I would say it never goes away. I have built companies, angel invested, ran M&A. Still, I always think I am clueless.
I am starting to view it more as a power. "You cannot learn what you already think you know". Having imposter's syndrome means I always will fight harder to get better.
Sometimes the "experts" know, or think they know, so well what needs to be done that they are not open to other possibilities which may even be better.
You might not realise it, but there are great benefits to being new in your field. When you are not steeped in the conventional wisdom of a given profession, you can ask questions that haven't been asked before or approach problems in ways others haven't thought of. It's no surprise, for example, that some of the best research ideas I get as a professor come from undergraduate students with little previous experience.
Read more at https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/07/embrace-the-advantage-...
This is excellent. There's definitely an element of being called out on something you don't know in detail acting as a forcing function of curiosity/learning.
Could imposter syndrome be a blessing in disguise? I am re-inventing myself building a professional services firm for individuals in Shanghai, China (resumes, interview coaching, LI Profiles, academic docs). The sheer spread of skills needed to grow the company keeps me energized and "hungry" every day. That and the tsunami of tools available to biz dev all aspects of the venture suggests imposter syndrome won't go away anytime soon.
I would like to add to this, i got asked the question recently in context of the workplace
'When did you realise that in fact, outside of governmental, there are no rules?'
outside of your own moral and ethical values and the rules of Law we are free to do as we please, largely without consequence.
By realising this you allow yourself to question the norm and start to understand how to change it
I had an older, wiser worker relate to me this exactly. He was a line worker in a GM production facility and a while after working there realized his foreman just absolutely couldn't have a clue about what their job. He made some suggestions and soon enough was promoted to line foreman.
A while after that he started to realize that his supervisor just absolutely didn't have a clue with how to supervise the shifts, the lines, etc. And on up the mgmt chain, he slowly realized nobody really knew what they were doing.
I think this is especially true of management at all levels and most professional workers, aka knowledge workers. There really isn't a "book" or a how-to for this type of work. If you have some skills and knowledge of how to acquire more skills, you are good. Just don't be afraid to admit, at least to yourself, that you don't know something but then seek to learn whatever it is that you don't know.
Ship product. Ship as much as you can as often as you can. Finish a project by yourself, finish one with a team. And then do another.
Any feeling of inadequacy can disappear if you sit back and think about stuff you've finished. Because it's finished. All the HN comments and soap boxing in the world can't match a finished work.
> if I look back at the list of things I have done I am happy enough with myself.
This is so true, and can be extrapolated on a micro-level, by tracking what you learn and accomplish on a daily (or whatever) basis.
I've found training your attention this way a great hack for building confidence and momentum. It's kind of like watching a plant grow. You normally don't notice all the little things, until it adds up to magic.
Shameless plug, but one thing I'm proud of building was a micro-notes app for tracking these micro-accomplishments. https://www.bicycl.com
To add onto this: narrow scope if you're still struggling to ship product. I know I've been guilty of biting off more than I can chew, then feeling inadequate when I fail to deliver (or deliver much less than hoped).
You're right. My biggest issue with shipping is perfectionism.
I guess I should lower my standards a little and just allow myself to look a little foolish just to keep progressing. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg, there is nothing wrong with that.
One thing to keep in mind is you should not compare yourself to what Mark Zuckerberg is right now. You're at the beginning of a path and he is much further along. When you boil down Facebook to what it was originally when he shipped it was a rather good idea, written as a crud app in php, and looked like this:
I should put a LOT less pressure on myself and just focus on the process. Reading through this thread tells me I need to adjust some of my underlying beliefs about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.
nothing banishes doubt faster than success. successfully shipping a product, successfully getting paid, successfully building a team. just like everything else, the only way to prove you can do something is to actually do it.
This so hard. Smart is good. Work product is better.
HN is a great place to daydream about the future. But most ideas here are months away from production in any meaningful sense, if they ever really see the light of day. Enjoy HN for what it is.
Take what you know, build the smallest possible functional thing you can and then improve on it quickly. Teach someone else. Then have them teach someone. Get away from being "the guy" as fast as you can. Being "the guy" is a good way to get stuck in a rut. Continuing to deliver on stuff in general is where you want to be.
Each project will be better than the one before. You will always remember everything that is wrong with all of them, and that's OK. Keep looking at new things and fold them into your projects when they make sense. Don't be afraid to goof around and not finish things in your free time. That's the equivalent of working out for your brain.
There are plenty of smart people who can critique all day or play around with clever ideas or tell you how to do what you're doing in some cooler or more pure way. Everything we love could have been done better, but we remember the folks who did them.
After 20 years, I've shipped over a dozen different products, probably over a hundred different versions - products that probably have affected 100s of millions of people (some of these products were libraries used in other big products). And, I've worked for four successful startups through three acquisitions. And, I still feel like an imposter. It sucks.
Everyone is different. I wasn't granted the confidence gene, unfortunately. So, I've just had to fake it. I still fake it.
The long version of this is "acquire any non-mainstream skill to a degree most will never match." Once you know something well that most people think is impossible, incomprehensible, or just too much work, your viewpoint changes.
"I picked up this skill people say is hard, but it's really not. It's just another thing to learn," is an amazing antidote to imposter syndrome. It shows you that you can learn anything, and that includes whatever you still need to learn for the job at hand.
If people can't comprehend what you're doing, it's often because that's not their job. It doesn't have to be hard to be incomprehensible. A large code-base built in the most simple language is incomprehensible to the person who hasn't put in the time to crack open some files.
The value in code is in getting customers to pay for the product and for you to be a good person on the team. That means you are engaging (meaningful connections) with your team and with the customer. You don't do that by working in a silo in a world in which nobody can communicate with you. Better to concentrate on delivering value.
Learning to write incomprehensible code is not the answer to impostor syndrome. You are immersing yourself in one rabbit hole when you should be putting time into better understanding your impostor syndrome (your emotions). That rabbit hole is a fear response and an attempt to gain a sense of control over your environment. Instead, you should be doing the opposite, embracing uncertainty and the impostor syndrome.
And love your team. Code so that everyone can join in. Even if you feel the tools which allow this are inferior.
IMHO imposter syndrome isn't a "thing" or if it is, it's a few things:
1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning.
2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the time and inclination". It's usually not true (because they overestimate capabilities of others, assuming they are like them), but I think it feeds into the humility you often see among the truly capable.
3) People who have remunerative yet non-productive jobs where you can get paid lots of money but your production is very abstract or secondary or even tertiary (or worse) to your direct output. This is the kind of person who talks about imposter syndrome at TED talks.
I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.
> I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.
I think you're onto something here. Some cases, at least, are less a feeling that you don't belong there, and more a feeling that you're not performing as well as you know you can.
While I respect your opinion, I think that there are a large number of people who struggle with the feeling of not having accomplished anything / not being "good enough" even in be face of what most would consider career success.
Psychology has some terminology for this: cognitive distortions, and in particular, minimization and magnification. Whether it's due to upbringing, environment, what have you, some large number of people tend to discount their successes and zero in on whatever they see as their flaws or failures.
The field of CBT is one way to work with this. I particularly like the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, which talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure lead to happiness / optimism or depression / pessimism. He also talks about some of the research that's been done to help change peoples' explanatory style.
This + meditation has been helpful to me, as well as trying to take other peoples' positive feedback to heart more, rather than discounting it as politeness.
Also, although I think it can be helpful to produce things, I feel like your advice can feed into the story of "not doing enough," even if they are. There probably are some people who feel this way because they're actually not doing much, but I feel like a lot of the people on this site are more likely to be the types with unrealistically high standards whose problems are not their output, but their perception of their output.
On that note, spending less time on HN and more time with friends / family / doing other things you enjoy can also be helpful, as it helps to diversify your identity.
This is rather good advice. To add to that I would recommend reading Feeling good by David burns. It has a lot of exercises, especially the Vertical Arrow technique that can really help OP.
Conducting interviews really helps put things in perspective. Or, once someone is hired, attempting to delegate some of your work to them.
Alternatively, try picturing what you would do to train people for the work you do. Think about people you know (even marginally) that are in the same field as you, and then try to figure out who could do as good of a job as you, or identify what they would have to learn. It's in scenarios like this, you realize just how much you know - not just about your particular job, but about your field in general.
On the flip side, you really don't want to be irreplaceable, and if you find yourself doing a lot of work because you think it will take longer to explain the task than to do it yourself, then you've got other problems to work on.
Focus on learning a little bit more everyday. Spend more time in your specific developer community, those are the peers you should judge your progress against. Articles on the front page of HN often go deep into a topic, you can't be expected to understand everything on that level.
Pick one important nitty gritty subest of your skill and really grok it.
When Walter Chrysler brought his son into the company, rather than starting him off in an executive position, Chrysler gave him a menial job in the basement of the Chrysler building (some say cleaning). Then he had to work his way up. As a result his son was a much better leader than some of the other auto industry heirs.
I've done this personally: you have to sacrifice a few months in a lower position than you deserve in order to master the nuts and bolts.
What really helped me was 360 anonymous peer reviews. In our case, you picked a sample of folks across teams and functions that you've worked with and ask for a review. They put down strengths and areas of opportunity for growth. Seeing grouped text for my strengths and weaknesses was really enlightening. I could agree with points of needed growth in many cases and the positive section showed that folks who work with me appreciate me and value my knowledge. Humbling all around.
These were a very important step for overcoming a large part of my imposter syndrome. Critical. Later, mentoring junior devs, representing my team in meetings, conducting interviews, doing deeper research into my domains and spreading that knowledge have all helped to reduce my feeling of being an imposter. Knowing that it is ok to not know everything, to ask questions and for help, and to strive to close those gaps. But all this, for me, paled in comparison to the 360 reviews.
If not you, then who? If there were someone better positioned for the role in which you feel an imposter, then you wouldn't be there. There probably are people who are smarter than you are who _could_ take the role. But they're doing something else. Why? Probably because they are actually better suited for some other challenge. And why bother with a role which isn't a challenge? It's better to vacate and allow someone who will actually learn something rather than tread the same tired ground. If we don't move, we die.
How do you know that you aren't well suited? If you feel you aren't suited for the role then your sense of value is probably out of whack. That's probably because you aren't seeing the game for how it really is. And that's fine because we all start out there.
Org charts don't tell you who the actual influencers are within the org. An org chart might tell you that Bob is the person to go to for making decisions. But people who work there know that Bill is the person you go to for really getting things done (maybe Bob is a lame duck, incompetent or just doesn't care).
Written rules create structures which have solid walls but also holes, leaks, cracks and open spaces. We tend to focus on the physical structure. But just as important is the unintended uses of that structure. The rules are important for what they say, but also important is what they _don't_ say.
Just the same, we're probably not understanding our value. We are looking at the wrong targets. By the time we do figure out the game, we'll likely move on and let some other imposter take our place.
That's good. Better to keep us on our toes. I would rather be on a plane flown by a tense inexperienced crew than a lethargic overconfident crew. While we're on the subject, there has been a history of plane crashes which could have been avoided if the inexperienced crew members were more vocal in pointing out problems to their superiors. They kept quiet because they suffered from imposter syndrome.
Just be helpful. You wouldn't be there if someone didn't think you could help. If there are smarter people working with you, then it's probably the people who hired you. Trust their decision to hire you.
A lot of people on HN grew up in wealthier families, and perhaps never had to work a manual labor job. If the average worker lifts 100 boxes per day, you just have to lift 100 boxes and you know you are doing the work correctly. You deserve to be there.
In manual labor, you never have imposter syndrome if you are doing the work right. Why? It's extremely easy to mentally calculate your benefit to the company and compare it to your fellow workers.
After a day of doing manual work, you always feel refreshed and come home satisfied.
Software on the other hand is much more conceptual, and it is much harder to determine if your input is up to par.
To fix this, you need to figure out goals and milestones with your manager that you can work to reach and exceed - ask your manager what you can do to be in the top 25% of employees, and get a concrete list of features/bugs/etc. on a timeline from your manager for you to complete.
Not sure I ever want to overcome that feeling, just channel it into motivation instead. Don't see all those smart people as your competition, see them as potential hires or colleagues, people to learn from. And when everyone realises all the other high performers feel the same way, then everyone gets a little kinder to one another. That's been a pillar of all the high-functioning teams I've been lucky enough to be part of.
Litmus test: if you ever think you might be the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
this is something to definitely keep in mind. i've noticed that people I admire are usually pretty nice about helping out someone just starting out or struggling on a project.
this is exactly why I spend more time on HN than reddit, I feel like the dumbest person in this room :)
Also- understand that there is a big difference between competency and imposter syndrome. A lot of young people confuse the concepts.
Competency means you knows the limits of your knowledge. Expertise means you know one thing exceptionally well. It is easy to stumble into competency- and people around you will mistake it for expertise. When this happens, you will feel like you are impostering. This is because you know the subject well enough to recognize the inaccuracy of your celebratory peers.
Give a little talk about something you're really passionate about and interested in. Make it so that it generates a lot of questions. Once you get people talking about your area of expertise you'll start to feel better about what you know. That's what worked for me anyways.
> A lot of people on HN grew up in wealthier families, and perhaps never had to work a manual labor job.
Speak for yourself. I find this offensive. But maybe you are right since a large number of people here have upvoted this to be top post.
> If the average worker lifts 100 boxes per day, you just have to lift 100 boxes and you know you are doing the work correctly. You deserve to be there.
Deserve to be there? Wow. I won't say what I am really thinking right now. I think I'll go have a few beers and hope I calm down. Hopefully some day you will talk this trash to us in person rather than anonymously on some board.
Whoa, what? I don't think this comment meant anything negative to people from blue-collar backgrounds, and I think when it reads "deserve to be there" that--you might be reading that as "don't deserve anything better than that", but I think the context implied that what was meant was "shouldn't feel like you're a fraud at box-lifting and thus don't deserve to be doing the work you're doing". My family's blue-collar AF, but I don't think there's anything offensive about noting that a field that widely requires college degrees (these days) is going to be populated largely by the classes of people who get college degrees (for whatever reasons such class divisions exist). "Wealthier" doesn't even necessarily mean anything above middle class, in context.
I can understand it might be a red flag for you. It's a clumsy choice of words. I do believe it's meant to say "and you are an asset to the company, in no risk of getting fired".
Though if you could tickle my fancy and go back and read it again, the context is "doing as much work as others" (lifting 100 crates). Which is a positive thing. So you "deserve" to keep your job.
I wonder what is it you'd do if they told you in person, that you can't do online?
try to read that sentence in the context of the Article, imposter syndrome. Deserving to be here means not feeling like an imposter, taking this job as something positive you need to merit, not some kind of curse.
The question was about “impostor syndrome”. The implication that the OP feels like he doesn’t really “deserve” to be where he is is right there in the name.
Nobody said that he was justified in such a belief. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: “Impostor syndrome is a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”
I don't think I have a solution if the setting is as broad as "technology" or even the narrower "careerist technology".
I do have a solution if one is experiencing "imposter syndrome" in a particular domain: have a mentor. The mentor will help you measure the extent of your knowledge. If the mentor says, "That looks/sounds good to me," then you cast the research into the big scary world and sit with those "imposter" feelings knowing they are false positives.
Eventually you learn to measure your knowledge without reliance on the mentor, and the "imposter" feelings lessen.
Better to think of imposter syndrome as an engine of improvement. You are signalling yourself that you want to be more like (insert current inspirational figure here)
If you were as good as you'll ever be how would you improve? How would you stay interested in your life?
It's a long journey of small steps...
Being able to deliver with what you know and getting better is fun. If you really feel deficiency in a particular field that you want to improve, crack the books, ask for help, get peer feedback and set simple goals you can achieve.
Build on that and keep going.
It's not intelligence, per se, it's also tenacity, diligence, and practice that combine into satisfying feelings of improvement.
158 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI am starting to view it more as a power. "You cannot learn what you already think you know". Having imposter's syndrome means I always will fight harder to get better.
I like to always remind myself 'in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few'.
The novice thinks twice before doing something stupid
You might not realise it, but there are great benefits to being new in your field. When you are not steeped in the conventional wisdom of a given profession, you can ask questions that haven't been asked before or approach problems in ways others haven't thought of. It's no surprise, for example, that some of the best research ideas I get as a professor come from undergraduate students with little previous experience. Read more at https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/07/embrace-the-advantage-...
outside of your own moral and ethical values and the rules of Law we are free to do as we please, largely without consequence. By realising this you allow yourself to question the norm and start to understand how to change it
A while after that he started to realize that his supervisor just absolutely didn't have a clue with how to supervise the shifts, the lines, etc. And on up the mgmt chain, he slowly realized nobody really knew what they were doing.
I think this is especially true of management at all levels and most professional workers, aka knowledge workers. There really isn't a "book" or a how-to for this type of work. If you have some skills and knowledge of how to acquire more skills, you are good. Just don't be afraid to admit, at least to yourself, that you don't know something but then seek to learn whatever it is that you don't know.
Any feeling of inadequacy can disappear if you sit back and think about stuff you've finished. Because it's finished. All the HN comments and soap boxing in the world can't match a finished work.
I may be clueless, but at least I have tried many things. Some even worked!
This is so true, and can be extrapolated on a micro-level, by tracking what you learn and accomplish on a daily (or whatever) basis.
I've found training your attention this way a great hack for building confidence and momentum. It's kind of like watching a plant grow. You normally don't notice all the little things, until it adds up to magic.
Shameless plug, but one thing I'm proud of building was a micro-notes app for tracking these micro-accomplishments. https://www.bicycl.com
I guess I should lower my standards a little and just allow myself to look a little foolish just to keep progressing. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg, there is nothing wrong with that.
https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA...
Ship, learn, iterate.
I should put a LOT less pressure on myself and just focus on the process. Reading through this thread tells me I need to adjust some of my underlying beliefs about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.
HN is a great place to daydream about the future. But most ideas here are months away from production in any meaningful sense, if they ever really see the light of day. Enjoy HN for what it is.
Take what you know, build the smallest possible functional thing you can and then improve on it quickly. Teach someone else. Then have them teach someone. Get away from being "the guy" as fast as you can. Being "the guy" is a good way to get stuck in a rut. Continuing to deliver on stuff in general is where you want to be.
Each project will be better than the one before. You will always remember everything that is wrong with all of them, and that's OK. Keep looking at new things and fold them into your projects when they make sense. Don't be afraid to goof around and not finish things in your free time. That's the equivalent of working out for your brain.
There are plenty of smart people who can critique all day or play around with clever ideas or tell you how to do what you're doing in some cooler or more pure way. Everything we love could have been done better, but we remember the folks who did them.
After 20 years, I've shipped over a dozen different products, probably over a hundred different versions - products that probably have affected 100s of millions of people (some of these products were libraries used in other big products). And, I've worked for four successful startups through three acquisitions. And, I still feel like an imposter. It sucks.
Everyone is different. I wasn't granted the confidence gene, unfortunately. So, I've just had to fake it. I still fake it.
I wrote about it here recently :
https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/the-invisible-mountains-b...
The long version of this is "acquire any non-mainstream skill to a degree most will never match." Once you know something well that most people think is impossible, incomprehensible, or just too much work, your viewpoint changes.
"I picked up this skill people say is hard, but it's really not. It's just another thing to learn," is an amazing antidote to imposter syndrome. It shows you that you can learn anything, and that includes whatever you still need to learn for the job at hand.
If people can't comprehend what you're doing, it's often because that's not their job. It doesn't have to be hard to be incomprehensible. A large code-base built in the most simple language is incomprehensible to the person who hasn't put in the time to crack open some files.
The value in code is in getting customers to pay for the product and for you to be a good person on the team. That means you are engaging (meaningful connections) with your team and with the customer. You don't do that by working in a silo in a world in which nobody can communicate with you. Better to concentrate on delivering value.
Learning to write incomprehensible code is not the answer to impostor syndrome. You are immersing yourself in one rabbit hole when you should be putting time into better understanding your impostor syndrome (your emotions). That rabbit hole is a fear response and an attempt to gain a sense of control over your environment. Instead, you should be doing the opposite, embracing uncertainty and the impostor syndrome.
And love your team. Code so that everyone can join in. Even if you feel the tools which allow this are inferior.
1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning.
2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the time and inclination". It's usually not true (because they overestimate capabilities of others, assuming they are like them), but I think it feeds into the humility you often see among the truly capable.
3) People who have remunerative yet non-productive jobs where you can get paid lots of money but your production is very abstract or secondary or even tertiary (or worse) to your direct output. This is the kind of person who talks about imposter syndrome at TED talks.
I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.
I think you're onto something here. Some cases, at least, are less a feeling that you don't belong there, and more a feeling that you're not performing as well as you know you can.
Psychology has some terminology for this: cognitive distortions, and in particular, minimization and magnification. Whether it's due to upbringing, environment, what have you, some large number of people tend to discount their successes and zero in on whatever they see as their flaws or failures.
The field of CBT is one way to work with this. I particularly like the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, which talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure lead to happiness / optimism or depression / pessimism. He also talks about some of the research that's been done to help change peoples' explanatory style.
This + meditation has been helpful to me, as well as trying to take other peoples' positive feedback to heart more, rather than discounting it as politeness.
Also, although I think it can be helpful to produce things, I feel like your advice can feed into the story of "not doing enough," even if they are. There probably are some people who feel this way because they're actually not doing much, but I feel like a lot of the people on this site are more likely to be the types with unrealistically high standards whose problems are not their output, but their perception of their output.
On that note, spending less time on HN and more time with friends / family / doing other things you enjoy can also be helpful, as it helps to diversify your identity.
Alternatively, try picturing what you would do to train people for the work you do. Think about people you know (even marginally) that are in the same field as you, and then try to figure out who could do as good of a job as you, or identify what they would have to learn. It's in scenarios like this, you realize just how much you know - not just about your particular job, but about your field in general.
On the flip side, you really don't want to be irreplaceable, and if you find yourself doing a lot of work because you think it will take longer to explain the task than to do it yourself, then you've got other problems to work on.
When Walter Chrysler brought his son into the company, rather than starting him off in an executive position, Chrysler gave him a menial job in the basement of the Chrysler building (some say cleaning). Then he had to work his way up. As a result his son was a much better leader than some of the other auto industry heirs.
I've done this personally: you have to sacrifice a few months in a lower position than you deserve in order to master the nuts and bolts.
These were a very important step for overcoming a large part of my imposter syndrome. Critical. Later, mentoring junior devs, representing my team in meetings, conducting interviews, doing deeper research into my domains and spreading that knowledge have all helped to reduce my feeling of being an imposter. Knowing that it is ok to not know everything, to ask questions and for help, and to strive to close those gaps. But all this, for me, paled in comparison to the 360 reviews.
If not you, then who? If there were someone better positioned for the role in which you feel an imposter, then you wouldn't be there. There probably are people who are smarter than you are who _could_ take the role. But they're doing something else. Why? Probably because they are actually better suited for some other challenge. And why bother with a role which isn't a challenge? It's better to vacate and allow someone who will actually learn something rather than tread the same tired ground. If we don't move, we die.
How do you know that you aren't well suited? If you feel you aren't suited for the role then your sense of value is probably out of whack. That's probably because you aren't seeing the game for how it really is. And that's fine because we all start out there.
Org charts don't tell you who the actual influencers are within the org. An org chart might tell you that Bob is the person to go to for making decisions. But people who work there know that Bill is the person you go to for really getting things done (maybe Bob is a lame duck, incompetent or just doesn't care).
Written rules create structures which have solid walls but also holes, leaks, cracks and open spaces. We tend to focus on the physical structure. But just as important is the unintended uses of that structure. The rules are important for what they say, but also important is what they _don't_ say.
Just the same, we're probably not understanding our value. We are looking at the wrong targets. By the time we do figure out the game, we'll likely move on and let some other imposter take our place.
That's good. Better to keep us on our toes. I would rather be on a plane flown by a tense inexperienced crew than a lethargic overconfident crew. While we're on the subject, there has been a history of plane crashes which could have been avoided if the inexperienced crew members were more vocal in pointing out problems to their superiors. They kept quiet because they suffered from imposter syndrome.
Just be helpful. You wouldn't be there if someone didn't think you could help. If there are smarter people working with you, then it's probably the people who hired you. Trust their decision to hire you.
A lot of people on HN grew up in wealthier families, and perhaps never had to work a manual labor job. If the average worker lifts 100 boxes per day, you just have to lift 100 boxes and you know you are doing the work correctly. You deserve to be there.
In manual labor, you never have imposter syndrome if you are doing the work right. Why? It's extremely easy to mentally calculate your benefit to the company and compare it to your fellow workers.
After a day of doing manual work, you always feel refreshed and come home satisfied.
Software on the other hand is much more conceptual, and it is much harder to determine if your input is up to par.
To fix this, you need to figure out goals and milestones with your manager that you can work to reach and exceed - ask your manager what you can do to be in the top 25% of employees, and get a concrete list of features/bugs/etc. on a timeline from your manager for you to complete.
Litmus test: if you ever think you might be the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
this is exactly why I spend more time on HN than reddit, I feel like the dumbest person in this room :)
Also- understand that there is a big difference between competency and imposter syndrome. A lot of young people confuse the concepts.
Competency means you knows the limits of your knowledge. Expertise means you know one thing exceptionally well. It is easy to stumble into competency- and people around you will mistake it for expertise. When this happens, you will feel like you are impostering. This is because you know the subject well enough to recognize the inaccuracy of your celebratory peers.
Be calm and be patient.
Speak for yourself. I find this offensive. But maybe you are right since a large number of people here have upvoted this to be top post.
> If the average worker lifts 100 boxes per day, you just have to lift 100 boxes and you know you are doing the work correctly. You deserve to be there.
Deserve to be there? Wow. I won't say what I am really thinking right now. I think I'll go have a few beers and hope I calm down. Hopefully some day you will talk this trash to us in person rather than anonymously on some board.
Though if you could tickle my fancy and go back and read it again, the context is "doing as much work as others" (lifting 100 crates). Which is a positive thing. So you "deserve" to keep your job.
I wonder what is it you'd do if they told you in person, that you can't do online?
Nobody said that he was justified in such a belief. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: “Impostor syndrome is a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”
I do have a solution if one is experiencing "imposter syndrome" in a particular domain: have a mentor. The mentor will help you measure the extent of your knowledge. If the mentor says, "That looks/sounds good to me," then you cast the research into the big scary world and sit with those "imposter" feelings knowing they are false positives.
Eventually you learn to measure your knowledge without reliance on the mentor, and the "imposter" feelings lessen.
Minimize ego and whining, do more.
Everyone puts pants on one leg at a time.
Set a good example and don't be a d1ck.
If you were as good as you'll ever be how would you improve? How would you stay interested in your life?
It's a long journey of small steps...
Being able to deliver with what you know and getting better is fun. If you really feel deficiency in a particular field that you want to improve, crack the books, ask for help, get peer feedback and set simple goals you can achieve.
Build on that and keep going.
It's not intelligence, per se, it's also tenacity, diligence, and practice that combine into satisfying feelings of improvement.