I am an imposter

In 2022, I joined a startup in Chennai through a referral from my friend, who was a classmate during my Master's program. I started as an intern, and surprisingly, there were no technical interviews—my lead brought me on board without assessing my skills. Initially, I felt fortunate, but in hindsight, that was my first mistake.

During my internship, I worked primarily on mobile app development with Java and Firebase, as I was passionate about becoming a mobile app developer. Alongside that, I also started learning PHP. In March 2023, after completing my Master's, the company converted me to a full-time role. However, I quickly realized that there weren’t many Android projects available, and my lead moved me to work on the LAMP stack. The application I was working on felt like a basic college project, and I wasn’t gaining the growth I had hoped for.

When my lead left the company, my friend and I found ourselves as the only ones left in the team, which meant we had to make the key decisions. We decided to migrate the application from the LAMP stack to the MERN stack, thinking it would open more opportunities for us. Unfortunately, I struggled to learn MERN properly and ended up relying heavily on tools like ChatGPT to build the entire application, and my friend left the company for masters in the UK and for now it's just me and two other employees we don't do anything literally cause we don't have lot of projects and they still pay us to come to work, the pay is below average as well.

Now, even though I’ve gained two years of experience, I still don’t feel confident in Node.js or React, which has been frustrating. I can’t seem to crack interviews because I haven’t built a solid foundation in these technologies, and I feel ashamed for depending on external help rather than developing my own skills.