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When was the last time you felt that people had considered you a bad engineer because of a mistake or misunderstanding that made you look small in the eyes of those people? You are not alone, as engineers experience this feeling at least once in their careers. At the time, you did not have the tools and knowledge to do the work intended; however, that should not discourage you, and you can learn many lessons from such experiences.
We can not say that you are bad or good at your job because we simply do not know. However, we can provide guidance and signs of why you feel like an outsider or someone who is not cut out to be an engineer. The answer could be because: (Some or all can apply to you)
- You are really bad at your job, but you live in denial.
- Your managers are toxic, and you simply do not know any better.
- Or maybe you have not been given the tools required to do the work, making you feel incompetent.
The harsh truth is that it is easier to blame others for your dysfunction because it is not easy to admit that you are not good enough. Engineers can fall into doubt at least once in their careers. Engineering careers are highly technical and complicated, with many people in those jobs acting like assh*les all the time.
You can be the victim or the abuser; either way, people can be mean in engineering jobs. This creates tension, doubt and impostor syndrome. It is not okay to live with those feelings constantly, and it is not healthy to leave them in your system without examining them.
The following can give some guidance on how you can examine yourself and unravel those feelings of not being good enough.
The following section might sound a bit harsh; well, it should be because it is directed to you. I personally had my share of those feelings. But, by being honest with myself, I am now a better engineer.
5 Ways To Overcome Feeling Incompetent As an Engineer
Not everything here will apply to you, but at least one or two things might help with your situation. So do not take everything personally.
1- Get over the unwillingness to learn
Engineers might be stubborn. Well, why would not we? The better we do at university and work, the more it inflates our opinion of ourselves. Engineering jobs are difficult, making us overestimate our abilities because we feel that we know so much that no one can teach us anything. In a nutshell: the smarter you get, the more arrogant you can be.
This inflated opinion of ourselves goes downhill when we fail at something and refuse to learn from it. We refuse to listen to others and see the value in someone else’s words of wisdom. This has a negative effect on the engineer if left unchecked.
People refuse to learn because they are arrogant and mistreat the people trying to teach them something. This might have empowering results in the short term, but it can cost you your career and pride in the long term.
The solution is to be more humble and understand that you are not perfect; we all are. A good place to start is to deal with your bad attitude. We encourage you to read: 5 Ways Your Attitude Is Destroying Your Career.
2- Overcome the feeling of unimportance
The truth is we all want to feel important. We all want to feel respected. Unfortuenly this is not always true in your job. People might mistreat you because you could not do something well enough, or they just mistreat everyone. This could be even worse if you have the constant need to seek attention and respect.
This feeling of unimportance correlates with feeling incompetent. Because you always need the validation of others which makes you feel incompetent at your job. The sooner you get out of feeling unimportant, the better it is for your mental health.
People will not be clapping for you every time you do something. When your boss asks you to have this report complete on his desk by tomorrow morning, just because you did not get the “Thank you” when you finished it, that does not mean you are not good at your job. It would be good to feel appreciated from time to time, but that is not always the case, so get out of the trap of seeking validation on everything.
Do not get me wrong; feedback is good, but in the end, we are engineers. We are awkward, cold humans that unintentionally mistreat others from time to time. So do not take it personally.
To combat this, start treating your job as a secondary thing for a few months, get a hobby or a side job that keeps you busy outside work. This can help you reduce the feeling of unimportance.
3- Get over the feeling of being the new kid
This might not apply to everyone. This applies to new kids in town. The fresh graduates and the people starting a new job. Because you are new to something, you might not be as good at it at the beginning making you feel incompetent.
Imagine a scenario where you are starting a graduate job at a consultant engineering company. You are asked to do something that, ultimately, you did not do the job very well. Instead of being told you are wrong in a nice non-direct way, you are met with: Have they not taught you this at university? Or a 5-year-old kid could do a better job than you, among other bad responses intended to bring your self-confidence down.
Remember what we said earlier about engineers having inflated opinions of themselves that make them misjudge and hurt others unintentionally? This is one of those scenarios. Senior management and engineers usually want to get things done and are quite busy. When they are swamped with work, they give some to you, not because they can not do it faster but because they would rather deal with other more pressing matters.
Getting one thing wrong usually infuriates them and makes them say bad things about you. They probably were as clueless as you were when they started, but they have done it so many times that they forgot how bad they were the first time they did it.
There is no easy way to say this, but you might get a few people in your organisation treating you this way. Toxicity is common in highly technical jobs. As a result, your impostor syndrome grows with every negative encounter. This is a long topic, and we feel it is well deserved to have a full post by itself. You should definitely check how you can combat this issue here: Not Reaching Your Full Potential: 5 Ways Your Boss Is Toxic.
4- Overcome the frustration of not finding the answer quickly
Another one. You feel useless and frustrated when you cannot find a solution to a simple problem. We, as engineers, think that we should know the answer to everything and feel bad when something so simple has taken us so long to do. We second guess our abilities and feel not good enough to do the job just because we got something so simple wrong.
This is very common among engineers, and you are not alone. We feel we should be able to write a simple code line, and we feel bad about using illustration and visual aid to help us do the job. Some even feel worse searching google for the answer they should know.
You need to know that you are not a supercomputer and are not meant to remember everything. If you used some materials and aided software to help you do your job well, then who cares, right? You did it right, not that you used someone else’s materials, notes or the internet to do it.
Most of the engineering work does not involve reinventing the wheel. If a design has proven to be robust and sustainable, why change it? Why spend hours doing something where you could easily find the solution online or by looking into your company database. You saved yourself time and effort and avoided falling into the mistakes of your design. So do not be frustrated when you are following good self-check practice, as this is not incompetence.
5- Overcome the constant need to compare yourself to others
You must have compared yourself to someone at some stage of your life. We are all guilty of it, and there is nothing good about trying to deny it. We feel that we could be better than other people, but because they have been given certain advantages and privileges, it makes them better than us. This is how humans justify their way of comparing themselves to others.
Those feelings that others have been given more privileges that make them better can be a drive to make you angry. This has the reverse action where you have an inflated opinion of yourself and justify why others are only better than you because they have some privileges. This is simply the inner working of comparing yourself to others.
This is a very sensitive topic to many because if we stop comparing ourselves to others, we have to accept that we are not as good as we think. Usually, people choose arrogance over dealing with their own fault.
Again everyone is guilty of it, so there is no need to justify your action. So what to do now that you want to step into the solution. Well, start by examining ourselves. We have catered a complete guide for engineers to help them deal with this problem: Stop Comparing Yourself To Other Engineers. It’s Not Healthy.
What Can You Do Now To Change Your Mindset?
Changing your mindset is not easy and is not a quick fix. It takes constant work and monitoring yourself until you feel more competent to do your work. This is more of a psychological thing than a lack of ability thing. When people are more accepting of their abilities, they are more immune to feeling incompetent.
Start by monitoring your behaviour, and see what triggers you about your ability. Is it something that you will get better at with more experience? Or is it related to how others treat you? Remember, you can only control your actions, not others, so there is no need to react to everything external, especially when you do not know how to respond.
Finally, do not make the current situation affect your passion for engineering. You might lose passion for the job, which you can easily change careers but never the passion for what got you to engineering in the first place. For more help with this issue, read: 8 Reasons You Are Losing Passion For Engineering-How to Fix?
