Most people experience impostor syndrome at least once in their lifetime. In this case, their thoughts might be something like: “I'm not ready for this,” “I don't have enough experience/knowledge to do this," “I have to earn this position/project,” etc. If such thoughts stimulate you to further development and self-improvement, then you should not worry. But when you constantly say to yourself: “I'm a loser,” it's already a problem that should be discussed with a psychologist.
Self-doubt during the employment process results from the wrong attitude to the job search and some mistakes.
Let's consider five typical mistakes that lead to self-confidence:
Exaggerated expectations for the first job
After studying, people often imagine their dream job, which does not coincide with reality. And that's normal.
Therefore, it is better to perceive the situation with the first job like this: you arrive in a new city, get off at the train station, and then look around and decide where you should go next in this unfamiliar city. The first job is an opportunity to get professional integration and understand what's what and how it works in practice.
Lack of understanding of the situation in the job market
Before entering a new industry, it is worth understanding what is happening there now: the geographical distribution of employment, people with which backgrounds are more frequently hired, etc. It means that you should not believe posts in social networks; instead, talking to people who have worked for a long time in the field that interests you is better.
Non-acquaintance with the employer company
Imagine the situation: you send many of your CVs to different companies. Then you are invited to a job interview and know almost nothing about this company. And you come, and they ask you: "How can you be useful to our company?" And you don't know how long this company has been on the market, whether they rebranded, or what products they produced. Of course, in this case, you will have nothing to offer the employer. And that's why the chances of getting a job in this company will be off-chance. That is why it is essential to learn more about a potential employer. Make a personal list of companies where you would like to work, which are suitable for you in line with the company's activity, values, etc., and carefully collect as much information as possible about each. Then you won't have to blush at the job interview.
Lack of a career goal or dwelling on a career goal
A frequent question at the interview is, “Who do you see yourself in our company after N years?”. Only some job seekers can answer it. However, this answer shows what a person is striving for and whether he is striving for anything.
Another situation is when, for example, you are studying to become a recruiter, but you dream of becoming an HR professional. And you come to the interview and say that you see yourself as an HR manager in two years. But this company already has such a specialist or specialists, and there are no plans to increase the number of such positions. In addition, you can get valuable and exciting experience while working as a recruiter.
Incomprehension of your strengths
When you create your curriculum vitae, you should clearly understand your strengths and weaknesses. You need to either strengthen your weaknesses, for example, take additional studies, or not mention them in your CV. We will talk about such an audit of your strengths/weaknesses below.
If you avoid these mistakes, you will have fewer job rejections, and your self-esteem will not suffer.
When we enter the employment market, we start selling our “goods”: knowledge, skills, experience, etc. Therefore, it is worth critically analyzing this product's quality, zest, and “wrapper”. And when the product is not sold, it is necessary to think about whether it looks unattractive or did we come to offer it in the wrong place.
Look at yourself as a business project and the hiring process as a commercial proposal for cooperation.
Employers do not take very kindly to a person who comes and starts literally begging for a job: "Please give me something, at least somewhere, because life has pushed me into a corner. I need money...". In fact, this is not the kind of person an employer will want to take on the team, even if a high-level specialist came to the job interview.
Consider your CV a commercial proposal for cooperation and the employer as a future business partner. Pay attention to how they communicate with you at the job interview and what they offer you. Employment is when you sell a set of skills and are sold a position. And you and your employer are negotiating.
If, as a result of such negotiations, you receive a rejection, be sure to find out what the problem is so that you can work on these points and improve your offer in the future.
Create a business model of yourself as a specialist. Here are its main components:
Self-esteem affects self-confidence and, therefore, can cause impostor syndrome. If we do not see the level of self-esteem in other people, then our confidence or self-doubt already has external manifestations in our behavior.
How insecurity is forming and how we evaluate ourselves
A child is not born with self-doubt. Someone forms it. And here is what you need to understand to prevent the development of self-doubt:
In our childhood, reference people put a particular set of statements about us in our heads, which develop into beliefs. And later, we don't even remember why we treat something in a certain way or behave in certain situations, just like that and not otherwise.
A belief is a hypothesis that needs no proof. Our beliefs are most often not realized by us.
Our beliefs can be both supportive and limiting. Some of them help us to go further and achieve our goals, and some of them, on the contrary, prevent us from moving forward. This set of beliefs becomes a filter by which we evaluate the results of our actions — we state success or failure. That is why, all other things being equal, one person will say to himself: “I got a fantastic experience. What a good man I am!” and the other will sorrow: “I'm a loser; I shouldn't have started.”
Examples of limiting and supporting beliefs
Limiting beliefs:
Beliefs about yourself are closely related to your attitude to money. If you ask yourself the following questions: “Why can't I earn more? Why do I face a salary ceiling?” think about it, isn't this your belief, which says that earning more is dangerous, having a higher position is also dangerous because you will “fall painfully”?
Examples of supporting beliefs:
Here the question arises: who should tell us all these words? It is good if your parents and those around you speak such supportive comments, but if no one tells you this? In this case, learning to say this to yourself is very important.
Most people think that impostor syndrome is a bad thing. In fact, this is a manifestation of self-doubt, and it should not be considered that this is a pathological phenomenon that you must fight. In general, this is a psychological phenomenon in which a person suffers from insecurity in his abilities and achievements and cannot accept his personal successes.
There are the following types of impostor syndrome:
Impostor syndrome can be considered a standard psychological mechanism that happens at least once in any person's life. But if the impostor syndrome does not go away for a long time, it can lead to anxiety or depression in a person.
Usually, impostor syndrome can happen to anyone who takes new steps in the professional direction. He learns something, grows professionally, and masters new work areas.
When a person doubts himself, he begins to work on his weaknesses and improve his strengths so that he no longer doubts and thus grows professionally.
Impostor syndrome is a good marker that you are not an impostor and are moving in the right direction. But sometimes, the emotions associated with a person's lack of confidence in their competence are exhausting.
In this case, you can use the following techniques.
Auditing of your skills
Divide skills into groups:
Such an audit will help you check the quality of your own “goods” and understand what you have and lack to interest an employer. In addition, such a table will be helpful when you make a CV.
The second group is often the largest. In this case, check the level of your skills at last. You can ask one of your colleagues or those who know you well to rate your skills. Feedback is invaluable in professional development.
Moreover, there is an opinion that impostor syndrome can occur when we do not have feedback about our work. That is, when you work, work, and no one tells you whether you are working well. And you need help to figure it out.
The third group also sets the direction of your development. If, for example, you are offered a job related to something you know but have not yet tried to do, you will understand that now you can develop these skills. Or you needn't discuss these skills at all in the job interview.
So, this is one of the ways to understand which skills you want to develop and which ones you don't need right now, and you won't pay attention to them and spend time developing them just yet.
Other techniques for overcoming impostor syndrome
How to find the beliefs that limit you?
Here are some points to consider:
What's next? Here is an example of working with limiting beliefs:
The following metaphor can be used as an example. You have been walking to the store on the same path all your life, and now you have decided to change the route. The new way is unfamiliar to you, but it is full of new things and may turn out to be more interesting.
Reconstructing your limiting beliefs and considering personal experiences will help you improve your self-esteem.
A skills audit will become the basis for forming a business model of yourself as a specialist and help you create a CV that interests an employer. Avoid common mistakes when looking for a job, and impostor syndrome, if it occurs, will only be beneficial.
See more in the video on our channel.
Not quite unusual for computer fonts, Times New Roman has been around since before computers became a thing. The British newspaper The Times commissioned it in 1931 as a retro update from a regular 19th-century font to something more solid with a strong 18th-century vibe. Old broom sure knows the corners (or so the saying goes), but you can see how the font may feel outdated in the 2020s.
It would not be a stretch to say Times New Roman looks ancient, as we already know it was designed this way. Even Roman in the name is a nod to the Italian school of printing from (15th century!). Seeing old-fashioned characters on a groundbreaking visual device, CRT screen, was weird enough. Now that we have modern LCD screens with much higher resolution and fidelity, a font capturing aesthetics from 300 years ago feels crystal odd.
Fonts classification is usually much more objective than old-fashioned or modern. One reason why Times New Roman may give an archaic vibe is that it is a serif font. All letters (or other characters) come with decorative lines, which range from very subtle to indeed something you would see in an 18th-century newspaper. Note how you can’t see any tails on the letters in this article—or almost any website created in the last 10 years.
Serif and Sans serif versions of Inria font from Black[Foundry]
Times New Roman, much like a lot of newspaper fonts, is rather narrow. It is a mostly business decision: you gotta fit in as much text on a page as possible—even during the times (ha-ha!) when the ratio of ads to stories was much lower. At the end of the day, all publications did that and it’s not like many people would’ve changed morning newspapers just because one is a bit easier to read than the rest.
Computers, however, do not have the same limitation. You don’t pay more for publishing an article or sending a document with much more reasonable line spacing and kerning than the average Victorian newspaper. If it’s the intermediary audience (e.g. client that commissioned an article) that needs to save costs, they can always change character size or pick a narrow font themselves.
Furthermore, the mobile boom is not helping narrow fonts like Times New Roman. Most devices connected to the internet now have a vertical layout. Trying to squeeze in extra characters on screens with little horizontal space will bring nothing but frustration for the reader. Interestingly, The Times had to adapt similarly in print: they had to create yet another Times New Roman-inspired typeface after moving from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004. These days, a narrow font is a compromise on usability that you don’t actually have to make—and people would appreciate it if you didn’t.
One could argue that a document in Times New Roman screams laziness or indifference. If the sender didn’t change the default option to something more balanced, it communicates that they either did not want to make your experience better or did not bother to do that. That kind of attitude does not help to secure a job or scholarship.
On the other hand, certain institutions would have you use nothing but Times New Roman. Some universities strongly encourage if not outright mandate the use of Times new Roman for papers, and so do scientific journals. Older government forms coming as templates to be filled out in Word would not play nice if you try to change the font. That being said, such restrictions are getting scarcer, especially with the rise of Mac. The OS and default office-like apps there have a default font different from Times New Roman (and a new one every few years at that).
The current default font on MacOS
Summing up, the cardinal sin of Times New Roman is defaulting to it without consideration. The font is a must in very few scenarios, but you see it much more often than that. Even Microsoft agrees something has to change: the default font for Word has been Calibri since 2007.
The above-mentioned Calibri is a spiritual successor to Times New Roman. It is now the default font for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. It is a sans serif font (no decorative lines) that looks perfectly fine on both screens and paper.
If you want to ditch the default and stay sleek, Georgia is a great option. It is a serif font but letter strokes are much more subtle than what you see with Times New Roman. Georgia does not look outdated and works better for vertical screens, as it is not too tight on the horizontal space.
Should you feel like going barebones, Helvetica is the right font. It is a sans serif font looking as bland as it gets—in a good way. Helvetica lacks elements that would make it look too modern, but it also has no archaic elements that would make the font too classic. I think we can trust Apple on that: they used a spin on Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, as the MacOS system font for two years.
Somehow, I felt a big future for tech when the Internet connection was provided in my dormitory
I'm from Kramatorsk, Donetsk region. I studied in Kharkiv and was supposed to become a radio-electronic engineer, but in 2001 I understood exactly what I wanted to do. It was the time when the Internet “appeared” in our dormitory. I liked what was happening there and felt a future was behind it. So I switched to web development. I bought some books, and for the next two years, I had the luxury of free time to study without having to work. 2003 I graduated from the university, and within one month, I found my first work as a PHP developer. I was the happiest junior developer who was paid for the work he liked. I remember my first salary — $250 transferred via Western Union from the USA — was like a fortune. Back then, there were no web developers among my friends. Compared to nowadays, it wasn't that hype. But for me, it was evident that this was a future. I told my friends that all the companies I knew would need a website or should be represented online somehow. And I wanted to be a part of this evolution.
Pink Floyd, my lifetime project, and three kids
I was always a fan of the music of the 70s, and Pink Floyd was my favorite band. But there was no website dedicated to Pink Floyd in Russian or Ukrainian. So I decided to do that on my own. I reached out to the person who did the official newsletters about Pink Floyd to help me with that, and long story short — I made a website, and it turned18 recently. This fan website is the most extended project in my life, but I switched it off because I didn’t want to contribute to the Russian-speaking community anymore. The most crucial thing is the following. Remember I mentioned that person who worked on the official newsletters about Pink Floyd? She is currently my wife, and we are bringing up two kids. We used to make jokes that we actually had three kids — our first one was the Pink Floyd website.
From a web developer to a start-up founder
After two years of work in Moscow, I was back in Kyiv. I didn't like living in Russia, so moving back to Ukraine was obvious. At this time, I stepped out of web development, and in 2007 I started my own business. All went well, but the political regime of Yanukovych reminded me of Russia, so we decided to move to Poland and work remotely. Since 2014, when the war started, it has been impossible to run my business in Ukraine.
And after a 7-year break in web development, a dozen hours of upskilling, and 60 interviews, I have found a new job in Berlin as a senior back-end developer. Now in 2022, I'm a co-founder of the tech startup countX, and all my engineering team is from Ukraine.
How I met Beetroot Academy
It was a coincidence and proof that networking rules. One of my colleagues, Alex, also works as a teacher at Beetroot Academy, so I've heard a lot about this online school. When Alex introduced me to Dmytro, CEO of Beetroot Academy, I was ready to start our partnership. He told me about the fundraising campaign on a mission to help Ukrainian people affected by the war start a new career in tech. So I couldn't stay away from it and donated for scholarships — the less I could do in these challenging times. Now seven women from Donetsk and Luhansk regions are studying at Beetroot Academy, and I’m happy to be their mentor.
Why I support tech education for Ukrainians
Ukrainians, especially men who are out of the country, live with the feeling of guilt. My life is safe, but my three classmates are now fighting against Russia, risking their lives. People try to find their own way to help Ukrainians win this war, overcome the consequences and rebuild the country. So do I.
I already had an idea of investing in tech education. That is where I can contribute as a professional and entrepreneur, so I chose to support the future of Ukraine this way. Many Ukrainians affected by war want to enter the tech industry and need an opportunity to do that. Tech education is one of the most impactful and cost-effective ways to help Ukrainians restore their lives and fight poverty after the war ends. I believe our country will be the next tech cluster after Silicon Valley in the USA and Bengaluru in India. Moreover, I want many Ukrainians to be a part of that success story. I contribute to it by donating for scholarships and would like to encourage others to support Beetroots Academy’s mission.
Imagine a house. To have it running steadily, there should be a good foundation, building blocks, proper infrastructure, good furniture, designs, and usability functions. In web development, the front-end developer is somewhere in between the processes as he takes the ideas from the UI\UX team to turn them into clickable websites that work. Back-end developers, PMs, and QAs take care of the other vital parts, such as proper foundation, team and project management, and testing.
So there's actually a front-end and back-end. We won't say which one is easier. Let's just leave one picture here for your understanding.
To light up a room, you have to click the button. Ensuring it is clickable is a job for a front-end developer; ensuring there is a light is a task for a back-end developer. Front-end web development is the art of using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a set of other tools for a website/app for a user to see and interact with them.
Basic front-end development glossary
In front-end web development, there are vital terms you should know. We bet you've heard most of them, so let's just keep them handy in the list below.
Programming languages or codes
For example, HTML
In development, you need to speak a language everyone understands — your machine, your code compiler, your user, and your project manager. Below are just a couple of languages we use in the front-end. They look different to everyone, but mean the same and help achieve the result — have the webpage ready and running.
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the code developers use to structure a webpage. Remember seeing a webpage made up of blocks, paragraphs, or tables? HTML helps with that. It originates from a code developed by WHATWG some 30 years ago, in 1993.
JavaScript, conveniently referred to as JS, is a programming language considered one of the cores for front-end development. Designed over 26 years ago, it is now used in almost every webpage you see. Even on the Beetroot Academy website, too :) JS is used to create animation, control multimedia, and generally work with dynamically updating content, buttons, banners, etc.
Here, you can also look at some Javascript libraries — jQuery, React.js, and more here on Kinsta, for example.
Front-end development tools
Git, Google Fonts, W3C, and more
Compilers, linkers, code editors are essential for every front-end developer. These are basic tools that you will use in your daily routine — as home technicians use multitools for repairing the leakage, for example.
To name a few, there are Google Fonts to help you work with fonts, W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your code, and many more.
Version control tools are also part of the list here, used for monitoring changes to your code. We guess you strive to make your code better and better each time. Hence, version controls will help manage the evolution of your code as it becomes clearer and more effective. Git is the most popular, and it's open and free of charge.
Design principles in front-end
In front-end development, we use responsive design to ensure our content fits every (or almost every) gadget and looks good on it. Recall how you open a webpage on your iPhone, reopen it on your laptop, and send it to granny's email — and it still looks good on your grandparents' old-fashioned computer? That's responsive design in action.
Design automatically adapts to given dimensions, so all users feel comfortable interacting with the content. The feeling is the key here — because the front-end is mostly about what the user feels while using your web piece.
CSS, closely connected to HTML, is a code used actually to style an HTML doc. It has everything to do with the colors, styles, and other properties.
Looks quite interesting, huh? Now that you're familiar with the basic front-end development glossary, it's high time to learn the front-end. We hope you find this glossary helpful, no matter which tech direction you will choose. Keep it in your saved links to come back once in a while.
Join our next group in May and start learning with tech industry experts to gain knowledge you need to work as a junior front-end developer.
While such languages as Python and PHP have existed for quite a long time, C# is regarded as a young programming language. Danish software engineer Anders Hejlsberg developed it in the year 2000. Today, he still works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#. Anders Hejlsberg is also known for being the chief architect of Delphi and the original author of Turbo Pascal.
C# was originally named COOL, whereby the acronym stood for “C-like object-oriented language”. Alas, Microsoft could not hang onto this “cool name” because of trademark law.
C# is pronounced, “see sharp”. The name was taken from the musical notation, whereby a sharp symbol points that the written note should be played a semitone higher. The “sharp” suffix has been used by several other .NET languages that are editions of present languages, including J#, A#, and the functional programming language F#.
The base syntax of the C# is similar to C-style languages such as C, C++, and Java. This programming language most directly represents the underlying Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).
If you plan to create apps for the Microsoft platform, you should definitely learn C#. The developers favor this language for being easy to use and well-designed. Also, it is often recommended programming language to use when creating games through the Unity Game engine.
C# used for:
A list of programs and applications written in C# includes Microsoft Visual Studio, Paint.NET, Windows Installer XML, Open Dental, FlashDevelop, KeePass, NMath, Pinta, Banshee, OpenRA.
Here are a few reasons to work with this particular programming language:
The future looks bright for C# because of its popularity, versatility, and existing creations. If you want to have a solid foundation to become a master developer, you should learn this “cool” programming language.
