimes to understand those big pictures it can be pretty you can be pretty daunting right and then you start to wonder like how can you not make mistakes right and I feel like it's kind of a good segue from the first few speakers that we've had because everybody's brought that up like you're gonna make mistakes right it's not going to be perfect all that really matters is that you're working you're learning and you're trying to get better right who's gonna argue with this guy right yeah I fell in yield aggressive Tyson on Twitter but this was brilliant right if you never make mistakes then you're not on the frontier of discovery for that is where mistakes are made all the time right we really only get those amazing solutions when we do crazy stuff and it either doesn't work and we're like well we're not doing that again or we go you know that didn't work but maybe if we do this other thing right we'll have this awesome solution but you need to be in environment where people feel like they can actually make those mistakes right and the biggest kind of I think crippler there is is absolutely fear right fear can be pervasive not everyone feels imposter syndrome levels of fear but it's absolutely something that you might notice on your teams right as an agile coach that's absolutely something I have to look for right if I see that something is not working on a team sometimes it's well I can see the issue is we have a couple people on the team that don't feel like they can contribute and you have to kind of dig into that and figure out what is it right is it the culture is it maybe I like to say PTSD from a previous client or for a previous team right where they don't feel like they can share they don't feel like they can take risks so yeah fear is absolutely pervasive in IT and it will kill collaboration every time right how can you really truly be collaborative that people are afraid to take those risks and if they're afraid to kind of open up and sometimes be vulnerable right I feel like that's a that just makes me feel weird to say that word right you think about like I have to possibly put myself out there and say something that might be perceived as dumb or brilliant right you have to be you know not only willing to do that but have a team that will support you in doing that think about anything that we talked about trying out new tools trying out new processes right adopting you know scrum on the team one of the things about it is man it starts to shine a light on dysfunctions so fast you start finding out like are there people on the team who discourage people from taking risks right are there people who you know maybe inadvertently discourage people from making mistakes by calling them out in meetings or just joking right I get that all the time like oh that was so dumb right they're totally kidding but other people on the team might see that go yeah I'm not gonna say anything because I don't want that guy making fun of me right so you have to start thinking about those types of things so the talk isn't really about necessarily your own imposter syndrome it's also about looking at your team and making sure you're recognizing it in others because again it can kill all of these amazing plans that that you can make in terms of how to improve and and how to change things within your culture some of you guys may remember this this was actually kind of a pretty big deal not just on Twitter obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter but you know it's been a big thing in the open source community as well right people do something like you know they do a pull request into some github project and someone tears them a new ass because they're new right they don't know maybe this is the first time they've ever done it and they were all stoked and they were pumped and they have great ideas but it wasn't the the most elegant solution and someone literally just quashed their their passion to do this maybe they're not gonna do it anymore right and it's easy to be that person that goes oh I worked so hard and you just screwed something up did we really not all do that at some point I mean I think about myself that my first year out of college I thought I knew everything right right my classic ASP and my VB6 com like yeah that was I'm sure if I look back at that stuff it was so awful but I thought that I was amazing and I knew everything it was almost like I didn't know enough to know that I didn't know anything right and so you have to kind of be empathetic to the people who are new to the community because you're setting the stage for them right for how they interact with others as well you know so what are we all what are we so afraid of right we're afraid of making mistakes we're afraid of having the wrong answer right we're afraid of people calling us out humiliating us making us making us feel you know bad about not being perfect so we also have to be careful that we're not stoking the fires for other people so I think this might actually be my last Twitter thing because again I love this one I thought this one was so good is that often we tend to forget about the people who are watching us as well right because whether or not you realize it people are watching you right new guys on the team interns other people right they're kind of watching you going okay so that's what we do when someone screws up that's what we do when people have good ideas you also have to think about how you're setting examples right and and honestly one of the things I normally go to and and I cut it and now I'm kind of regretting cutting it so I'm just gonna talk about it is so there's another conference that I work at called that conference and we have a kids track and I think about how amazing it is that we had something like 13 or 14 girls under the age of 14 teaching classes at that conference right they haven't even learned right that girls don't do it or things like that like no one has said those things to them yet it doesn't happen that often but it only needs to happen once for someone to kind of go okay maybe this isn't what I should be doing and I think about the fact that they've always had such great examples right they come to this conference every year they get this great experience right we give them we give them applause we encourage them and then they come back the next year and they keep doing it right and so even if you don't think about your coworkers think about your kids your friends kids like we also want to make sure we're setting a good example for them as well so that's giving us an opportunity right to kind of be heroes right be good examples set a good stage make sure that you're welcoming new people to the team and helping people understand how they should act how they should treat each other right and help them kind of you know channel their powers for good right so I feel like this is kind of harkening back to to the first talk right so be a beginner be okay with other people being a beginner and not always knowing all the answers right be fearless right don't be afraid to share things right and if you get a response that isn't an appropriate one don't let that stuff slide right don't let don't let that slide with if you see someone else doing it as well right so hey come on we all screw up this is how we learn be passionate right the whole again the whole idea of discoveries we have to have that passion and at least for me I feel like my imposter syndrome I kind of use it to fuel my passion I always feel like well I don't want to walk in the room and disappoint I'm never gonna know everything but I'm gonna work as hard as I can to learn the relevant things and it pushes me where other people might just give up right and so for me I actually see it as a positive thing but I do have to be careful to make sure that it doesn't overwhelm me right and and last but not least right if you're gonna be anything right be excellent to each other that's the lesson here right it's all about making sure that we're being awesome to our team members that we're fostering collaboration and that we're doing the things that will really help our teams to thrive and improve and grow and that's it so thank you