So the thing that has really benefited me, probably the best of everything that I’ve done professionally, is I come in with a fundamental belief that any problem that I’m going to face, I will be able to solve. Where this kind of started from for me, at least, is when I was in school. We’d be getting these lab assignments and I never thought, “Oh, I was like, oh man, this is gonna be so hard,” and then about four hours into it, I was like, “Okay, I kind of see what’s going on here,” and that eventually completed every single time.
It made me realize that I always go into something I don’t know, not really thinking I can do it, and that’s like a really crappy mentality to have. You’re going to avoid harder situations all the time, and ultimately, you’re going to stunt your own career because you constantly avoid these situations where you’re like, “Oh man, I could get fired because I might not be able to build this thing because I don’t know how to do it.” You’re always worrying about the worst possible situation, but instead, you’re not even thinking about the benefits and the good things that are on the other side.
So for me, every single problem that I faced at Netflix, I always thought, “I could do this.” A good example of this is when I was at Netflix. When I was very first at Netflix, my very first project was called Social Mountain, in which we integrated Facebook so you could recommend videos to other people and it would pop up in the app and all that kind of stuff. There was a front-end component to it and there was a back-end component to it. Now, there were three people working on the project on the front end. I was one of those three people, and of the three people, no one wanted to do the back end. A, it was in Groovy, but B, everyone there was front-end engineers, and I was like, “Hey, I’ll do it, I don’t care, this should be fun.” And so, of course, I started going through it. I absolutely dominated it because I didn't have a fear that I could or could not do it. I just had to learn everything and do it as best as I could. And guess what? In the end, I ended up finishing it way sooner than the other parts of the work, and my boss even said I moved the project up several months. I really just did it because I wasn’t scared that I could or could not do something.
In fact, that one decision made my boss tell another boss, “Hey, I know you want to do this upgrade to our back end. Why don’t we just let, you know, Prime take care of it?” And so I did do that. I did such a good job on that one that I started working in open source with Falcor. You can see that I’m the number one contributor back when we used to do it. So that one small decision with the team where no one wanted to do it because they were like, “Wow, it’s really hard, I don’t like doing back end,” I was like, “Dude, I’ll do it, I’ll crush this out.”
It opened up an opportunity, which opened up an opportunity, which allowed me to work on open source for multiple years, which allowed me the next opportunity, which allowed me the next opportunity, which I am working on now. And it was all because I never once thought, “Hey, I can’t do that.” I will always look at every single opportunity out there and I will see it as an opportunity, never as a hurdle, because the thing is, once you get over that hump, there is something on the other side. There’s always something on the other side. There’s recognition, there’s skills you’re going to be taking, there’s going to be respect you might get from your co-workers, but you just aren’t afraid to take these leaps. Like, we all have to leap or we can sit on the side and watch other people do it.
I don’t want to watch the game, I want to be in the game. So, what is the best decision I’ve made professionally? I just don’t say no to things I don’t understand. I am willing to take risks, I’m willing to look at obstacles as opportunities, and I sure hope that you can take some of this mentality with you.
Now, I know there’s gonna be a lot of people like, “Well, you know, if you don’t say no, you’re really being a disservice to yourself.” Obviously, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying go work a thousand hours a week. What I’m saying is that when something kind of worries you, stop. You’ve solved things in the past, you’re gonna solve this one. Use the past as an indication. You started to learn how to program knowing nothing about programming, and now you’re doing it full time. Just think about how far you’ve come and how many problems you’ve hurdled. You got it, you can do it again.
And lastly, this should just vanquish imposter syndrome. The reality about imposter syndrome is because you’re so busy looking at other people’s perfect lives that you see either on Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, wherever you see these things, and you don’t see all the time spent debugging, doing the wrong thing, the heartaches, facing the challenges, the worries they feel internally. You just are over there looking at their highlight reel going, “Dang, I wish I was as good of a coder as that guy. Oh man, it’s so cool. Look, he’s driving a Lambo and he programmed PHP.” But the reality is, even the guy driving the Lambo writing PHP, he still solved problems in which he didn’t know if he could or could not do. He took the opportunity. Take it. Take the opportunity. Stop being so worried about if you’re good enough or not good enough. You’re gonna always sell yourself short, you always, always will.