As a junior engineer, I struggled with severe imposter syndrome. My seniors and our head of engineering seemed to know everything: the best implementation, the right integration, the ideal data structure for any situation. It left me confused, and I kept asking them the same questions: "What resources should I learn from?" and "How do you know all of this?"
That was my mindset going into my session with Thomas Zhou. Thomas works in Silicon Valley on products serving over a billion daily users, so naturally I arrived with a million questions.
He opened with one of his own: "Why do you need this mentorship session?"
My answer, in short: I don't know the extent of what I don't know. So whenever someone offers an answer or an opinion, I end up trusting them simply because they are more experienced. It starts to feel like blind trust.
This isn't reluctance to listen to my seniors, nor a desire to do everything my way. I believe it is the deeper issue underlying my imposter syndrome.
Thomas quickly reassured me. He had felt the same way as a junior, confused by much of what surrounded him. So I asked what he would do if he were a junior again, feeling exactly this.
His first answer was simple: stay openly curious. Whenever a technical decision comes up in a project, ask your seniors about it. If there are options A, B, C, and D, ask what considerations led them to choose C. Understanding the full context and watching them walk through their reasoning accelerates your growth.
That idea ran through all of his advice. He has mentored many juniors who want to move fast and aggressively, often aiming to become a tech lead as soon as possible. He doesn't think that's necessary. "Slow is fast," he said. As long as you stay curious and keep improving, you will get where you want to go.
Ambition is fine. But asking now how to become a tech lead, what it takes to reach senior, or what objective bar signals readiness for promotion is premature. For someone with less than a year of full-time experience, those questions are distractions from the real task: becoming the best engineer you can be right now.
He stopped me every time I drifted toward those questions. His message was consistent: do your current work to the best of your ability. That is all a junior truly needs to focus on. Time and experience will supply what is needed to reach the next level.
As long as the curiosity remains, everything else will fall into place. And it is okay to feel everything I was feeling.
Finally, I asked how to grow technically in the age of AI. His answer: fundamentals. A solid foundation is what allows us to move into larger and harder domains. Then he challenged me: can you explain what actually happens when you send a prompt to an AI? How does it generate a response? Questions like these, and the effort to fill the gaps they expose, are the building blocks that, over time, turn a junior into a tech lead.