The Work in the Seams
On misnaming, longevity, and the erosion of belonging
Author’s Note:
This is part one of a two‑part series.
This essay had been sitting unwritten for a long time. A recent LinkedIn post by Scott Hanselman about belonging in software finally nudged me to stop avoiding it.
I learned to write code in the late 1970s on a TRS‑80, as the only girl in the computer club.
I did not have language then for what that meant. I only knew that I loved making the machine do something it had not done before, and that my presence was quietly surprising to the boys around me.
I moved on to BASIC on an Atari at home. By the early 1980s, my mother was going to school to learn to code, and I learned alongside her. Sitting nearby. Trying things. Breaking things. Fixing them.
Technology was not a phase for me.
It was a place I grew up.
I worked my way through college, first an associate’s degree, followed immediately by a bachelor’s, by taking a job in a computer room.
Operations work.
Reading job output.
Moving tapes.
Making sure the systems ran.
It was unglamorous, essential work. And it taught me how computers actually behave in the real world.
Under load. At scale. With humans depending on them.
Over the years I wrote Assembler, COBOL, RPG II, C, C++. C#.
I worked on mainframes, minis, Sun workstations, PCs, and Macs.
I watched paradigms rise, harden, and fade.
I adapted.
Again and again.
And still, I carry a voice from early in my technology journey. It says:
“If she can do that well, imagine how well we can do.”
That sentence matters.
It is not self‑doubt.
It is not insecurity.
It is success being reassigned in real time.
My competence framed as evidence of others’ potential, not my own.
This is the part of imposter syndrome that rarely gets named.
Most writing about imposter syndrome focuses on beginners.
Career switchers.
Juniors.
People who feel behind because they are, in some objective sense, new.
That is not my story.
My story is about doing the work for decades and still having it described as something adjacent to the “real” thing.
At one point, someone who worked for me told me they wanted to do real engineering, not what I do.
They did not mean it cruelly.
They meant it descriptively.
But the description landed with weight.
Because what I do has always lived in the seams.
I made a deliberate choice to focus on data.
Not because I could not do systems work or application engineering. I had already done those things, across generations of technology.
I chose data because it is where the patterns surface.
Where edges matter.
Where the system tells the truth, if you know how to listen.
Data work is not flashy.
It rarely looks like heroics.
It is connective tissue.
It is sense‑making.
It is asking questions that cannot be answered cleanly, and then staying with them anyway.
It is also, often, invisible.
When people talk about “real engineering,” they are usually pointing at what is legible and narratable. The parts of the work that fit cleanly into a story of individual contribution and visible output.
I have spent most of my career doing the work that makes those stories possible.
That does something to you over time.
You start to internalize the idea that maybe the center of gravity is somewhere else.
That maybe the fact that you are still here, still curious, still effective, is an accident.
That the room you are in belongs more naturally to someone else.
This is what imposter syndrome looks like when you are not new.
It is not the fear of being exposed as unqualified.
It is the quiet erosion that comes from being consistently misnamed.
Alison + Wiggins