I recently published a blog post[0] about this with an excerpt from my book[1]. I wrote a whole chapter on feeling like an imposter, so here's some thoughts on what you can tell them:
- It’s common for software developers to feel overwhelmed with the pace of things during the first few years of their career.
- You shouldn't feel intimidated by coworkers who are smarter. In fact, you can leverage their knowledge and experience to learn faster.
- It's a feeling, not a syndrome. We should move away from using the word "syndrome" because it's not a medical condition at all and that word has a negative connotation to it. It's just a feeling like stage fright or anxiety, and it's temporary and will eventually pass.
- It’s okay to admit that you don’t know something, or that you hadn’t considered some obvious edge case. In fact, admitting that you don’t know something is a sign of maturity.
- Identify your knowledge gaps. Write down things that you know you don't know. This could be things like topics, phrases, or acronyms that you’ve heard repeatedly, but don’t know what they are. Programming specific things could be OOP principles, scalability strategies, security practices, agile methodology, design patterns, kubernetes, etc.
- Close your knowledge gaps. Take 20-30 minutes each day and teach yourself one thing from your list of things you wrote down. After a few weeks you'll be much more knowledgable on topics you previously had nothing about. It'll help build confidence in conversations and open up new ideas and new things to add to your list.
Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more about this. Like I said, I wrote a whole chapter about this and many more on helping junior software engineers build up their soft-skills. My email is in my HN profile.
[0]: https://www.exponentialbackoff.com/posts/how-to-beat-imposte...
[1]: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior