Hello fellow HNers!

I'm 23 and I've been programming since my teenages and found no problem being hired short after high school.

However, since January I've been working at a company where there are academic and non-academic engineers in a split proportion. Since then, I've been under a constant impostor syndrome pressure inside my head.

Before joining my current workplace, I always thought I was a good programmer for my level and that during time I would become a Senior one after getting more experience. I just needed to keep working and learning new languages/frameworks.

Now, I'm being exposed to more theoretical concepts all the time and after looking at the curriculum of my co-workers and their Masters/PhD thesis I started to fell like I know nothing, I just know how to press keys and watch the compiler do its work.

Since then, I feel like I'm just a replaceable worker in an industry that now just employs me/pays me well because we are in the middle of a tech bubble that will inevitably end — leaving behind only those that know well the hard science stuff. This feeling started to worsen as I read articles foreseeing that developers will be replaced by neural networks some time in the future. How would you approach this issue?