What's a real engineer, anyway?
By Marty Bacik
An exploration into imposter syndrome
In November of 2021 I received a life changing offer to join Calm as a software engineer. It was a dream come true and immensely exciting, but it also brought an uneasiness. I was a finance major in undergrad. I went to business school. I was primarily self taught and worried that people would find out that I scammed my way in, or I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I was hired almost two years ago now at the time of writing. I’ve been promoted twice, piloted and implemented massive technical projects, now know what p95 latency is, and have proved I can hold my own with the best of them. I’ve recognized that I bring a unique skillset to the table, and there is no such thing as a ‘real engineer’. Although I can’t quite yell it from the rooftops yet, I can now confidently say that I’m a great engineer, and I’ve earned that proclamation. It’s easier now to say ‘I don’t know’ and not feel bad about it. No one can know everything, afterall.
However, there are still times when I’m caught off guard. Almost every day I’m learning new terms - DAGs, webhooks, etc - and each time one comes up, a little bit of that doubt from when I first joined Calm begins to come back. It feels like there are some secrets that everyone learned in the comp sci undergrad that I didn’t have (although I’m at least mostly sure that’s not true). Even the very act of writing this post brought about a resurgence of feeling like I wasn’t enough of an engineer. Despite wanting to write a Calm Engineering blog post for months now, I’ve hesitated each time I’ve thought about it because I felt like I didn’t have any advanced technical concepts to talk about like my very talented colleagues (I probably do). So I guess I’m doing things in my own way like I always have.
I’ve been so immensely fortunate in my time at Calm to have incredible mentors and managers who have helped to reshape the illusion that to be a real engineer you need to come from a certain background and know certain things. By nature, I’m a very self deprecating person. In part this is intentional to make me more approachable, and to be honest, make people laugh. But, I really doubled down on this tone in my early days almost as a defense mechanism. If I said something wrong then oh well, I wasn’t sure about it anyway. One of my coworkers once said, and I quote, ‘asking Marty to not be self deprecating is like asking him not to breathe’. There was a really important moment where my previous manager pulled me aside after presenting. We sat on a Zoom call and she told me that I knew what I was talking about and I was heading down a path where I wouldn't be taken seriously if I continued to downplay myself like I had in the presentation.
On the occasions when I fall back into old doubt patterns, my manager supports me and dispels my notions that I’m not engineer enough. Recently, in a conversation with him about taking the next step to Staff Engineer, within a split second I blurted out my gut reaction of ‘no that’s not for me, I’m not like the other staff engineers’. But why can’t it be me? I’ve tackled some of this organization's biggest challenges. I may not know the inner workings of AWS Lambda, but I’ve used my business background to get projects greenlit, executed them, and reduced org wide latency by 50%. I’ve solved major customer pain points. My portfolio here is full of things I’m immensely proud of. Just because I don’t read about Typescript doesn’t preclude me from being qualified as a Staff Engineer. With imposter syndrome there can be a tendency to focus on what you don’t know instead of what you know well, and I’m learning to focus on the latter.
I didn’t set out writing this with the intent of having a takeaway or some piece of wisdom, I just thought I could bring some comfort to those who may feel like they are alone in thinking they aren’t a ‘real engineer’ or a ‘real manager’ or a ‘real [insert your profession here]’. Although if there is one takeaway (and this is where the fact I work at a meditation company comes out) I think it’s that we are all unique, and your uniqueness is your strength. I used to shy away from the fact that I didn’t go to undergrad for computer science and I came from a business background. I now wear that fact very proudly. The way I think about the financial impacts of my projects and my customer obsession creates a really interesting concoction of traits for me as an engineer. It makes me valuable as an engineer. And yes, I said it, I’m a real engineer.