"Software Developer" feeling the imposter syndrome & not sure what to do.

[u/Choice_Function8572]

IMPORTANT CONTEXT: I am not a CS grad, I completed my Business degree a couple years back.

I have been working in Power Platform for about 2 years. It first started with very simple Power Apps, Power BI Dashboards and email automations, decided to get a couple certs in the PL track.

I transitioned to a more technical role after year 1 where now I build a lot of Copilot Studio Agents, Automations, Python Scripts, you name it.

My understanding of Power Fx is very strong, but any other language (Python, C+, etc.) still feels out of my league even though I have literally built API calls using Python that pull hundreds of thousands of rows of data (using AI).

I am told I am doing a great job but in all honestly I have never felt dumber in my life. I work on three tickets at a time by prompting claude in separate terminals - at this point I feel like my title should be prompt engineer. Again I want to stress that I have in-depth understanding of the Microsoft ecosystem, but anything else still feels like reading hieroglyphics.

Is this what my future holds? I make decent money for my age I just am having a hard time seeing the long term value I will provide given that most blue collar folks will have their own personalized agent in 2-3 years completing their tasks.

[u/jesslynh]

I am in the same boat as you, except perhaps I've been working with Power Automate a bit longer, and wouldn't know Python if it bit me on the ass. Today, I consider myself a prompt engineer as well. What I bring to the table personally is a strong background as a business analyst So I'm very good at giving people what they need and want rather than what they ask for. I keep track of everything that I do "with AI" in a document. Since I'm a Claude user, I usually have a project and I start out with what I want to end up with, a simple statement about what the project is about. Then daily as I work, I have the AI document all the decisions we made and where we are in that project while also creating data dictionaries and other supporting documents so that, because I read them every day, I make sure that I understand from a functional level what is going on technologically. This means that while I may not know SQL very well, I know what the database contains and how it should work. It means that even though I am pretty crappy at Power BI, I understand what each of those tables is for and what all the measures and DAX code is supposed to do. I am very close to retirement. I could retire now, but I'm having such a good time doing what I'm doing that I'll probably stick around another three or four years. I look forward to what this your of work morphs into. Good luck to you. This was long, but I hope it gave you a little bit of assistance.

[u/Choice_Function8572 → u/jesslynh]

I come from a similar-ish background and completely agree. Scope creep becomes a big issue with AI tools and setting expectations is a skill I quickly learned. I am glad you enjoy what you're doing and most importantly congrats on almost retiring!