Ask HN: First month job anxiety. Am I actually an impostor?

1. Your coworkers have clear thoughts not because they're better than you but because they have built months or years of context, situational awareness, and pattern-matching around a particular project, process, or initiative. This precaching of resources allows for faster processing time which you perceive as increased mental clarity.

2. You're scared to ask questions because you think doing so will lead to getting "found out." In my experience, the exact opposite is true. Not only that but most people in meetings do not synthesize everything and yet stay silent. Leave the mental frame of "I don't understand and they'll judge me for it" and adopt one of "I want to make sure I understand this clearly so that we can best move forward as a team" - in fact even preface your questions with the latter. People will respect you for it.

3. People find proactive communication difficult because they assume the nature of the relationship is going to be somehow adversarial in nature, especially when reaching out to people/teams to ask them add more work to their plate. This is the wrong mental frame. When reaching out to people as part of your work, adopt a collaborative mindset of "we're in this together and to work together with Team X we need to merge our realities." All subsequent communication should then focus on both sides articulating the particulars of their individual realities, making a shared one, and establishing a roadmap to work together moving forward.

4. Everything that's happening to you is a form of irradiation that will result in hypergrowth of you as a person and an engineer - if you let it. There's a great book by Carol Dweck about growth mindsets vs fixed mindsets. A fixed mindset perceived your skills and abilities as immutable. A growth mindset recognizes that your skills and abilities are capable of optimization and accepts new input to make it so. Input that induces growth is necessarily painful - if you accept this you will realize that in time YOU will be the grizzled veteran engineer confidently able to articulate thoughts on a complex project and rally the necessary people to execute on it - because you've seen the underlying patterns a million times.

Work on the above over time and you will join a select club of people who no longer have to pretend to be high performers but actually are.

I’m a semi-freelancer. I have a long term contract with a company , and it’s my first big contract.

I get the feeling of being an imposter. I overcome it by constantly asking questions and talking to my coworkers. And I’m learning.

As long as you keep learning and are making a positive impact , you’re doing fine. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself too busy to care!

Just do your best and try to improve anything you touch, even if the improvements are minor. (EG boyscout rule)