Recently, I was invited to participate in a mentorship mixer with the Mt. Sac Computer Science Club, and thanks to the host, Christopher Theung, who met me at a real fun meetup in Long Beach. This was a first for me and introduced an expectation that was really unrealistic and had me a bit worried about what was expected - The reality was that it was very casual, very fun, and I think I could’ve been a lot less nervous.

It went well enough that I had a headcount during my talk which was more than what I had expected, and I got some good questions during and after the event, with one of my LinkedIn messages ironically being about the same thing I was worried about…

Thank you so much! If I remember correctly, when you worked on one of the COD apps, you were overwhelmed by the workload. Did you ever deal with things like Imposter Syndrome or other forms of self doubt? If you did, how did you overcome it? Apologies if it’s too personal, you don’t need to answer it if you aren’t comfortable.

No problem at all with the question - it’s an essential aspect of being a junior dev; one of the tribulations you have to walk through for your first major project that doesn’t reflect the environment you’ve learned in, and I don’t get to spend as much time talking about my experience as I did today with people who are as curious as you.

You’re right - my first task at Activision was to work on the Companion App for Call of Duty, which was a very overwhelming experience. The codebase was massive, with many hands that had touched it with their own coding conventions; all who’d worked on components for both desktop and native mobile that were tied together in one repository without sub-modules. There was a broken data getter component that had a retired API endpoint. It left me uncertain and doubtful, like a bad case of imposter syndrome.

I hate to feel as though this is controversial in the industry, but I’ve become comfortable enough with my experience, and I can’t help but believe that Imposter Syndrome could be so easily overcome with a supervisor who will make it clear that you can be straight with them about something you don’t understand, because there’s a good chance they were once in your shoes and would love to provide guidance, share their own experiences, and help you build confidence in your ability to build and ship.

It could be that you got hired because you showed competency in multiple talks and code assessments for the job, but a culture question to ask is if the job has room for learning opportunities. For me, I asked my supervisor for a check-in, which he didn’t have a lot of time for, but he set up a short session to talk to me about quick facts of the app, components to look at, ‘owners’ to talk to (and methods of finding them myself - checking to see if you have an employee directory), and his history with the app. This short talk gave clarification on understanding not only the codebase but also older internal documentation of the app and a few other functions that weren’t made clear to me during my onboarding. There are so many things you can do to push yourself beyond being ‘the junior’ - being able to engineer and master your tools, and being resourceful with what your organization gives you can really push you towards this goal, even if it doesn’t come up with a solution but just a step toward one.

This isn’t always the case; sometimes you may get a supervisor or lead who isn’t responsive in this way, maybe the culture isn’t set for that, or maybe you find yourself in a situation where it’s hard to find cooperation - this happens. Regardless, I’ve gotten so much mileage on my own just by reading statements, finding the logic behind them, and referring to any (internal and library) documentation to get an understanding of what and why. A lot of time I spent there was looking at Mozilla Developer Network to get context about what a statement is doing, and I think most offices are fine with you doing this.

If the culture is good towards juniors, all the better - you can ask for a safe time to meet with your lead for some context on what you’re working on, and I bet they’d love to help you instead of finding that you’ve been falling behind. Don’t be afraid to ask because the worst thing that could happen is that you get nothing done at all…

Thanks again to Christopher Theung and the Mt. SAC Computer Science Club for having me!
My message was edited for this post