Congratulations! You landed your first development job. There is just one problem: you're not a "real" developer. This is your first job in the industry. Your resume has little relevant experience. Your side projects are mediocre at best. You've never even used a testing framework! You feel like a con artist.

At stand up, tickets shuffle across the board as your team members give their updates. They ship features; you don’t even know how to start them. A knot wells up in your stomach. Intrusive thoughts take over. "I don't deserve to be here". Getting laid off lingers in your mind. Negative thoughts eat away at you all day.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you're like me, you've experienced anxiety like this. In school, I used my anxiety as motivation and assumed this strategy would work in my professional life. Instead, I struggled with impostor syndrome and lost sleep because I didn’t feel like a real programmer.

When I started at Jobber, I was a self-taught developer. My only experience in web development was building personal pet projects, nothing near the scale of what Jobber does. Even with Jobber’s great onboarding program, Welcome Mat, I still struggled with anxiety and imposter syndrome. However, I can now manage those emotions and I owe a lot of that to the great company culture at Jobber.

Working on my very first ticket

I wrote tests with a senior engineer as my first task. We were half way done when he got pulled into a meeting. I should have been able to finish writing the tests by the time he got back. But your code knows how to hide a problem until the person who can help you leaves the room. In this case, the test required extracting information from a token. The correct way to test a token is to mock the service that decodes the token. This way, you don't have to worry about having a perfectly formed token to match your exact test case. But I didn’t know about mocking, so I tried to generate a cryptographically signed token. By hand.

"So, how're the tests coming along?," I hear after an unfruitful hour down the rabbit hole of JSON web tokens. After explaining the situation, I expected the senior engineer to berate my mistake. Instead, he said this:

"When we hired you as an engineer at Jobber, it means that we trust your judgment. If you believed that trying to generate the token was the way to go, then go for it. Even if it leads you down a rabbit hole, we want you to take those risks that you feel are necessary as that's why we hired you."

The senior engineer explained that through mocking, you can have the "decode" method return the expected payload without worrying about the actual token. While I enjoyed learning how to write effective tests, those words of encouragement had a much bigger impact on me.

I think you learn the most when you take the time to struggle through a problem. Deep dives are what get you that long term understanding in difficult topics like physics, math, and computer science, but they can come at the cost of short term productivity. So it was liberating having a senior engineer encourage me to engage in that struggle, to trust my judgment when I think I need to dig deeper to understand something. And that trust does a lot.

Trusting someone is a powerful motivator, more powerful than fear. When you’re driven by fear your goal is to avoid a negative outcome. You’ll avoid doing anything, even the right thing, to avoid a mistake. And victories are shallow since they just delay the consequence another day. Fear focuses your attention on yourself while trust focuses your attention on others. When someone trusts you, you want to justify that person’s belief in you. The failures might sting more, but it’s because you want them to be right. The victories are sweeter for the same reason.

Since I've started at Jobber, I've onboarded other new team members. I do my best to highlight the company culture at Jobber by following the same example I was given by that senior engineer. I never thought that I'd be able to work without imposter syndrome. But I didn’t get here alone. I got here through positive reinforcement from my peers—positive reinforcement which I pay forward so future engineers at Jobber can also overcome imposter syndrome.

A lot of articles describe the benefits of a positive company culture (increased efficiency, profit, etc.), but not all of them look at it from the perspective of the employees' mental health. I've read horror stories about workplaces inducing burnout and self-doubt by not having a culture of trust. A company that values trust will show that primarily in how its employees act towards each other.

Despite Jobber's massive growth—almost doubling in size since I started working here—the company's core values are deeply instilled within each employee. I know that this culture of trust is thanks to the wonderful mentors who onboard new employees as well as the new employees who pay it forward.

About Jobber

Our awesome Jobber technology teams span across Payments, Infrastructure, AI/ML, Business Workflows & Communications. We work on cutting edge & modern tech stacks using React, React Native, Ruby on Rails, & GraphQL.

If you want to be a part of a collaborative work culture, help small home service businesses scale and create a positive impact on our communities, then visit our careers site to learn more!