You get promoted. People congratulate you, you update your title on LinkedIn, you get added to meetings you never used to attend. And in the first of those meetings you sit down, listen to everyone talking with a confidence you don't have, and think that at any moment they're going to realize you have no idea what you're doing.
Remember when you were a kid and the older kids let you join their pickup soccer game? It was equal parts pride and terror. You got picked last, they stuck you on defense, and every time the ball came your way you felt everyone was waiting for you to mess up.
But you were there because someone thought you could be there.
The first few weeks were rough. Then you started touching the ball. And one day you realized the older kids messed up too, they just didn't care as much.
That feeling, as an adult and with a promotion involved, is called impostor syndrome: the persistent idea that you don't deserve the place you're in, that what you achieved was luck or someone's mistake, and that sooner or later you'll be found out. The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described it in 1978. It isn't a clinical diagnosis, but anyone who works in tech recognizes it in two seconds.
And it can happen to people who are doing really well. You can be doing your job well and still feel you don't deserve to be there.
It tends to show up right when you're growing. You went from dev to tech lead, from lead to manager, from a small team to a big one. You left the comfort zone and stepped into the stretch zone, which is exactly where you learn and also where you feel most like a fraud. So it isn't always a bad sign. Sometimes the impostor is the noise growth makes.
It gets ugly when it starts deciding for you. When you don't ask for help so nobody notices you don't know. When you work twice as hard to make up for a shortcoming nobody has pointed out. When you don't apply for something because you're "not ready yet", and you'll never be completely ready. When you stay quiet in the meeting and ten minutes later someone else says what you were thinking, with less to back it up and more confidence.
What holds you back is hiding that you're still learning.
Whoever leads has plenty to do here. If on a team you get exposed every time you make a mistake, everyone ends up hiding their doubts: if every mistake gets called out, if nobody says "I don't know" out loud, if the seniors never show their doubts, new people learn that not knowing is something to hide. That's why it matters so much to me that on a team we can fail.
It helps to tell someone why you picked them, with concrete facts and not a generic "you're a rockstar". It helps to show your own doubts. And it helps to name it and talk about it, because knowing it happens to others too takes a lot of the weight off.
I don't know if it ever goes away completely. It does shrink, though, every time someone says they don't know and nothing bad happens.
If they let you play with the older kids, call for the ball.