Reddit Experience · Dec 2025

Promoted to staff too early. How to deal with impostor syndrome and get my footing?

MLE Technical Senior
84 upvotes 86 replies

Interview Experience

I am in a really weird spot in my career and I am struggling a bit with how to navigate it. In Jan I will just have hit 4 YOE, and I will also be starting my first staff+ role as a staff MLE at a F100

Full Details

I am in a really weird spot in my career and I am struggling a bit with how to navigate it. In Jan I will just have hit 4 YOE, and I will also be starting my first staff+ role as a staff MLE at a F100 financial services company. I am simultaneously excited (and a bit in shock) and extremely nervous. The job was initially posted looking for candidates with 8-10 YOE, and I got the job because I was already working as a contractor at the company as a senior dev and my new boss (director of DS and Analytics) was impressed with my performance. I genuinely think it has a lot more to do with strong communication and soft skills than technical expertise, although I feel more or less competent in my current role. This will be third promotion in about 2.5 years (MLE 1 -> MLE 2 at one role, switched companies, MLE contractor -> Sr MLE contractor, now converting to staff MLE). I don't want to sound as though "my steak is too juicy, and my lobster too buttery", but I am really worried that in this process I am accumulating a ton of technical blindspots and effectively depriving myself of the types of growth and experience that are necessary to succeed at staff+ (random tangent but was rejected in the databricks interview loop over the summer for this reason). Has anyone else found themselves in this situation where they have been effectively promoted too fast? How did you handle it? I feel massively underprepared, and even though I've been reading up on Will Larson's staff blogs/resources, I have dealt firsthand with incompetent technical leadership and I am super worried about becoming one. The director (my new boss) is letting my propose to her effectively what the scope of my position should be, and I am wrestling with what is appropriate for staff. Are there any recommendations from folks here about how you stake out what your position should be and set a bounding box for what you do in your day to day?

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