Yes, My History Does Influence How I Perceive Things

Recently I’ve been in a few conversations where people have questioned if I perceive things differently because of my history. I think that’s an odd thing. Humans tend to pattern match. There are things that I notice today that I wouldn’t notice as much earlier in my career. I don’t think that means that anything that happened earlier wasn’t that bad, but more that I was blissfully unaware. Here is a quick example from school:

When I was an undergrad, we had a year-long capstone project with a team of seven. It was myself, one other woman, and five men. Even though I had work experience in the domain we were doing our project in, none of the guys would listen to me when I said it was near impossible to accomplish. The other woman and I ended up hanging back and letting the guys crowd around a computer because we realized we weren’t being heard. We finished the project (which was a general failure because I was right), got an A due to the white male confidence of some of my team members, and graduated. When I did grad school, I ran into a similar problem. I was doing a capstone project with four men. We were building a web app. I was the only one with web development experience. They refused to listen to me. This time, I contacted the professor because I wanted the experience. I didn’t just want to skate by on little work because I was being ignored. Instead of helping, the professor just put me in a group alone, and I had to do the entire capstone project by myself. It was worth it, but it was frustrating that was the response.

I will do a quick, anonymized list of all the absurd things that have happened to me over my 13-year career. I think some of this is gendered, and some are just ????

• Was told I sounded angry in emails. Started adding emojis, changed nothing else, and no longer got that feedback.

• Got feedback on my review that I was abrasive.

• Had a coworker who would sit and stare at me during meetings while pulling up his shirt and scratching his stomach. I cannot make this up. I am not that creative.

• Had a coworker and a manager conspire to get me to quit by making my work environment terrible.

• Have been the only woman on my team (sometimes all of engineering) four times.

• Would ask a coworker questions (as a new teammate) and then have him say, “I’ll just do it.” I ended up having nothing to work on.

• Had HR talk to me for saying no to an offer of a doughnut and mentioning to a coworker that I wasn’t excited about the offsite.

• As the only developer, had the CEO listen to investors who had never looked at the code over me.

• Had a coworker tell me that since I got the benefit of working from home, I didn’t get the benefit of coworkers answering my DMs.

• Was told when interviewing there were several women in leadership in the engineering organization. After I started, I discovered there were none, and the only women were on my team, plus one person in QA.

• Was told I should write down every step I have taken if I want any questions answered.

• After telling me I did not need to take FMLA, I was told I wasn’t performing at level one month after my husband was hit by a car (he is fine now!).

• Was accused of anti-Southern bias. I grew up in Northern Alabama and spent seven years in Atlanta.

• Have been told I don’t change my mind multiple times after I have given an opinion, listened to the opposing arguments, and still not agreed… even if I’m happy to commit to the consensus.

• Had a male coworker refuse to work with me because I disagreed with him, even though I suggested that we both present our ideas to a larger group and get more input.

• Had a tweet mentioning “bad behavior from white men in tech,” and when two coworkers saw it, they decided it was about them. Instead of asking them to consider why they would think that, HR talked to me.

• When I questioned something, a male coworker told me that it was “universal knowledge” that it was wrong.

• Have been called “pessimistic” for suggesting that an idea was unlikely to work.

And honestly… that’s not exhaustive. That’s just what is on my mind right now. Also? This is only 13 years! I’m fully expecting to have at least 20 more years of work. And I’m getting wholly burnt out on DEI work… it feels thankless and like there is never any improvement. The teams I am working on continue to be more diverse, but the problems still exist. Some are even worse than they were on teams where I was the only woman. This feels like a hopeless post. I’m not hopeless! But I struggle to feel hopeful at the moment.

Why We Should Stop Talking About Imposter Syndrome In Tech

Last week, my Virtual Coffee small group had a great conversation about imposter syndrome. I had wanted to talk about it because I had seen a request for an imposter syndrome channel in Slack and I didn’t think it would be a healthy choice. So I had some hot takes, which I am now bringing to my blog. First up, let’s define imposter syndrome. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

a false and sometimes crippling belief that one's successes are the product of luck or fraud rather than skill

Historically, this has been a phenomenon seen in high achieving women, which, as HBR noted, is likely due to the negative feedback that women regularly receive. So why does it seem like everyone in tech (particularly developers) have imposter syndrome now? Well, strap in, because I’ve got some hot takes coming your way!

1. People commonly use the term when referring to junior/early-career developers. This is pretty wild to me! If you are early in your career, you, by definition, have not really had any success as a developer! You are just getting started. I think Kim Crayton described this well in a talk she gave on mentoring at PyCaribbean in 2017 (quote is slightly paraphrased):

Learners do not have imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is people who have senior level skills and still don’t think they can do a job. Imposter syndrome is not learning. Learning is hard. Learning takes time. You don’t look at a baby who’s just been born and can’t flip over and tell them they’re suffering from imposter syndrome. No you’re not, you just don’t know how to flip over yet! That sounds absurd right?

With that in mind, maybe stop telling junior developers they have imposter syndrome. They are learning! They should not be expected to know everything.

2. Our job descriptions are absurd. I’m pretty happy with my current company (hey come work with us at Splice) because we don’t have 20 different technologies in our job description. HOWEVER: most job descriptions ask for multiple years of experience in both a backend language and frontend framework, Docker, AWS/Azure/Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GraphQL, etc. And you will see that on job descriptions that are not for senior developers. This is especially fraught for early-career devs, who regularly see non-senior posts that are still asking for all of those and 5+ years of experience which makes the job search seem hopeless. Let’s be more realistic with what we need versus what it’s more acceptable to learn on the job.

3. Interviews are an absolute nightmare. If you want to feel terrible about yourself, interview as a developer. At almost any level, you will be told by at least one company that you “aren’t senior enough” or “aren’t technical enough.” The way most companies do interviews also makes it feel way more like it is a personal failing on your part rather than just you and that job not being a great fit (which is actually the case). For example, I have had a broad swath of experience which has enabled me to jump into almost any codebase and be able to figure out (roughly) what’s going on and be able to make improvements. But I do not have experience building applications at scale. If we are being honest, very few people do. If you are at a large company that’s at that scale, you are likely part of a larger team and not making big architectural decisions. Or you might be at a smaller company and maybe have to scale from 100 to 1000, but not any further. Or, like me, you could have spent a decent portion of your career at B2B companies that do not have a ton of users. So why are we making people feel like they suck for just not being the right fit at your company? Maybe we should treat each other better.

4. To that point: talking about imposter syndrome makes it an individual problem. The problem is not with the individual! The problem is how we, as a community of developers, are treating each other. Instead of helping each other grow and lifting each other up, we are constantly putting others down to make sure it’s clear that we are the better developer. There are a ton of jobs! There is room for so many great developers. We do not have to compete in this way.

5. Is talking with others about imposter syndrome actually helping anyone? I think in some ways, it’s nice to feel like you aren’t alone! But when I see people with way more experience than me say that they are also struggling with imposter syndrome, it makes me feel hopeless. Like there is never going to be a point in my career where I can feel confident in my abilities. I can’t imagine what early-career devs are feeling when they see more accomplished developers also struggling. I think talking about it has made it way more of a thing than it should be. Everyone is sad sometimes, but not everyone suffers from depression. Everyone has times that they doubt their abilities, but not everyone has imposter syndrome. But we are at a point where, if you doubt your abilities, you have imposter syndrome. I think this is a bit absurd! It’s turning a normal human experience into a problem that you must solve.

Always happy to talk more about this and am also interested in any other hot takes!

Don't Tell Me I Have Imposter Syndrome

The article about Mailchimp that I mentioned in my last post was finally posted last Monday. This was fun:

Jennifer Konikowski, Mailchimp's only female engineer during her tenure from 2011 to 2012, told Insider that her managers criticized her "tone" in a performance review and that a male coworker complained about her simply for disagreeing with a different coworker.

Unbeknownst to Konikowski at the time, her managers had explicitly conspired to get her to quit, according to Jared Van Aalten, who said he was in the room during their conversation. The managers worried firing Konikowski could be perceived as sexist, so they discussed giving her projects outside her skill and comfort zone to make her look bad and avoid suspicion, Van Aalten told Insider.

Konikowski quit, but her managers — both white men — were eventually promoted to senior management. Van Aalten said the promotions troubled him because one of those managers had called him a Nazi, despite knowing he's Jewish. Multiple former Mailchimp employees also said that the manager questioned whether people with Down's Syndrome were "real people" because they inherit an extra chromosome.

It’s a little off: I only had one manager (Brandon Fouts) and the other person (Matthew Grove, the one who said the gross comments) was not a manager at the time and just a year senior to me. Another oddity is that I wasn’t technically the only female engineer: there were frontend engineers at the time, but they were totally separated and referred to as designers. Somehow I only realized this recently and, every time I see this, I feel like I’m erasing them. Overall, it was a solid article and I went on a whole tweetrant about it. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned since the article came out is this: despite leaving on what I thought was a positive note, Matthew disparaged me to other people on the delivery team for at least a year after I left. People who didn’t know me heard my name in a negative context. I know there’s been anger from me recently, but I didn’t say anything against Mailchimp for years. Until a month ago, I thought Brandon had been a good, supportive boss. He had actually apologized to me when he had cc’d HR after Matthew reported me for telling Van he was wrong. When I asked not to share an office with a different coworker who creeped me out, he seemed to support that and did not move me back into the office. I blamed everything that happened afterward on Matthew. I didn’t realize that Brandon and Matthew colluded.

This whole situation has me revisiting the article “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey in HBR. Definitely go and read the entire thing, but here is one (of many) parts that really jumped out to me:

Imposter syndrome took a fairly universal feeling of discomfort, second-guessing, and mild anxiety in the workplace and pathologized it, especially for women. As white men progress, their feelings of doubt usually abate as their work and intelligence are validated over time. They’re able to find role models who are like them, and rarely (if ever) do others question their competence, contributions, or leadership style. Women experience the opposite. Rarely are we invited to a women’s career development conference where a session on “overcoming imposter syndrome” is not on the agenda.

The label of imposter syndrome is a heavy load to bear. “Imposter” brings a tinge of criminal fraudulence to the feeling of simply being unsure or anxious about joining a new team or learning a new skill. Add to that the medical undertone of “syndrome,” which recalls the “female hysteria” diagnoses of the nineteenth century. Although feelings of uncertainty are an expected and normal part of professional life, women who experience them are deemed to suffer from imposter syndrome. Even if women demonstrate strength, ambition, and resilience, our daily battles with microaggressions, especially expectations and assumptions formed by stereotypes and racism, often push us down. Imposter syndrome as a concept fails to capture this dynamic and puts the onus on women to deal with the effects. Workplaces remain misdirected toward seeking individual solutions for issues disproportionately caused by systems of discrimination and abuses of power.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve had some supportive coworkers and a couple of decent managers. But I’ve also had this happen. And I’ve had a manager and HR have a talk with me about refusing a doughnut (not joking). I’ve had a manager tell me I was not performing at level during a time when my husband was recovering from seven broken bones (after having previously gotten positive feedback). Then that manager told me I shouldn’t ask any questions unless I had fully documented everything that I had attempted. At a few points during that position, I actually cried at work. I felt worthless. I felt like I couldn’t do my job. I didn’t know why anyone would ever hire me again because, clearly, I couldn’t code. When I was reading this article, I felt both sad and vindicated. I often don’t have a lot of confidence and there are distinct reasons why. It’s not imposter syndrome. It’s a past of regularly having my abilities being questioned. I know I’m not the only one. So stop telling women they have imposter syndrome.

On Being An Abrasive Woman (In Tech)

It's story time, y'all! All the names have been changed.

One of my earlier jobs, I worked at a company that had the family vibe. Everyone hung out together, and we were all "friends." The company also really valued "niceness." I put that in quotes because the people who tended to get pinged for not being nice were women about 80-90% of the time. Heck, there was a guy who would regularly tell people they were "fucking stupid" and we'd laugh it off.   At this company, my team consisted of:

• My manager (Peter)

• A guy who had been on the team for a year (Keenan)

• A guy who had been with the company for a long time but just joined the team (Erlich)

• And me

For a while, I really liked my manager and my team. The one caveat was Erlich who, like his namesake, was a total creep. He could be funny, but he was distracting and disruptive and just generally skeeved me out. For about six months, Keenan, Erlich, and I shared an office. Then a new developer joined the team (Richard) and I moved into an office with him. It was a lot quieter, and I got so much done. After another six months, Richard was let go. I went to Peter and requested that I stay in an office with this other guy on a related team, instead of moving back into the office with Erlich. I told Peter that Erlich was distracting and he creeped me out, and I would be more comfortable not sharing an office with him for 6-8 hours every day.

I went on vacation a few days later, and while I was on vacation, Erlich was let go. I was a bit concerned about the timing, but he was also a shitty employee! So I didn't think it had anything to do with what I said. However, after I get back, Keenan starts treating me differently. I’m making a presentation to explain what we do to support, and I’m supposed to get feedback from him. I go back to Keenan at least five different times, and every time he tells me to make some other big change. Every time, I make the changes, but every time, it’s not enough.

Then Keenan reports me to Peter for being abrasive. I can't remember the exact content of the email I got from Peter (which had HR copied), but it made it sound like I had cussed out this other guy on our team (Nelson) and I had to wrack my brain for what I said. I kept wondering if I had blacked out and forgotten saying something horrible. When I finally remember, I realized all I said was a rather direct “no, you’re wrong.” I got reported to HR for telling a coworker they were wrong. I talked to Peter about it, and he apologized to me and said he should have spoken to me first, but at that point, I realized I would probably just have to switch jobs.

I've seen this double-standard exist in many places, but that was the most egregious. Maybe a month or so before this I had been eating lunch when Keenan decided to make the argument that "people with Down syndrome aren't people," and yet I was considered offensive for telling a man they were wrong.

I don't have a summary for this story. It's just one I need to tell in hopes that it will make others consider more carefully how they are treating their female colleagues.

Update: since I originally posted this, I have discovered that both Peter (my manager) and Keenan conspired out loud to get me to quit. Peter assigned me public speaking jobs thinking that would scare me off because he thought it was outside my comfort zone. Then have Keenan make sure to always find a problem with it. If I complained, then I didn’t take feedback well. I’m sure some of you are thinking “well, that’s how you get rid of bad performers if you don’t want to fire them.” Friends, I got a great review, a bonus, and a raise. I was not a poor performer. These assholes were just sexist as fuck.