The Feed Never Stops: On the Developer Anxiety That Never Goes Away
The anxiety that you're not keeping up isn't a personal failing - it's the predictable result of measuring yourself against a target that has never existed.
The Stack That Only Grows
It’s 8:14 PM on a Sunday. You’re wherever you need to be at that time; in bed, on the sofa, in the garden, but regardless of where you are, you’re scrolling through your social media posts, a backlog of newsletters and browsing through Discord. You come across a thread on new CSS scroll-state queries, a GitHub star-count for a library that didn’t exist on Friday, and then you get a Slack notification from a colleague that just says: “Have you seen this? Seems like it might replace our current stack.”. No. You haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen any of this. The library didn’t exist on Friday. The thread is six hours old. And somehow you’re already behind.
But you’re not behind. There’s no ticket, no deadline, no dreaded upcoming performance review. Just a feeling that you’re not keeping up with the pace of the industry. The pace of change. But, the problem isn’t the pace of change. It’s the measuring stick.
The Developer Who Doesn’t Exist
It’s not a great feeling. But it’s not some mystical thing that sits in the back of your head, growing away unexpectedly. You can give it a name, give it something to bring it to life, and if it’s something, then it’s something you can deal with. Chances are a lot of people with this feeling - not just developers as I’m sure it happens throughout most careers (we’re not the outliers) - identify this feeling as Imposter Syndrome, but it’s a bit of a broad term to get anything useful out of it.
What’s actually happening is something way more specific. You’re pitting yourself up against a developer who doesn’t exist. A developer who has seen everything, learned everything, kept up with everything. Almost like they’ve got insider knowledge, or bring the features out themselves. The Slack message, the thread, the Github library…they aren’t the threats. They’re just statistics that you are using to build a comparison in which you were going to fall on the losing end.
Rather than Imposter Syndrome, you can call it the Imposter Tax. The mental load you’ve taken on to keep the idea that you should already know this.
This can show up in four ways.
The feeling that the goal posts have been moved further back, the idea of the ‘complete developer’ is the mirage of fresh water always sitting on the horizon. Every new feature, specification, every “you should take a look at X” from a colleague. It’s a moving target set by the feed, not a marker of the job.
The fear that you’ll pick up an assigned task at work and be confronted by a project or a piece of work that you didn’t write. Let’s be real here. This happens, and it happens a lot - especially in agency work. It’s something that isn’t necessarily fixed by your mindset. But the fear it can create, “I should already know this”, is different from the actual job of “I need to learn this now”. The imaginary target in your head has convinced you that you should have already pre-learned every system, every version. Like a rolodex of JS Framework and CMS versions. Unobtainable.
The fear of visible correction. Working on a post for a while, convinced you’ve got the topic down. But have you? What if you post it, and it gets dismissed immediately. What if the backbone of the topic was incorrectly learnt from the start, and therefore it’s all wrong*. In the same space, showcasing something in a team meeting, or in a reply on social media to someone that has more followers than you. All ways you could assume that you are on a lower level. The mental load mentioned earlier is much bigger on this compared to how often it actually occurs.
The last one is something that has started to occur recently with AI blowing up in the industry. The self-doubt that can come from asking Copilot, or Claude, or ChatGPT about something that you “should” know. The more you rely it on it, the less you can feel like you know, and instead it’s replaced by a feeling that you’re nothing but a middle man between the LLM and the code editor. Looking things up has always been the correct, encouraged idea - thinking back to Stack Overflow at it’s peak - but the measuring stick just made it a new way to feel like a failure instead.
All of these have the same structure - there’s a large gap between what you should know and what you think you should know. The gap is real - that’s fine - but the “should” is invented.
The Fictional Target
- The feeling is based on a target that doesn’t exist
- You’ve never been up to date on everything
- Frontend developer - in comparison to a decade ago - is too large for any one person to cover expertly.
- The job title may have stayed the same, but the scope didn’t.
- Imposter syndrome maybe be resolved, but this feeling can still occur, because their origins are different.
If the Imposter Syndrome post is about questioning whether you belong, this one is about realising the map you’ve been navigating by was wrong to begin with. Different problem. Same developer.