Somehow I got here: On impostor syndrome

I had the great honor of being on Chuck Tomasi’s Break Point podcast! I had a lot of fun talking to him about my career, the role that ServiceNow has played in my life and how we both have experienced and battled with Impostor syndrome. Give it a listen then come back for more!

Me and Chuck at the K22 CreatorCon Keynote!

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I am a Venezuelan American immigrant, and I came to the united states in 2001. I am currently a ServiceNow developer at a partner, but I have basically worked almost every facet of the ServiceNow environment in some capacity – admin, architect, production support, etc. I’m going back to school and hopefully going to finish with getting a master's in computer science, but I've basically accepted that life happens and no matter how long it takes I'll at least have finished eventually.

I first went to college in 2011 – starry eyed and dreaming of starting a career in... something. I could never decide what I wanted to do because I always compared myself to everyone around me. I was friends with some intelligent men who were all in computer science or engineering major courses. I saw them and I thought I wasn’t good enough to even try those classes. I didn’t think I was skilled enough, intelligent enough, focused enough or really in any way enough to compare. I saw them spending their free time building servers or using raspberry pis or all this new technology that I couldn’t grasp my mind around. So, foolishly, I excluded myself. I tried being an art major, a psychology major, and none of it worked out. I ended up getting academically suspended from VCU because I got into a bad car accident and my grades plummeted, and then I started working serving tables at basically every restaurant you could imagine. After a while I started working at a bank, and once that became sufficiently soul crushing, I started looking for a new job.  

I decided – why not try something in tech support? Maybe it was close enough to customer service for me to be able to be good at it. I was still discounting my skills and my worth, unfortunately. After some encouragement from friends and having one of them work at this company, I applied to a golf course software company. I thought I struggled in the interview – but they saw more than I ever saw in myself. There was a pre-interview test that I had studied for and if you didn’t pass it you didn’t get an interview. When the hiring manager returned with my graded test, he asked me why I wanted the job. I responded that I wanted to learn more about computers and IT. I won’t forget him chuckling and saying, “Well first let’s start by learning what you got wrong...” Turns out – I had barely gotten the passing score. To this day there’s a part of me that wonders if I really did pass it or not – but this would be one of two moments that would change my life and career forever.  

I learned irreplaceable things from that job – most notably of all, what to do when you accidentally drop a SQL table. (FYI: Step 1. hold your tears, don’t panic; Step 2. Go to your senior technician’s office and ask for help. Step 3. Once they get hold of the situation and are fixing it, you can cry.) Once I felt I had outgrown my position and the company got acquired by a larger competitor, I started applying for new jobs. That’s how I ended up meeting my mentor. He was the IT manager of a medical coding company and I had applied for two jobs with him – one for an outage coordinator and another for a tier 2 technician. He was dead set on me interviewing for the outage coordinator position since I didn’t have any experience for the tier 2 technician role. I managed to convince him to hire me, he told me later on, by telling him about how I saved $300 on a car repair by googling it, going to the dump, taking that part out of a broken-down car, and putting it in my car. He thought “If she can teach herself that, I can probably teach her anything.” 

Several months later he was making a comment about needing to hire an administrator for this software system they were re-implementing. Something called “ServiceNow”. Jokingly, I said “Oh, don’t worry about hiring someone. I’ll just figure it out!” and he responded with “You’re on.”  

Once I jokingly made that bet with my mentor, I got my CSA in 3 months and helped with that implementation. I finally felt like I had found a place where I belonged, which is kind of weird to say about software. I had always struggled with somehow connecting my passion for IT, my love of art and design, my skills for customer interactions and my love of processes and procedures and making it into something that could make me money. I found all of that in ServiceNow.

I also learned some valuable lessons such as the fact that, while I saw all these people around me being incredibly smart, it wasn’t because they sat down somewhere and memorized everything they read. It was because they were able to do research on the spot and learn and teach themselves what was needed to do the task at hand. I found that in ServiceNow – a place where I could learn while being supported by a vast knowledge base including people on the snDevs slack, the people on community, the old wiki (RIP) and the new Docs website. I felt confident pursuing things I had never let myself pursue – I learned HTML and JavaScript and I love Service Portal work. I taught myself (with the mentorship of others of course) ITIL, learned how to interact with customers, and I found my own niche. I may not be the best hands-on-keyboard developer out there, and I may not be able to write endless lines of code without referencing and googling a lot, but I can be that developer or architect that can translate technical jargon into something the customer can understand, and then translate what the customer really wants (not what they are asking for necessarily) into requirements for the developers to work on. I finally found a place where I could use all my skills and feel needed, which was something I had worried about for so long.  

Impostor syndrome is that feeling that you get when you think you aren’t as good as others think you may be. You feel like you don’t belong where you are and you are fooling everyone around you. I feel that way constantly and even Chuck has felt that, and I want to let you know that almost everyone feels that way at some point or another. Just try your hardest and remember that you belong and you got where you got to through your hard work and efforts. Good job.

“You're valid. You're worth it. And you belong. You can do so much more than what you think you can do.”