Impostor and Belonging on a Dutch Team

An honest mini guide for the first few months, when you feel like a fraud at work and you are the only Brown person in the room, and you start wondering if both are connected.

Who this is for

Filipino tech workers who just landed in the Netherlands and are now inside the team, not job hunting anymore. You passed the interviews, you got the visa, you are sitting in the sprint review, and instead of relief you feel like you do not belong here. Maybe you are also the only Brown person in that room, and you have started counting.

What this helps you do

This helps you tell apart two different feelings that get tangled together in the first 90 days, so you can deal with each one honestly instead of carrying both as one big weight.

The first feeling is impostor: the sense that you are not actually good enough and they will find out. The second is belonging: the sense that you do not fit, that you are visibly different, that you are reading the room alone. They feel the same in your chest at 2am, but they are not the same problem, and mixing them up makes both worse.

Working through it

1. Name which feeling is talking. “I gave a wrong estimate today” is a normal work thing. “Everyone here is white and Dutch and I am not” is a belonging thing. Write down which one is actually loud this week. They need different responses.
2. Separate skill doubt from culture shock. Dutch directness lands hard at first. Someone saying “no, that is wrong” in a sprint review is not a verdict on you as a person or as a Filipino, it is just how they talk to each other too. Watch how they speak to the senior Dutch dev. Often it is the same bluntness.
3. Keep a small wins file. Not for your manager, for you. The impostor feeling lies about your track record, so keep receipts: the bug you found, the review someone thanked you for, the thing you shipped. Read it on the bad days.
4. Ask the question you are scared to ask. In a lot of PH workplaces, asking can read as not knowing your job. On most Dutch teams, asking early is normal and expected. The person who asks at day 10 looks better in six months than the person who guessed silently. This is a real culture difference, not a weakness in you.
5. Find one person to read the room with. A teammate, another migrant, anyone. You do not have to decode every unwritten rule alone. A lot of what feels like “I do not belong” is just missing context that nobody thought to hand you.
6. Let being the only Brown person be a fact, not a job. Some days you will be the only one in the room. That is real and you are allowed to feel it. But you did not get hired to represent anyone or to make anyone comfortable. You got hired to do the work. You can hold both: notice it, and not make it your second unpaid job.
7. Give it more than a few weeks. The first 90 days are the worst sample of how you will feel. You are new, jetlagged in a new culture, and learning the codebase and the country at the same time. The fraud feeling usually fades as the work becomes familiar, not because you suddenly became smart, but because you were never the fraud.
8. Bring your own context in slowly. You do not have to flatten yourself to fit. Mentioning the food, the language, how things work back home, this is not unprofessional. Most Dutch teams are curious, and it turns you from “the quiet new guy” into a person.

Common mistakes

• Treating Dutch bluntness as proof you are failing. It is the house style, not a performance review.
• Staying silent to look competent, which on a Dutch team usually reads as disengaged, not impressive.
• Deciding in week three that you do not belong and quietly checking out, before the team or the country has had time to feel normal.
• Carrying the impostor feeling and the only-Brown-person feeling as one lump, so neither gets dealt with.
• Assuming everyone else has it figured out. The senior dev who looks relaxed also had a first 90 days.

What to verify

This is about feelings and culture, so there is no official body to check. But if it tips into something heavier, get real support. Many Dutch employers offer a confidential counsellor or an arbodienst (occupational health service), and your GP (huisarts) can point you to mental health help. If something at work feels like discrimination rather than culture shock, that is a separate matter, and you can raise it with HR, a works council if your company has one, or get information from an organisation like the College voor de Rechten van de Mens. Confirm what support exists with your own employer.

Jake note

I was the only Brown person in every sprint review for six months straight, and for most of that time I also felt like a fraud who got lucky in the interviews. I want to be honest that the two were not the same thing. The fraud feeling went away as I learned the codebase and saw my own commits land. The only-Brown-person feeling did not disappear, it just stopped scaring me once I realised I was hired to write good code, not to disappear or to explain myself. If you are in that room right now, you are not behind and you are not a fraud. You are just new, and new ends.