Hey Gregory,

First off, thank you for the kind words. I’d like to think I treat people well, but it’s always nice to hear a confirmation!

Secondly, I hope it’s clear it’s never my intention to be intimidating. At least assuming we didn’t meet in a dark alley. 🤣 Seriously, I’m just a guy like anyone else, just ask my co-workers! I have my moments, for example, I nearly fell down putting on my jeans this morning.

Sadly, we aren’t looking to hire any full time staff right now, but we do occasionally need additional subcontractors. And yes it’s a bit of a high bar as our customers at REVSYS come to us expecting that.

On Imposter Syndrome

I was thinking of a quote and I couldn’t exactly find it. My AI tells me the popular version is something like:

“Confidence isn’t a personality trait — it’s the result of evidence. It’s built by stacking proof that you can do what you say you’ll do.”

That is often attributed to Naval Ravikant and Alex Hormozi.

Imposter syndrome is VERY common. In fact, I would guess 99% of people have it on some level in their career and we all have it in some area of our lives. So you’re not alone. I’ve worked with several great engineers who suffered from this. Some it wasn’t as pronounced, but for some it was nearly debilitating to their careers.

My advice? Focus not on what you lack, but on what you have done.

Apologies for channeling Yoda there, but it’s true. If you don’t feel you have done enough, find ways to do more. Get more reps in.

You mention that you look great on paper. So I’d work on expanding your off paper experience, even outside of your day job. Feel like you need more experience in developing with a certain tech? Try to find an Open Source project you can contribute to that uses it. Or if it’s more on the ops side of things, do a bad version in a home lab to get started and then do it again in a more robust way. And then maybe again with a full observability stack, gitops, and the whole nine yards.

Couple of iterations of that and you’re on your way to being an expert.

Which reminds me of my absolute FAVORITE quote:

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” - Niels Bohr

I’m a confident expert because I’ve fucked it up in every single way you can think of!

Let’s make a list! I’ve …

• Deleted the production database without having backups
• Let the main work domain registration lapse
• Deployed to production when I meant to deploy to staging
• Double charged customer credit cards due to a bug
• Didn’t write tests
• Wrote bad tests
• Picked the wrong tech stack
• Was wildly wrong in an assumption of how something did work
• Slept through the pager alert
• Over engineered the solution
• Under engineered the solution
• Deployed a bug just before hopping on a plane
• Didn’t document the process
• Documented the process incorrectly

I could keep going and going, but you get the idea.

It’s not some idea that I’m magically infallible, it is precisely the fact I’ve made so many mistakes that I now know what NOT to do in the current situation.

It’s just a matter of reps. So go out there get some more reps in.

Go fuck it up good and learn from it.