Makes sense to me. It's a vicious cycle: feel like you're an imposter, get depressed and anxious, be less effective at your job, feel like you're an imposter.
And depression can cause you to overweight negative memories and discount or ignore positive memories, which seems like it would exacerbate anxiety and imposter syndrome.
It's funny how grad school is designed to bring out the impostor in you, kind of like a negative image of the different kinds of "impostor" listed. Obviously each of these is false in their own way, but these are messages that you will be given / experience during your PhD, so it's no wonder how people come out the other end thinking like this:
1. "The Expert": your advisor/other professors/students will make fun of you or berate you if you don't know "everything" i.e. if asked to list relevant sources you list twelve and forget the thirteenth.
2. "The Perfectionist": your advisor will never say that a work is "good" and there are always ways to improve everything, the good parts will go unmentioned while the warts will be called out for repair until eventually you run out of time and ship it.
3. "The Superperson": everyone else is always working, so why aren't you?
4. "The Natural Genius": these are the words that your advisor and other professors will use to describe "successful" students: genius, insightful, gifted. Words your advisor will never use to describe someone positively: hard-working. Hard-working is assumed. Everyone is hard-working. Everyone puts in a lot of effort. Get over it.
5. "The Rugged Individualist": Only work that you and you alone did "counts" for your PhD, and credit is zero-sum. Debate carefully the authors you add to your paper because they will take some of the "success" from your work.
> Eight graduate students have committed suicide at Harvard since 1980, officials said -- not an unusual rate for a university.
> Of those, three have been in the laboratory of Mr. Altom's adviser, Elias J. Corey, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist.
> But Dr. Long asserted today that by all indications, the first two deaths, one last year and one in 1987, had nothing to do with the students' work in chemistry.
> One student, he noted, had been very successful in his work, and the other had barely begun.
My theory is that "impostor syndrome" is just another facet/manifestation of anxiety.
While many people do have anxiety time to time, for some the degree is high, and it manifests as the impostor syndrome. (worrying if they are good enough, or over anxious about the tasks not being done correctly, feeling not being a good performer, etc, when they are actually performing great).
I'd say, the same CBT techniques that help people deal with anxiety will help with the 'impostor syndrome' as well. (things like gradual exposure, getting used to the new situation, stepping back and accurately assessing the situation (like a third person) etc).
Funny story, in 15 years of professional software development I never experienced the sense of imposter syndrome until very recently when I decided after 12 years at one employer (on many satisfying projects) I needed to consider expanding my employment options. AKA I started looking for a new job. Once I got a whiff of the putrid state of hiring in our industry today holy hell...
Sure, I’ve been successful at this for 15+ years, delivering at or above expectations at almost 100% rate with some great individual excellence tossed in for good measure. But I am 99% sure I’d never pass an interview for a new job doing exactly what I do now. Am I even a software engineer developer programmer whatever?
It has been a very disconcerting experience.
Anyway, I figure the feeling of being an imposter is just a natural subconscious reaction to what seems like an entirely alien definition of what my job is vs. what other employers seem to expect from someone doing my job. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed this disconnect as so many links/threads on HN allude to.
It certainly has given me a good deal of anxiety, though, I don’t really see what choice I have but to accept this nonsense and try to prepare for it. Luckily I haven’t been feeling any depression or burnout or any other obvious mood impact from the whole experience, but, I could see that happening if I had less confidence in my ability to fill in my knowledge gaps, even if it’s for nothing beyond an interview.
Similar situation: I have a history of obtaining lower level positions and then quickly rising up to higher level engineering position within the same company (this has happened with two employers). I don't think this can reliably be used as a general strategy, I just have been lucky with employers. This doesn't give me a huge amount of confidence when considering my chances at getting a new job comparable to the level I'm at now.
Also the past few times I have seen the job posting for a position I've held, based on the job posting I'd assume I was unqualified. There's a bazillion buzzwords and technologies in our industry and it's difficult to account for how experience carries across related technologies (or not directly related technologies) in a job description. So employers end up just listing every technology you may touch and add an 'X years experience required'.
On the other hand, having worked with several engineers of varying backgrounds at my company and our partners I don't feel like an imposter at all in my actual abilities, knowledge, and performance.
This week I got to see the job posting for a replacement of a colleague of mine. The first requirement was 3 years of experience with a product we don't even directly use. I'm pretty sure the only reason it's in there, is that HR requires it for working in our department, even tough our specific team doesn't even touch it. The same line also requires "Java, Java script", while it's a backend Java position with literally no JavaScript work.
I already told my manager that with the maximum wage (shown in the posting) and the listed requirements, none of my peers would even try to apply. Even if they were an extremely good fit for the actual job.
By the time they've taken your skillset, added the skills team lead would like or wants to learn, the skills that are from a different role but manager thinks can be combined few can still recognise their own job.
As a last pass CEO asks for 3 years experience of a tech launched last year that he's just finished reading an article about. :)
The worst is when it isn't engineers or any kind of technical leader performing any screening, but strictly an HR rep with no technical knowledge or experience outside of names of things (and the tools they personally employ) or an applicant tracking system that will immediately filter you out if your resume doesn't contain ~XX% of the required skills— or enough/too many years of experience according to the parameters in the posting.
And to so many people operating that way it just seems practical.
I feel lucky with how I got my current job— even though it's a very large company and they definitely do operate in those fashions, my resume somehow made it directly into the hands of the Senior Manager and Lead Engineer for the specific team at the time. They brought me in to talk— no whiteboards, no brain teasers— just some technical questions and personal/professional questions and I was hired inside of two weeks— onboarded a month later.
Applying and [if I even get to] interviewing at most other places previous has left me feeling much the same as yourself...
Every high performer at my workplace states regularly that they wouldn’t be able to pass the entrance exam at the place they currently work. It’s a cruel fucking environment.
In the last couple weeks I've had to decline 18 total hours of "challenges" and "work samples" from 4 different interview processes. I'm not sure at what point it became de rigueur to require applicants to complete on average 4.5 hours of work without pay, but I really, really don't think it's reasonable.
I've even offered to show them my current projects in lieu of work samples, and no go. Baffling.
The danger with pair programming is you easily get a partner who sees the activity as a competitive exercise / dick measuring activity* , and some engineers find enjoyment in proving to everyone else (including new hires) their superiority.
*excuse my language, but it is the most accurate description I could come up with.
i'd posit that if an employer can't find a decent pool of current employees to potentially pair program with an interviewee, they have deeper problems than getting that upcoming interview right, and need to correct for some past hiring mistakes ASAP.
i would definitely be looking for employment elsewhere if i my co-workers were so unpleasant that i thought they'd turn every pairing session into a pissing contest (and i say that as someone who generally prefers solo programming as far as immediate enjoyment goes, but who finds that pairing is often useful and/or necessary).
Idiots have a negative impact on any type of job search. I have been in interviews where I showed a valid solution for a problem but failed because it wasn't exactly the one the interviewer wanted. On the other hand if I did pair programming with somebody and it worked well this would be a strong indicator for a healthy comonay culture.
That's actually another reason why pair programming is good: The interview is just as much a signal to the candidate as it is to the employer. If the developer he's pair-programming with is a douche, it's a good sign for the candidate to run and not look back.
In A both the interviewer and the interviewee are giving a similar amount of time. In C, only one is giving time. To compensate, the other should give money.
In C the interviewer is also spending time reviewing the assignment. Maybe not the same amount, but if you also have a handful of your current devs review it and give their feedback, the company time spent on it might not be trivial.
Also there is usually more than one person sitting with the interviewee when they come in, so the company time spent is multiplied at that stage.
> Cheaper than a bad hire, stops you missing out on good hires who think "fuck that".
Does it? If I have a developer job then I'm paid well and don't really care about the money which I have enough of, I care about the time which I have very little of.
If you're in the top 0.01% of companies to work for (and the applicant knows that) then it's probably a worthwhile time investment, but for the other 99.99% it's a waste.
If you are interviewing with a company, asking you to spend time in exchange for money is reasonable. If you feel you are above that exchange, personally, that is an effective filter for a potential problem employee.
> If you are interviewing with a company, asking you to spend time in exchange for money is reasonable.
These tests are typically a pre-interview step and they don't really work well for much apart from that. So at this point I'm not interviewing with the company and all I know is that they have an interesting job ad. Considering how far from reality job ads can be I'm not going to waste hours based on one.
We used to do C for open source stuff that we contributed to at our organization. Seemed like a good comprise because it isn't a completely futile exercise for the person going for the job.
B) for sure. i haven't had that used as an interview technique on me, but i've been on the interviewing end of that, and the feedback from the candidates was great. additionally, we felt it gave a great sense of what it'd be like to work with them, and based on the people we've hired so far using pairing as a component of the interview, it's a better predictor than anything else i've ever seen.
we also ask for a presentation on prior work or a prior project, we do some architecture whiteboarding, and we have talkier personnel type parts. but currently, the hour and change pairing exercise is the only programming exercise, and we were happy enough with the results last summer that we're doing it again for an upcoming round of interviews. our setup was a PM, a tech lead, and a "driver" (the person at the keyboard, which is what i was in the exercise). interviewee is the "navigator" (and by not having to type, we get rid of some of the stage fright for syntax errors and such, and just get to see their thought process since it's a pretty compressed timeframe). best microcosm of real work i've seen. one important thing is to give the same exercise each time (one possible risk in our case was that we gave the candidate 3 possible things to choose from, but settling on what we thought was the best choice was part of the test, and all the candidates ended up passing that part, so we never had to compare WIP from two different coding exercises).
apologies for rambling or repetition, dashing this off before i go to bed. but i'm a big fan of this interview approach, and i think it's probably the best thing we've hit on so far in this field, for positions where that would be a reasonable microcosm of what day-to-day work is like. i think it's much better than making someone code on a whiteboard, or giving them a take home or solo exercise, because you get so much more info about other things besides how well they can bang out a single well spec'ed piece of code.
On the contrary, when I was last looking for a job, I hit a snag in that a company wanted examples of current projects, but I had none because I don't really program outside of work
(I have other hobbies).
I wish I could add more to my anecdote, like how I solved this problem, but I avoided it entirely by taking a job offer from a different company the next day.
>I don't really program outside of work (I have other hobbies).
Oh, that's really no problem at all! Not everyone can just be at home in front of a computer all day, both at home and work, coding all day. What kind of a society would that lead to, haha. Anyway thanks for coming in, we'll be in touch.
Yep, also had that problem for years and finally saw something I could build with a reasonable chance of being useful, strictly to serve as an example. Hopefully it makes me the time back someday.
Funnily enough, nobody has asked to see it yet. They all want you to have side projects, but they don't actually want you to drone on about them for an hour. All this time I could have just been saying "Yes, let's talk about the intricacies of accounting for an hour, it'll be great" and passing that part of the interview through sheer aversive stimulus.
I really don't get this interview process, and why it's so ubiquitous. I wouldn't care if an interviewee could pass a whiteboard fizzbuzz test if he/she provided some samples of projects they've done. That would tell me much more about your proficiency and methods.
I'd be much more interested in finding out if we would have a cultural fit. You can teach certain skills, but if your personality doesn't fit the culture it's going to be a bad experience for everybody.
Me: "This project you've assigned me is asking me to implement a basic REST API with 2 endpoints. Well... you could take a look at my github profile, I have at least one project that includes a RESTful API considerably more advanced/complex."
Them: "We have to be fair to all candidates, so you need to implement the interview project like everyone else."
I've never had an employer short-circuit an interview process (as in skip some/all of the BS tech screening) based on having actual, real work samples available for review.
What was once a “more objective” way to hire has become a restriction by HR departments - they will not let anyone in unless you pass whatever the bar was, in the exact way that everyone else has taken it. Have seen this at a bunch of mid-enterprise companies.
But how do you determine if someone's a cultural fit without expending your time and their time? Just seems unavoidable to me, though that's what people often complain about here. Like they want to get a job without putting in any skin of their own.
https://hashrocket.com/ had a pretty extreme interview where they flew me out to Florida to pair-program with them for a week. It was a really pleasant experience. Every day I would pair-program with someone new on production code. By the end of the week I knew exactly if it was the job I was looking for. (Great group of people though and wish I'd known how to keep in contact with people professionally in my early 20s)
So unless everyone can afford to do that, you have to extrapolate from far more limited data.
Could you elaborate on how do you go about keeping in touch with people professionally. It’s a struggle for me to even keep in touch with friends. I guess I need to sustematize it somehow, because otherwise I just don’t keep in touch with anyone. I’m 30, so it’s an issue.
No, no it would not be okay. A couple hours over a couple different days, followed by either contract to hire or a short paid sample is how I hire, if and when I do it.
There's no substitute for actually working with someone.
An 8 hour onsite interview costs me 8 hours and it costs the company 8 hours, so they're not likely to bother with it unless they think I'm in with a good enough chance to be worth the investment.
A 5 hour homework assignment costs the company nearly nothing, but it still costs me 5 hours. This means the company has no incentive not to waste my time.
When you spend 5 hours on an assignment alone, stressed because you need a job & your time is short, only to not get a response after several email follow ups, you will see the logic.
I wouldnt do this for the same reason i worked at a gas station over taking an unpaid internship:
If the company isnt willing to make some investment in you, they arnt worth investing your time into.
The only time that sort of thing makes sense to me is for very high level positions, and then at the level of achieving a mutual vision for the direction of that department (or even the whole company for a C level hire).
For lower levels such work should be compensated, the best solution there is to do some actual work, get paid for it and then the company can make up its collective mind if they want to hire the candidate or not.
Last year a applied for an Android position at an up and coming Banking startup in London. Loved the company and what they were building, but their pre face-to-face interview process comprised of probably around 2 days of work if one were to finish it all.
It's almost as if they were trying to get me to build a whole feature for them for free, as it involved a complex UI that I knew they wanted to add into the Android app.
Maybe companies that want that level of work done in their code "tests" could offer a small amount of compensation. I had already been screened on the phone, so they knew I wasn't a time waster.
There's some trade-offs here, because there does need to be some sense of how good a developer they are if you're hiring them as a developer: the distribution of skills is so broad at each "level" (junior, mid, senior, principal), and cultures so different you need some way of understanding if they really do have 5 years experience of LanguageX, or 3 months of it repeated 20 times...
What I prefer to do is ask them to show me some example code they think is "good" (ideally their own, but perhaps from an open source project), and some that is "bad" (ditto), and write a paragraph or two on _why_.
Colleagues prefer to ask people to do coding exercises, and that's fine, I won't criticise, I've done it before, but I hate the fact we are asking people to do toy problems that don't represent real World problems.
My favourite process that I don't get to do much now (I have to conform to somebody else's policies these days), is just to sit and talk through a candidate's favourite project or problem.
Why did they choose that problem? What tools did they use? Did they consider alternatives? If it was a personal project did they write tests, and why/why not? If it was something they were paid to do, how did they input vs other people, etc.? Get a sense of them, try and build some empathy for what makes them excited.
Get somebody in a room with a coffee and just listen to what makes them not shut up about some code they worked on. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's better than asking for another todo list app.
And then I also like to do an architectural thinking exercise. "Let's pretend we're building [well known piece of software] from scratch. What do we need to build, what do we need to think about?". Go through it, you draw their idea on the whiteboard, not them. Ask which technologies they know about for each piece. Find the edge of their comfort zone.
All more useful to me and my assessment of somebody than asking them why manhole covers are the shape they are, how many windows there are in a nearby city or asking them to build a scaffold generated app that nobody would ever use.
> Why did they choose that problem? What tools did they use? Did they consider alternatives? If it was a personal project did they write tests, and why/why not? If it was something they were paid to do, how did they input vs other people, etc.? Get a sense of them, try and build some empathy for what makes them excited.
> Get somebody in a room with a coffee and just listen to what makes them not shut up about some code they worked on. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's better than asking for another todo list app.
> And then I also like to do an architectural thinking exercise. "Let's pretend we're building [well known piece of software] from scratch. What do we need to build, what do we need to think about?". Go through it, you draw their idea on the whiteboard, not them. Ask which technologies they know about for each piece. Find the edge of their comfort zone.
I've seen your interviewing approach in action and it works brilliantly. This is pretty much a step-by-step of the way my last hiring manager interviewed and he never failed to build very strong dev teams.
If a company asks cookie-cutter questions and gives out cookie-cutter exercises to complete, then they shouldn't be surprised when they also make a number of bad hires that were just developers that knew how to pass these "tests".
On the other hand, as you say, if you sit down, ask them to talk about their experience, and shut up and listen, you're going to learn really quick if they are a BS artist or actually know what they're doing.
I also really like your idea of working through problems with the interviewer. I imagine it gives the interviewer some pretty important insight into how well the person breaks down a complex task into some semblance of an architecture, as well as how good they are at keeping such an architecture clean and simple.
I was discussing this with a friend just last week. He too believes it is wrong to ask for a home assignment. But I have serious anxiety problems so I find whiteboard coding tests terribly difficult. Same thing with pair programming -- it's fine when you know the other person as colleague, but impossible for me in a "judgy" interview situation.
Agree. The discussion with my friend was actually sparked by the home assignment someone asked him to do. That was easily a 10-hour job. That's way too much. He correctly declined.
Once a potential employer baited me into writing a module that would determine a sentiment from given text and few more things. They liked what I did so they invited me to face 2 face interview. During the interview they had given me a task to integrate my code into their product's API and explain to his developers everything as I went along. I completed the task and their product's API has been enhanced. They thanked me and told me they'll give me a feedback in few days. After a week I got an email from them saying I am great, but I wouldn't be good cultural fit. Out of curiosity I checked their API month or so later and they had my code in production (or whatever left from what I did).
Have I got scammed?
Yea, I got tricked into doing something like that once. It is infuriating to see a new feature announced in a software product that's identical to an interview 'homework' assignment you had been given a month prior. "Wow, great solution! However, we've decided to go in a different direction..."
Whether they directly used my solution or gave that problem to several interviewees and picked the implementation they liked best I couldn't know. But I certainly felt used. There's a certain popular piece of software I refuse to use to this day because of my experience interviewing with them (fortunately, they have competition now).
Eventually you get to a point where your gut will tell you whether an 'interview project' is a toy problem or something that might actually be useful.
Bear in mind that if they didn't pay you, and there was no signed contract, they do not own your code. You may not be willing to hire a lawyer, but you could have some fun harassing them anyhow.
That said, do be sure it's your code... pretty much by definition, if you accomplished it during an interview, they could accomplish it in the same or less time themselves freshly and legally... for all you know, they'd already written it, just hadn't deployed it yet, and were using it as an interview question precisely because they had just written it themselves and it was fresh on their minds. Given the prevalence of NIH syndrome, this would even strike me as the most likely explanation unless you have some sort of really solid proof it's your code... generally, even when a programmer should take somebody else's two or three hour work they'd rather do it themselves!
I'm in this situation myself and I'm quickly reaching my breaking point.
In one instance, I submitted an "exercise", which I spent ~six hours on, one week ago and haven't heard _anything_ back -- not even a confirmation that the submission was successful. I had been on the fence about following up, but fuck that, I'm going to do it right now. Thanks for the nudge. ;)
This has bitten me in the past. When I worked at a certain company, you had to do a full 8 hours of whiteboard coding in order to transfer laterally. So I was permanently stuck in the team that hired me, despite having the best possible performance reviews year after year. All because I can't think very well when I'm anxious and someone is looking over my shoulder judging me. I can solve algorithm problems just fine when I'm left to concentrate.
I'm going through it. My past self from 12 years ago would have cleared every one of those interviews. I don't believe for one second that that former self was a better Engineer. But it's hard to not feel anxious.
I’m at a startup with about the same number of junior developers (which includes myself) to senior developers and I thought I was going to feel imposter syndrome but I haven’t felt it. I think it’s because we are a good team and ego isn’t there and we are working on really cool problems.
Years back I worked at a company called Red Gate for nearly 10 years. Latterly, old-timers at the company - including myself - used to joke that we'd never get through the present-day tech interview.
The impression was only heightened by a stint in recruitment where I realised, out of the hundreds of software engineer applications I was reviewing every month, >80% were rejected at first sift, and 80% of the rest were rejected at the coding assessment stage. If you actually made it to first interview there was a 40% chance you'd be offered a job, which is not terrible odds compared with where it had been. We'd hire about one out of every hundred applicants [1].
When it came time for me to move on I was, of course, terrified, because I hadn't updated my CV or gone for a job interview in 10 years, and I now knew from an insider's perspective exactly how ruthless the process can be.
[1] I did actually change the hiring process to try to give candidates a more humanised experience[2], but this didn't change the 100:1 ratio.
[2] Part of the motivation here was selfish: I realised that the way we had been doing it was making me short-tempered and miserable, and turning me into a worse human being.
The hiring process has become part of the bargaining process- its job is not to proof your competence (Hey, i can memorize algorithms and T.S. Eliot poems) - but to negotiate your self-worth down so the company can hire you for cheap.
I've spent much of my career as a contractor and even before that I often changed jobs often early in my career since I had a good reputation in the industry I was in so I got approached often. You have to realise that it's a numbers game and it's not you, if a company overlooks you because they are not asking you the right questions then it's their loss. I often land in interviews at companies where their expectations are set by how young graduates see the industry and the role, which usually totally overlooks more experienced, professional and reliable candidates. I also now believe that the first interview I land won't lead to a job, since this has been true so many times. It helps, since I am probably a bit too nervous at my first interview in a while, but I also don't beat myself too hard over it and by the second place I interview at I am more relaxed. Also, don't write off jobs based on the job spec or the recruiter, actually upload your CV to a job site or apply for a lot of jobs advertised by agencies, even if it's not the best fit. It just warms up your job hunt nicely, you get used to talking to people outside of your company, you get used to articulating your strengths, passions and preferences and along the way you may discover a job that is a lot more suitable for you than you could have imagined.
I learned my lesson. I took a job after working for 12 years as what for all intents and purposes was a junior developer (making a little bit more because wage stagnation is real). I've had 5 jobs since then and kept learning.
I think that depends on what you mean by "worse hire." Reading the article, it seems that those inflicted by more severe (or studied) cases of imposter syndrome are more likely to work harder in order to combat their own feelings of 'incompetence' or 'inability. If someone puts in extra effort and hours, is that a "worse hire"?
Personally, I'm not stranger to this feeling. I've recently been hired into a new (well-renowned) tech company and wonder how that happened / whether or not this company made a mistake hiring me. The only way I can reconcile this feeling is to try and do my best at my new position, within reason, while trying to maintain a healthy work-life-balance that allows me to avoid the biggest detrimental effects mentioned by the article.
I don't think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy per se. I think the only danger that can result from an 'imposter-syndrome hire' is that they may burn themselves out easily if they don't find their footing in a new ground / new position and leave sooner than a "normal" employee.
> I asked some of my male colleagues whether they also experience impostor syndrome and got a resounding yes. In researching the topic for this column, I read an article that suggested even Albert Einstein felt this way at times.
Damn.
It's hard to compare oneself objectively with others. Not that it's ever such a great idea. For others, you only know what they accomplish, plus whatever they're willing to share about the process. But for oneself, everything is laid bare. All the uncertainty, false starts, mistakes, dead ends, and so on.
I've thought about it in the converse. Imagine it's just after Einstein releases his paper explaining the theory of special relativity. Given what we know now about it, and it's ramifications, if Einstein truly understood this idea at anything close to this level we do now, how difficult must it have been to explain the bedrock concepts to those first few people that read it. Simply because it was such a radical idea, whether true or not, it must have been a pretty tall order to get his peers on board, as it changed so much about the current understanding of the universe.
I also think in this frame of mind for people like Copernicus, and how controversial his mathematical formulas and expertise must have been, simply because of the magnitude of the sea change that ensued from confirming the ideas.
As I recall, his intuitive insights about special relativity were the easy part. But he had to learn the mathematics required to coherently explain them. There must have been many opportunities for confusion and self doubt.
And that's my point. Just imagine how many times he must have heard some variation on the phrase "Newton has been right this whole time. His laws and ideas are too big to fail"
The accumulation of frustration of not being able to elucidate what is obvious to your inner thoughts, to the satisfaction of your peers, precipitates impostor syndrome.
I think it's hard to imagine how smart some people can be. Einstein would hang out with people a lot more talented than him in mathematics (Poincare, Von Neumann, Goedel) ... so it's easy to see how he would be humbled.
During my PhD, I thought I was the dumbest one in the group. Some of the mathematical feats of my colleagues would take me weeks to process. But they would grok it in minutes. Eventually you have to take a holistic view: There are the things you are capable of, there are things you might be able to do but are not interested in (For me, spending 8h/day reading theorem, lema, proof statements), things you will never achieve, ... and combinations of skills that only you have and those people don't. Your path to satisfaction and happiness is often not becoming those "expert" people. But it's still great to be challenged and stimulated by them.
I might have an impostor syndrome at work. And I am somewhat anxious about it. And I feel like it decreases my performance by quite a bit. And luckily, my managers understand it and are very supportive of me.
However, I have a question (and this is going meta). Maybe my managers are too understanding about it. Sometimes I wish they give me a harder time, and feel like I don't get reprimanded for failure enough and strangely, it exacerbates the feeling of being an impostor.
It's not like I would enjoy being wrong or beaten up for it, it's just sometimes I feel like I can afford being somewhat lazy because of that, and I don't think that's right. So I am not sure I entirely agree with the recommendation of the article.
Or to reword it as a question: Cannot the positive thinking actually hurt the person having an impostor syndrome?
Maybe we are all impostors, and I just happen to be the one most suited for the task.
>It's not like I would enjoy being wrong or beaten up for it, it's just sometimes I feel like I can afford being somewhat lazy because of that, and I don't think that's right.
I totally understand this. People live up to their expectations. I’ve felt this most often in competitive activities as I’ve moved up the skill ladder and started in a group just above me. Once you feel like everyone thinks you’re going to underperform, it’s all you can think about.
In any case, it always got better for me, so I’m sure you can overcome it as well.
I got hired on by a large corporation (who seemed desperate to make the hire, for reasons I can't fathom) and was placed on a team, I suspect without consulting the tech lead first. The guy seemed to start off with the assumption that I was an idiot and couldn't be trusted to do anything (and also that my presence was an inconvenience and that I wasn't needed).
I think that opinion has slowly begun to change (and the stuff we're doing here isn't hard, at all), but he did a pretty good job of getting me to hate him those first few months on the job, so I've been interviewing.
Imposter syndrome is normal and expected. It negatively affecting your performance should not be considered normal, in my opinion. If anxiety from imposter syndrome (or anything else) is affecting your job performance, it's worth considering if an expert could help (e.g. chemically or with some kind of therapy).
And I don't mean it should be stigmatized. It's probably not even uncommon. But to me "normal" implies you accept it and don't try to change it.
Interesting. I don't know that I've felt imposter syndrome since my first year or two as a programmer. If this persists for a long time in to your career, yet you've received pay raises, promotions and positive feedback from your manager/colleagues, perhaps it is time to start questioning your belief that you don't belong. While I'm not sure if imposter syndrome is common, almost everyone holds beliefs about themselves that are either not true or that while true, are not useful and could be reframed in a way to be more useful. Most people don't question these beliefs, but we could all do ourselves a favor if we regularly questioned our self judgements a bit more.
I had impostor syndrome for the first 6-12 months of a job that I felt lucky to get.
I struggled with some anxiety because of that.
However I have a pet theory that a lot of our internal perceptions don't tend to have a big impact on our behaviour. So I just kept chugging a long and gradually came to realize there was no issues with my performance, and the anxiety went away mostly.
Keep in mind there's always good days/weeks or bad days/weeks in terms of our actual performance. Sometimes I was horridly underproductive and I would have to make adjustments in improving my sleep, switching to decaf coffee, exercising more, etc.
I have struggled with impostor syndrome throughout my life - it doesn’t help that my 35 years to date look like a smacked out Mary Sue fantasy. In my previous business I often felt like I was pulling the wool over the eyes of the world - what right did I have to lead these people, to charge those people, to make these decisions?
Well, none, and neither does anyone else.
Through my dealings with other business owners, from small outfits through to the gods of the world of commerce, I have come to realise that everybody in any position of power or responsibility is faking it to some degree or another - or even more interestingly, they believe they are faking it, even when the results are tangible and real. I often find just talking to other people in a similar position really helps, as you rapidly realise that not only is what you’re feeling not unique, it is practically a universal maxim.
Where I ended up was concluding that we are all wittingly or unwittingly impostors, and the only actual question is whether it’s something worth being bothered by.
It’s the unwitting impostors you have to keep an eye on - hubris and incompetence are a dangerous combination.
Being aware of your own limitations brings humility, which is good in that it imbues striving, through which you grow your limits.
In short, we are all impostors. Being aware of and treating this as a law of being is a useful step in understanding both yourself and how to optimally operate the world in which we live.
People will agree to almost anything which makes them feel like less of an impostor.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree, and as far as I’m concerned, the reality is unsettling. In business, as I said, I found the leaders of mighty businesses to be often dangerously clueless - the larger the org the easier systemic inertia and process make it to hide at the top - in politics, the dunces of my year at school now sit in parliament.
Yes, this is purely my observation, but I’ve had a broad and global sample pool - and I inhabit a world in which almost everything is smoke and mirrors - yet I find these precepts serve me well, and the decisions and actions I make and take within this worldview produce expected results against the hypothesis.
Part of me just wants to hide under a rock - but we’ve muddled along this far, so on it goes.
That's also one hypothesis of why people are prone to believe in conspiracy theories: the alternative to believing in some malevolent force controlling everything towards some ultimate end goal is that no one is really in control and stuff just kind of happens. Some people find the latter more disturbing.
I’ve always wondered ir airplane pilots feel the same. I mean, they are tested through and through, this should give them some confidence, I believe. But never spoke to one about it to confirm this assumption.
I think imposter syndrome is an inevitable consequence of a competitive labour environment. People like to call this kind of environment "meritocracy", but since "merit" is not something objective that can be measured effectively, the reality is we compete on our ability to convince others we have "merit".
And since we are forced to compete for work, we feel the need to present the best possible version of ourselves, which is inevitably just slightly beyond the level of "merit" we perceive ourselves as actually having. I believe this disconnect is the main cause of imposter syndrome.
I think it's also the cause of so much bullshit in business environments. Since labour relations are fundamentally antagonistic, people feel unable to communicate problems or inefficiencies for fear that it will reflect badly on them. Especially when that problem is "I am not good at doing this task". Workplaces try to introduce blame free cultures to avoid this, but they will always struggle, because a business relationship is necessarily judgemental.
And I don't think there's an easy way to fix this without challenging the idea, entrenched in so much of our economic and political discussion, that competition will always produce the best results.
@aninhumer, thank you, this was a very insightful post. I often ponder the "perception of value" effect in my workplace and how much influence it has. In addition, for me, it was a realization that accountability requires recorded decision making outcomes and that accountability must be applied consistently across 100% of an organization including the CEO and directors. Because of this realization (and that implementation is highly unlikely to occur due to the requirement that top level decision makers adhere) it was a clarification in why "perception of value" is often more important than evaluating actual value to an organization. Even though an organization may think it's evaluating actual value.
A deadpan answer but: lose the syndrom but still keep trying to achieve more.
It's often that you're not expected to do the "right thing" since the expector doesn't know the area well enough (i.e in software dev). The choice and risk are yours to take, and the better you get at this the better you really are.
How many managers do you have and what is their level of experience at managing direct reports? It's certainly possible for managers to do a poor job at conveying appropriate feedback, both by failing to give positive praise for good things and by pointing out failures and negative outcomes that you could have avoided.
If you feel like you're not being challenged, tell your manager! They may have decided you're doing "good enough" and aren't motivated to take it to the next level, but it sounds like you are. A strong manager/report relationship is one where the manager can sense when you have more in the tank and knows when to push and when to back off. If you don't have that relationship, start building it.
If you start reading management books you'll see that this is true. Most of them talk about how they're terrified of being found out but that this is okay, you'll grow into your role.
The lack of the imposter syndrome for me as a programmer is a signal that I start to plateau. Therefore I kind of search to attain it by either negotiate a higher pay, or start working with a new technology, or switch jobs. I lived with this syndrome for the most part of my 12 years of professional programming.
I work in management and I treat impostor syndrome as a signal, like you.
I have recognized that I feel impostor syndrome when I am surrounded by people who are great at what they do. Great coders, greatminds and great leaders. How could I possibly compete with these people, my subconscious says.
Well, this is how I grow. Steel sharpens steel. I have learned to accept that I am good at what I do, even when others are great at what they do. If I feel impostor syndrom, it means I am surrounded by people who, given management is good, will make everyone in the team grow and prosper. I will connect with the people I can learn the most from.
When I no longer feels impostor syndrome it is because I am surrounded by people who all treat me as their mentor or senior - and it is time to move on.
I've felt imposter syndrome badly before, even while I was climbing ranks and getting excellent reviews. Now I manage developers and, while not a cure, the best I can do is constant feedback, and to urge them to find their "superpower". This sounds terrible but hear me out.
Years ago, after a string of programming jobs at, what I didn't know at the time, "boring enterprise" programming jobs, I felt like the top dog alpha supreme of developers. I sought out more pay and bigger challenges, and landed a job at a promising startup with 25 people.
This turned out to be my introduction to hard mode. I was dumped into a team with probably the eight smartest coders in the region, working on problems with huge scale, and immediately felt the fear. I cranked out code as fast as I could, as best I could, and still felt inadequate.
Then, months in, I discovered something that made everything better. My background wasn't in engineering. I went to college for Graphic Design, coding was a hobby from a young age, and a career I fell into. No one else was as interested in the UI/UX of our platform, they were deferring to me because I was constantly pushing code to improve it. This was my "superpower". That and, as it turns out, "boring enterprise" experience with Oracle, J2EE, and scaling also really comes in handy sometimes.
Years later I'm enjoying being a manager but the Imposter Syndrome is creeping back in. The difference this time is that I'm not scared of it, I see it as a challenge. I haven't found what my superpower is in this role. It causes anxiety yes, but also a drive to find a balance and purpose. If it turns out I don't have any special powers in management then maybe it's not the job for me, I'll step back and enjoy what I did previously. If I discover I'm good at it then I'll continue upward.
Everyone can rise to a position where they're incompetent. Imposter Syndrome is your brain being extra cautious. Sometimes it's off the mark, and sometimes it's exactly right. The key is that when you agree with it that you understand that's not a bad thing. Being an extra super great developer is just as useful as being a ground pounding monster of a VP of Development.
Might I suggest "specialty", "focus area", or "expertise". Maybe "competitive advantage" if you're talking to business types.
I like to tell engineers that their job is to be an expert. Find some area that we need more experts in. Read, experiment, troubleshoot, tweak, document, teach, and whatever else you need to do to be the person others rely on when they need an expert in that area.
> For what it’s worth Amazon HR specifically chose the term “superpower”.
I am a grizzled, experienced, and sometimes overworked 42 year old engineer. When HR start bandying around terms like "superpower" - like I'm, I don't know, an eight year old or something - I am not going to be impressed.
(I do however agree with the overall thrust of the eight_ender's post about finding your area of speciality. Not that you shouldn't stray outside it, but everyone on my team has strengths and weaknesses. When, for example, I'm looking for advice about SQL Server, I'll unfailingly consult with my colleague Mark, because he spent years working on Red Gate's SQL Monitor so knows SQL Server very well.)
I'd argue that superpower construes an innate ability, potentially something that does not need future nurturing to grow. I think this is bad. A term that suggests you can grow into a niche or area of expertise would be much more encouraging for someone I'd think.
But a lot of super heroes are just regular folks who gain their special abilities (super powers). Granted after being bitten by a radioactive spider (or something of that nature).
I feel it and it works to my advantage. My workplace is very good about reminding everyone that imposter syndrome is normal. Knowing that, I use it to motivate me to try harder and get better.
I guess part of this is coupling the inevitable feeling of "I don't belong" with the idea that "I can belong". Knowing it's normal keeps me from being truly worried about losing my job (for the most part).
Why is this article about women? Men suffer from it just the same. There seems to be this perception that men are somehow immune to the various work related shit. That’s not the case at all.
The best fix I’ve been able to find is to note and recall significant achievements: delivering projects, getting promoted, getting hired by top companies in the field, graduating with honors from one of the top schools. Think rationally about this, and there’s really no reason to complain.
This is a good question. Downvoted because it's unfashionably gender neutral, of course. This post should be titled "Is there a fix for impostor syndrome for women?" If you're a man just deal with it, as usual.
I explained why: to not create a harmful stereotype that women are the only ones affected, or even more affected by it than men. Why must everything be about identity politics?
Imposter syndrome is caused by improperly comparing ones own abilities to others.
The better one is at modeling another person the more accurate they will compare themselves to others, and from that the less severe their imposter syndrome will be. This is a learned skill.
>Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?
To outright nuke imposter syndrome permanently first some new vocabulary that will explain how to do this:
In Pali there is the word māna, which is sometimes called conceit, but is definitely not a standard use for the word conceit, and is very much not English. A quote to explain the concept behind the word māna:
"There is conceit or pride when we consider ourselves important. Because of conceit we may compare ourselves with others. There can be conceit when we think ourselves better, equal or less than someone else. We may believe that there can be conceit only when we think ourselves better than someone else, but this is not so. There can be a kind of upholding of ourselves, of making ourselves important, while we compare ourselves with someone else, no matter in what way, and that is conceit." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81na
These comparison cause many kinds of anxiety, including imposter syndrome. The solution to not create māna, but to instead create a kind of comparison that I think of as an "Apples and Oranges" comparison. It is seeing the differences in everything, in a way that has all of the benefits of a normal comparison, but one that does not construct a better and a worse. Everything is different. Everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages. With no better and worse, especially when this better or worse is attached to ones identity, there will be no more psychological stress in this way.
tl;dr - Stop claiming to be an expert at things you haven't delved into deeply. Conversely, if you've delved into a subject deeply, there's a high chance you won't feel like an impostor. If you don't have time (or resources) to delve into something deeply, and understand thoroughly, accept that fact and move on.
Could you restate what was "false"? Are you referring to the article or my comment?
I didn't mean to state that being aware of your need to learn and improve isn't normal or healthy -- but you can't learn about everything. You literally don't have the time to learn (and practice, and implement in production) everything as deeply and thoroughly to make you a tried and true expert. You have to cut and run at some point, if you want to get anything done. If you know anyone that constantly keeps every single piece of the actual "stack" (and I don't mean AWS + your apps, I mean down to the assembly at the very least) in their head, please direct me to them so I can learn how they do it.
I don't think widely considered experts experience the impostor syndrome in the same way that I see it explained. Experts on postgres internals don't wonder if they're experts on postgres internals... Maybe they worry if they're good application developers, but that's a different thing.
> I don't think widely considered experts experience the impostor syndrome in the same way that I see it explained. Experts on postgres internals don't wonder if they're experts on postgres internals...
Um. I'm an expert on PG internals. And I get impostor syndrome on stuff related to PG internals.
But you don't get impostor syndrome on PG internals itself do you?
If you do, could you expand on the parts of PG internals that you know the best (I assume that's what you've written/hacked on the most), and the parts that you feel you don't know enough to be an authorative source on?
A sub-point of my post was that maybe people should avoid statements like "I'm an expert at X" for a sufficiently complicated X. Maybe just say "I have a lot of experience using X's feature Y, and dealing with Z when it occurs".
> But you don't get impostor syndrome on PG internals itself do you?
I do.
> If you do, could you expand on the parts of PG internals that you know the best (I assume that's what you've written/hacked on the most), and the parts that you feel you don't know enough to be an authorative source on?
I've hacked, and in some of the cases authored, on many parts of postgres (I'm a committer in the project), including physical and logical replication, durability, locking, executor, JIT compilation, good chunks of the planner, ... There's a few parts of postgres that I don't know as well (SSI, some of the PLs, gin/gist/spgist), but even there I know a good bit.
But that doesn't really matter. Even on code that I personally wrote and committed I get impostor syndrome like feelings. I've learned mechanisms to cope and continue regardless. But I consciously have to do it.
I don't think you should disregard the fact that other people get impostor syndrome quite so blithely.
I don't like how you posit that expertise is some absolute thing.
To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice.
The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us.
I don't think I posited that though -- could you restate what you believed my thesis to be? I might just be a terrible writer and couldn't get my point across.
> To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice.
I agree with this -- but it was less about how others see you and how you see yourself. My point was that rather than claiming to be a programming expert, if you just get more specific about what you know, and keep good track of what you've learned/deep dove into at least once, and don't over-sell yourself, it is unlikely to feel like an impostor.
Regardless of your actual level of expertise, if you've literally taken the time to follow an interrupt through the kernel, or read the SMTP spec, you have those pieces of knowledge (though they may be rusty).
> The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us.
This is kind of a weird claim and seems to contradict the first thing you said. Most non-trivial skills can't be boiled down to one person just being the undisputed "best" -- for the world to work that way, expertise would have to be some absolute-ish thing.
If I had to try and sum up your thesis:
Expertise is very much about perspective. An amateur may look like a superhero to one group, but a novice to another group.
If I had to sum up mine:
Expertise is how much of a finite space of known things you currently know.
The two theses seem orthogonal, I don't think we actually disagree.
Where I think we disagree is that I would say impostor syndrome doesn't simply go away when you get better at something. This is because as you get better, you will encounter people better than you (especially if your career is advancing etc). To perfectionists or self-critical people this is hell.
You basically say "don't say you're good at something unless you really are", but have no threshold for this. This quote from your article highlights this:
> If you don’t want to be a fraud, or feel like one, do the hard work of learning(...)
There's no upper bound on the level of knowledge required here. Am I "good" with Python because I can understand basic syntax and scoping rules? Do I need to know all of the standard library by heart? Python 2 and 3?
Impostor syndrome isn't when you are a fraud, it's when you think you are but really aren't.
I don't think there's an upper bound on knowledge at all to begin with -- the pool of known facts for just about anything non-trivial is huge, and there's the known unknowns, and there's the unknown unknowns. If that's true, then it follows that it might be hard (if possible) to find an upper bound on the knowledge for python. There are so many ways you could use python (and related concepts and technology), a combinatoric explosion of complication and unique experience is guaranteed.
To go with this, an intended (but maybe not properly conveyed) second point of the post was to stop saying "I'm an expert at X" and start saying "I'm familiar with X and have used it to do Y, and deal with Z -- spending a long time debugging problem A when it came up".
The only way you can "know" a piece of code is by reading it, I would consider that table stakes, so for me "knowing" python means reading the interpreter code. But, I think it doesn't stop there because you could consider "expert"-level pythonistas to also include a working model of the system underlying to write super efficient python code.
The point was that rather than claiming you're "good" with python, get more specific about what you know about it, and it should be relatively easy to note what you do and don't know, and cut down on the feeling that there's a world you don't know (which there almost always is).
> Want to solve your impostor syndrome? Repeat after me (preferably in a tech interview): “While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on A, I have read about A and done X, Y, and Z with it so I’m confident I can solve problems with it and debug it when things go wrong.”
This line makes me cringe (and I wrote it), but the point I was trying to make is that we should stop boiling down language familiarity to terms like "good" and "expert", it's subjective, and depends on the application a lot of the time, just be able to recount the bits of knowledge you've gained with experience that you're sure about.
I get it from time to time, most recently I got a massive chunk of it when I was hired as an external examiner at my old university.
Whenever I do, I remind myself of a line from my first managing mentor that’s stuck with me over the years. He was(is?) this immensely talented guy who worked 70 hours a week, not because he had to but because he loved to, today he runs two companies he started on his own since then. Anyway, I was a fresh manager and had been mentored for about two months and I couldn’t figure out why he was always so confident in any part of the professional life. Having him as a mentor I’d seen behind the veil, he had the same amounts of uncertainty and doubt as the rest of us. So I asked him how he was so confident in his decision making and natural feeling of belonging. He told me “fake it till you make it”.
I may have misunderstood what he meant by it. But I took the combination of what he said and his own uncertainty to heart, and now I remind myself that everyone feels like imposters, so you just pretend to belong with the other imposters and eventually you’ll actually feel like you belong.
It’s worked wonders for me at least, but it obviously only works when you have the required credentials. If you don’t you need to own up to your mistake and get out.
I'm always reminded of a story I read from Orson Welles' daughter. Welles had dinner with her one night (he was mostly absent from her life) and she commented that her husband said she was a good writer but lacked confidence, and this was what was stopping her.
Welles derisively remarked 'Confidence? Forget confidence. If you want to write, just do a lot of it!'
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the implication was that confidence as a prerequisite was bunk. You only get confident by doing more of it than others and realising that you're the expert now whether you like it or not. That's definitely been my experience. Every time I've been called an expert I wince because I know someone else who's better at it than me, or someone I consider more talented, or whatever. Every performance review I have is an argument with my boss where they have to reassure me I'm actually capable in my job title and among my peers. It's surreal.
I've also come to accept that marketing and pushing yourself out there is fine, as long as you don't get an unrealistic sense of your own worth. You realise there's a wide band of abilities and knowledge and you won't be able to cover them all. And that's fine. There's still value to others in putting yourself out there.
My semi-cynical, 35+ years in the industry advice? Avoid blogs, forums, podcasts, social media pages, news sites that only focus on the 1% of startups that make it 'big' seemingly overnight.
Go out and talk to fellow entrepreneurs, hackers, company founders and people in the industry, and you will quickly find out that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE goes through a heartless grind and struggle to get things done or to make a difference. Connect with these people on a far deeper level than just making money or comparing tech stacks and identify what it is that gets them out of bed each morning with a spring in their step. If it is the same reasons that get YOU out of bed every morning, then sign them up as your support buddy so you can measure (and they can help you measure) the real metric that makes you tick. No room for impostor syndrome in this scenario at all.
I totally agree with your statement, but how can one compensate for the fear of missing out of new technologies, interesting discussions among interesting people sharing their insights to the problem in hand, like you're doing with us at the moment.
That's the only reason I check Hacker News, or some Subreddits multiple times a day, so that I won't miss that one non-upvoted post which could have proven significant to me, whether personally or educationally.
How many non-upvoted life-changing posts have you come across? I've been visiting hn and reddit almost every day for maybe 8 years now, and the answer for me is zero.
I find the time and effort needed (as well as the mental stress) to make sure I am not missing out on anything is not worth the end result.
A quick scan of the front page gives me more than enough interesting material.
FOMO is a trap. You're looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead you should let someone else bring the needle to you.
If something is worth your time, someone you know and trust will bring it up to you. The more people you talk to and interact with, the more likely you are to be offered up information that is actually significant to you. It is also more likely to have a real impact because human interaction is more "sticky" than a simple website post.
What you're doing now is akin to throwing a Bubble sort at the problem. It's slow, inefficient and a waste of time.
Yeah but there are bizillion other tech related websites and blogs. Those are mostly not as shiny as HN but they have links as well, discussions and buzz words which can be googled. That's basically how I did things in my pre-HN times. Actually Google was my entry-point oftentimes. I think I might have missed certain trends but on the other hand I got much deeper into technologies I actually cared about.
I had spent several years in this startup bubble - both physically and information-wise - and still do to some degree. So it happened to me that I talked to people I knew to some degree, that have very little technical technical understanding and then half a year later they tell me how they deep dived into some hard to get technology.
That frustrated me a lot and it took me quite some time to understand that they just went step by step through tutorials or fully finished boilerplates with doing very little on top on own initiative.
I remember this one guy even starting to blog about advanced Machine learning techniques on LinkedIn.
> Avoid blogs, forums, podcasts, social media pages, news sites that only
> focus on the 1% of startups that make it 'big' seemingly overnight.
I'm starting to think that Hacker News is one of them. Of course a lot of the information here is very new and up-to-date, and oftentimes I learn from articles and comments (obviously) things that are relevant for work and people like me working in this industry.
But on the other hand I get the impression that I was much happier fiddling around with technology before I touched this startup bubble and one year after started reading HN at least once a day.
Stop treating being an impostor as something bad. See yourself as con artist who succeeds in senior developer, architect and management jobs without the required skills.
Exactly. You might end up giving yourself a harder training than anyone around you. And there you go.
My current job is mainly kata for me, because most code reading, tweaking and engineering I do is well within my abilities. I can both choose my challenges and deliver, which is just perfect. I'll still mention that it took me almost a decade to get here, intensively tinkering on 1980ies computers as well as a pretty broad range of "modern" programming languages. All while working outside IT, part time if at all.
Impostor syndrome is bad because you fear being fired for not being able to do your job, or being dropped as a speaker because you're not worth listening to, or your career stalling because you can't compete with other people who seem to be better than you.
Suggesting that sufferers accept that might actually be true is not helpful.
Thinking of the world as one big pool of impostors might be equally relieving.
He said "See yourself as con artist...", not "See everyone as con artist..". Believing that most people feel this way may well be helpful. Believing that you're not good at what you do but you've successfully faked it definitely isn't.
But even people who are good at their job can be fired for not being (perceived as) able to do their job, or for any number of other reasons. Imposter Syndrome must be bad for reasons other than "I fear I might get fired".
I'm not normally one to comment here but this is just an awesome topic.
I have about 8 years experience in the industry. In the beginner of my career I did feel a bit of the impostor syndrome. Quite frankly, it was because I had this ideal of what a programmer ( or whatever buzz word title) should be. As I got on with my career I slowly realized no-body gives a shit. Its just HR that give those titles.
I also found that I accepted the fact that I will just not know everything. I will never tick all the boxes of what a job may require...
So moving forward to now. I don't care at all for titles. I just want to code and I want to TRY write some good code. I compare myself to nobody else and just talk and learn from everybody. I have learned equally from a juniors as I have from a senior developers.
I continue to chug along with the mindset that I am a crappy developer. Therefore always interested in learning and always open to whatever somebody else has to add.
I will never be the smartest programmer or the best programmer. That's ok because I will learn more from the programmers that are.
Fake it 'til you make it. The only way to get ahead in life. I've been doing it for the past decade and it's worked out well.
(To be clear, this doesn't mean go around and blow hot air. It means to believe in yourself despite what the little voices in your head may be telling you)
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[ 88.6 ms ] story [ 2071 ms ] thread1. "The Expert": your advisor/other professors/students will make fun of you or berate you if you don't know "everything" i.e. if asked to list relevant sources you list twelve and forget the thirteenth.
2. "The Perfectionist": your advisor will never say that a work is "good" and there are always ways to improve everything, the good parts will go unmentioned while the warts will be called out for repair until eventually you run out of time and ship it.
3. "The Superperson": everyone else is always working, so why aren't you?
4. "The Natural Genius": these are the words that your advisor and other professors will use to describe "successful" students: genius, insightful, gifted. Words your advisor will never use to describe someone positively: hard-working. Hard-working is assumed. Everyone is hard-working. Everyone puts in a lot of effort. Get over it.
5. "The Rugged Individualist": Only work that you and you alone did "counts" for your PhD, and credit is zero-sum. Debate carefully the authors you add to your paper because they will take some of the "success" from your work.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/21/us/after-suicide-harvard-...
> Eight graduate students have committed suicide at Harvard since 1980, officials said -- not an unusual rate for a university. > Of those, three have been in the laboratory of Mr. Altom's adviser, Elias J. Corey, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. > But Dr. Long asserted today that by all indications, the first two deaths, one last year and one in 1987, had nothing to do with the students' work in chemistry. > One student, he noted, had been very successful in his work, and the other had barely begun.
While many people do have anxiety time to time, for some the degree is high, and it manifests as the impostor syndrome. (worrying if they are good enough, or over anxious about the tasks not being done correctly, feeling not being a good performer, etc, when they are actually performing great).
I'd say, the same CBT techniques that help people deal with anxiety will help with the 'impostor syndrome' as well. (things like gradual exposure, getting used to the new situation, stepping back and accurately assessing the situation (like a third person) etc).
Sure, I’ve been successful at this for 15+ years, delivering at or above expectations at almost 100% rate with some great individual excellence tossed in for good measure. But I am 99% sure I’d never pass an interview for a new job doing exactly what I do now. Am I even a software engineer developer programmer whatever?
It has been a very disconcerting experience.
Anyway, I figure the feeling of being an imposter is just a natural subconscious reaction to what seems like an entirely alien definition of what my job is vs. what other employers seem to expect from someone doing my job. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed this disconnect as so many links/threads on HN allude to.
It certainly has given me a good deal of anxiety, though, I don’t really see what choice I have but to accept this nonsense and try to prepare for it. Luckily I haven’t been feeling any depression or burnout or any other obvious mood impact from the whole experience, but, I could see that happening if I had less confidence in my ability to fill in my knowledge gaps, even if it’s for nothing beyond an interview.
Also the past few times I have seen the job posting for a position I've held, based on the job posting I'd assume I was unqualified. There's a bazillion buzzwords and technologies in our industry and it's difficult to account for how experience carries across related technologies (or not directly related technologies) in a job description. So employers end up just listing every technology you may touch and add an 'X years experience required'.
On the other hand, having worked with several engineers of varying backgrounds at my company and our partners I don't feel like an imposter at all in my actual abilities, knowledge, and performance.
I already told my manager that with the maximum wage (shown in the posting) and the listed requirements, none of my peers would even try to apply. Even if they were an extremely good fit for the actual job.
As a last pass CEO asks for 3 years experience of a tech launched last year that he's just finished reading an article about. :)
And to so many people operating that way it just seems practical.
I feel lucky with how I got my current job— even though it's a very large company and they definitely do operate in those fashions, my resume somehow made it directly into the hands of the Senior Manager and Lead Engineer for the specific team at the time. They brought me in to talk— no whiteboards, no brain teasers— just some technical questions and personal/professional questions and I was hired inside of two weeks— onboarded a month later.
Applying and [if I even get to] interviewing at most other places previous has left me feeling much the same as yourself...
I've even offered to show them my current projects in lieu of work samples, and no go. Baffling.
Would you prefer Phone Screen +:
A) FANG/Valley style interviews multiple rounds of leetcode algorithm/data structure style questions and some whiteboard design/architecture.
B) Pair Programming. A few rounds of pairing on a problems to see actual code. Maybe some lightweight whiteboard design/architecture.
C) Take home challenge/assignment that you work on/add features to/add tests/talk about during your onsite.
*excuse my language, but it is the most accurate description I could come up with.
i would definitely be looking for employment elsewhere if i my co-workers were so unpleasant that i thought they'd turn every pairing session into a pissing contest (and i say that as someone who generally prefers solo programming as far as immediate enjoyment goes, but who finds that pairing is often useful and/or necessary).
Cheaper than a bad hire, stops you missing out on good hires who think "fuck that".
Also there is usually more than one person sitting with the interviewee when they come in, so the company time spent is multiplied at that stage.
Does it? If I have a developer job then I'm paid well and don't really care about the money which I have enough of, I care about the time which I have very little of.
If you're in the top 0.01% of companies to work for (and the applicant knows that) then it's probably a worthwhile time investment, but for the other 99.99% it's a waste.
These tests are typically a pre-interview step and they don't really work well for much apart from that. So at this point I'm not interviewing with the company and all I know is that they have an interesting job ad. Considering how far from reality job ads can be I'm not going to waste hours based on one.
we also ask for a presentation on prior work or a prior project, we do some architecture whiteboarding, and we have talkier personnel type parts. but currently, the hour and change pairing exercise is the only programming exercise, and we were happy enough with the results last summer that we're doing it again for an upcoming round of interviews. our setup was a PM, a tech lead, and a "driver" (the person at the keyboard, which is what i was in the exercise). interviewee is the "navigator" (and by not having to type, we get rid of some of the stage fright for syntax errors and such, and just get to see their thought process since it's a pretty compressed timeframe). best microcosm of real work i've seen. one important thing is to give the same exercise each time (one possible risk in our case was that we gave the candidate 3 possible things to choose from, but settling on what we thought was the best choice was part of the test, and all the candidates ended up passing that part, so we never had to compare WIP from two different coding exercises).
apologies for rambling or repetition, dashing this off before i go to bed. but i'm a big fan of this interview approach, and i think it's probably the best thing we've hit on so far in this field, for positions where that would be a reasonable microcosm of what day-to-day work is like. i think it's much better than making someone code on a whiteboard, or giving them a take home or solo exercise, because you get so much more info about other things besides how well they can bang out a single well spec'ed piece of code.
The idea of using a whiteboard to do software engineering is like asking a cellist to use writing to play Bach.
I wish I could add more to my anecdote, like how I solved this problem, but I avoided it entirely by taking a job offer from a different company the next day.
Oh, that's really no problem at all! Not everyone can just be at home in front of a computer all day, both at home and work, coding all day. What kind of a society would that lead to, haha. Anyway thanks for coming in, we'll be in touch.
Funnily enough, nobody has asked to see it yet. They all want you to have side projects, but they don't actually want you to drone on about them for an hour. All this time I could have just been saying "Yes, let's talk about the intricacies of accounting for an hour, it'll be great" and passing that part of the interview through sheer aversive stimulus.
I'd be much more interested in finding out if we would have a cultural fit. You can teach certain skills, but if your personality doesn't fit the culture it's going to be a bad experience for everybody.
I mean knowing the theory is a nice to have but I don't remember last time I used it on my daily job, especially after 10 years of experience.
Them: "We have to be fair to all candidates, so you need to implement the interview project like everyone else."
I've never had an employer short-circuit an interview process (as in skip some/all of the BS tech screening) based on having actual, real work samples available for review.
https://hashrocket.com/ had a pretty extreme interview where they flew me out to Florida to pair-program with them for a week. It was a really pleasant experience. Every day I would pair-program with someone new on production code. By the end of the week I knew exactly if it was the job I was looking for. (Great group of people though and wish I'd known how to keep in contact with people professionally in my early 20s)
So unless everyone can afford to do that, you have to extrapolate from far more limited data.
Very few would be willing to commit internal time to 100 onsite interviews of 8 hours each.
So the latter sends a signal to the potential employee that their time is at least as valuable to the company as the time of the interviewer(s)
There's no substitute for actually working with someone.
A 5 hour homework assignment costs the company nearly nothing, but it still costs me 5 hours. This means the company has no incentive not to waste my time.
I wouldnt do this for the same reason i worked at a gas station over taking an unpaid internship:
If the company isnt willing to make some investment in you, they arnt worth investing your time into.
For lower levels such work should be compensated, the best solution there is to do some actual work, get paid for it and then the company can make up its collective mind if they want to hire the candidate or not.
It's almost as if they were trying to get me to build a whole feature for them for free, as it involved a complex UI that I knew they wanted to add into the Android app.
Maybe companies that want that level of work done in their code "tests" could offer a small amount of compensation. I had already been screened on the phone, so they knew I wasn't a time waster.
What I prefer to do is ask them to show me some example code they think is "good" (ideally their own, but perhaps from an open source project), and some that is "bad" (ditto), and write a paragraph or two on _why_.
Colleagues prefer to ask people to do coding exercises, and that's fine, I won't criticise, I've done it before, but I hate the fact we are asking people to do toy problems that don't represent real World problems.
My favourite process that I don't get to do much now (I have to conform to somebody else's policies these days), is just to sit and talk through a candidate's favourite project or problem.
Why did they choose that problem? What tools did they use? Did they consider alternatives? If it was a personal project did they write tests, and why/why not? If it was something they were paid to do, how did they input vs other people, etc.? Get a sense of them, try and build some empathy for what makes them excited.
Get somebody in a room with a coffee and just listen to what makes them not shut up about some code they worked on. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's better than asking for another todo list app.
And then I also like to do an architectural thinking exercise. "Let's pretend we're building [well known piece of software] from scratch. What do we need to build, what do we need to think about?". Go through it, you draw their idea on the whiteboard, not them. Ask which technologies they know about for each piece. Find the edge of their comfort zone.
All more useful to me and my assessment of somebody than asking them why manhole covers are the shape they are, how many windows there are in a nearby city or asking them to build a scaffold generated app that nobody would ever use.
> Get somebody in a room with a coffee and just listen to what makes them not shut up about some code they worked on. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's better than asking for another todo list app.
> And then I also like to do an architectural thinking exercise. "Let's pretend we're building [well known piece of software] from scratch. What do we need to build, what do we need to think about?". Go through it, you draw their idea on the whiteboard, not them. Ask which technologies they know about for each piece. Find the edge of their comfort zone.
I've seen your interviewing approach in action and it works brilliantly. This is pretty much a step-by-step of the way my last hiring manager interviewed and he never failed to build very strong dev teams.
If a company asks cookie-cutter questions and gives out cookie-cutter exercises to complete, then they shouldn't be surprised when they also make a number of bad hires that were just developers that knew how to pass these "tests".
On the other hand, as you say, if you sit down, ask them to talk about their experience, and shut up and listen, you're going to learn really quick if they are a BS artist or actually know what they're doing.
I also really like your idea of working through problems with the interviewer. I imagine it gives the interviewer some pretty important insight into how well the person breaks down a complex task into some semblance of an architecture, as well as how good they are at keeping such an architecture clean and simple.
I'd rather do it at home.
The part I have the major problem with is the average length. Peak was 8 hours, I just chuckled and said thanks but no thanks.
2 hours? Sure. No problem. Even 3 hours is fine.
Whether they directly used my solution or gave that problem to several interviewees and picked the implementation they liked best I couldn't know. But I certainly felt used. There's a certain popular piece of software I refuse to use to this day because of my experience interviewing with them (fortunately, they have competition now).
Eventually you get to a point where your gut will tell you whether an 'interview project' is a toy problem or something that might actually be useful.
That said, do be sure it's your code... pretty much by definition, if you accomplished it during an interview, they could accomplish it in the same or less time themselves freshly and legally... for all you know, they'd already written it, just hadn't deployed it yet, and were using it as an interview question precisely because they had just written it themselves and it was fresh on their minds. Given the prevalence of NIH syndrome, this would even strike me as the most likely explanation unless you have some sort of really solid proof it's your code... generally, even when a programmer should take somebody else's two or three hour work they'd rather do it themselves!
In one instance, I submitted an "exercise", which I spent ~six hours on, one week ago and haven't heard _anything_ back -- not even a confirmation that the submission was successful. I had been on the fence about following up, but fuck that, I'm going to do it right now. Thanks for the nudge. ;)
Years back I worked at a company called Red Gate for nearly 10 years. Latterly, old-timers at the company - including myself - used to joke that we'd never get through the present-day tech interview.
The impression was only heightened by a stint in recruitment where I realised, out of the hundreds of software engineer applications I was reviewing every month, >80% were rejected at first sift, and 80% of the rest were rejected at the coding assessment stage. If you actually made it to first interview there was a 40% chance you'd be offered a job, which is not terrible odds compared with where it had been. We'd hire about one out of every hundred applicants [1].
When it came time for me to move on I was, of course, terrified, because I hadn't updated my CV or gone for a job interview in 10 years, and I now knew from an insider's perspective exactly how ruthless the process can be.
[1] I did actually change the hiring process to try to give candidates a more humanised experience[2], but this didn't change the 100:1 ratio.
[2] Part of the motivation here was selfish: I realised that the way we had been doing it was making me short-tempered and miserable, and turning me into a worse human being.
I found that my skill set wasn't what the market wanted. Sure I had been successful in my projects doing basically the same thing for nine years but I had become an expert beginner (https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...)
I learned my lesson. I took a job after working for 12 years as what for all intents and purposes was a junior developer (making a little bit more because wage stagnation is real). I've had 5 jobs since then and kept learning.
That's an easy one: nope! All the best people I've worked with have struggled with not feeling good enough while simultaneously doing stand-out work.
Personally, I'm not stranger to this feeling. I've recently been hired into a new (well-renowned) tech company and wonder how that happened / whether or not this company made a mistake hiring me. The only way I can reconcile this feeling is to try and do my best at my new position, within reason, while trying to maintain a healthy work-life-balance that allows me to avoid the biggest detrimental effects mentioned by the article.
I don't think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy per se. I think the only danger that can result from an 'imposter-syndrome hire' is that they may burn themselves out easily if they don't find their footing in a new ground / new position and leave sooner than a "normal" employee.
Somewhat true of our industry.
Damn.
It's hard to compare oneself objectively with others. Not that it's ever such a great idea. For others, you only know what they accomplish, plus whatever they're willing to share about the process. But for oneself, everything is laid bare. All the uncertainty, false starts, mistakes, dead ends, and so on.
I also think in this frame of mind for people like Copernicus, and how controversial his mathematical formulas and expertise must have been, simply because of the magnitude of the sea change that ensued from confirming the ideas.
The accumulation of frustration of not being able to elucidate what is obvious to your inner thoughts, to the satisfaction of your peers, precipitates impostor syndrome.
During my PhD, I thought I was the dumbest one in the group. Some of the mathematical feats of my colleagues would take me weeks to process. But they would grok it in minutes. Eventually you have to take a holistic view: There are the things you are capable of, there are things you might be able to do but are not interested in (For me, spending 8h/day reading theorem, lema, proof statements), things you will never achieve, ... and combinations of skills that only you have and those people don't. Your path to satisfaction and happiness is often not becoming those "expert" people. But it's still great to be challenged and stimulated by them.
However, I have a question (and this is going meta). Maybe my managers are too understanding about it. Sometimes I wish they give me a harder time, and feel like I don't get reprimanded for failure enough and strangely, it exacerbates the feeling of being an impostor.
It's not like I would enjoy being wrong or beaten up for it, it's just sometimes I feel like I can afford being somewhat lazy because of that, and I don't think that's right. So I am not sure I entirely agree with the recommendation of the article.
Or to reword it as a question: Cannot the positive thinking actually hurt the person having an impostor syndrome?
Maybe we are all impostors, and I just happen to be the one most suited for the task.
I totally understand this. People live up to their expectations. I’ve felt this most often in competitive activities as I’ve moved up the skill ladder and started in a group just above me. Once you feel like everyone thinks you’re going to underperform, it’s all you can think about.
In any case, it always got better for me, so I’m sure you can overcome it as well.
I think that opinion has slowly begun to change (and the stuff we're doing here isn't hard, at all), but he did a pretty good job of getting me to hate him those first few months on the job, so I've been interviewing.
And I don't mean it should be stigmatized. It's probably not even uncommon. But to me "normal" implies you accept it and don't try to change it.
I struggled with some anxiety because of that.
However I have a pet theory that a lot of our internal perceptions don't tend to have a big impact on our behaviour. So I just kept chugging a long and gradually came to realize there was no issues with my performance, and the anxiety went away mostly.
Keep in mind there's always good days/weeks or bad days/weeks in terms of our actual performance. Sometimes I was horridly underproductive and I would have to make adjustments in improving my sleep, switching to decaf coffee, exercising more, etc.
This, a thousandfold.
I have struggled with impostor syndrome throughout my life - it doesn’t help that my 35 years to date look like a smacked out Mary Sue fantasy. In my previous business I often felt like I was pulling the wool over the eyes of the world - what right did I have to lead these people, to charge those people, to make these decisions?
Well, none, and neither does anyone else.
Through my dealings with other business owners, from small outfits through to the gods of the world of commerce, I have come to realise that everybody in any position of power or responsibility is faking it to some degree or another - or even more interestingly, they believe they are faking it, even when the results are tangible and real. I often find just talking to other people in a similar position really helps, as you rapidly realise that not only is what you’re feeling not unique, it is practically a universal maxim.
Where I ended up was concluding that we are all wittingly or unwittingly impostors, and the only actual question is whether it’s something worth being bothered by.
It’s the unwitting impostors you have to keep an eye on - hubris and incompetence are a dangerous combination.
Being aware of your own limitations brings humility, which is good in that it imbues striving, through which you grow your limits.
In short, we are all impostors. Being aware of and treating this as a law of being is a useful step in understanding both yourself and how to optimally operate the world in which we live.
People will agree to almost anything which makes them feel like less of an impostor.
Yes, this is purely my observation, but I’ve had a broad and global sample pool - and I inhabit a world in which almost everything is smoke and mirrors - yet I find these precepts serve me well, and the decisions and actions I make and take within this worldview produce expected results against the hypothesis.
Part of me just wants to hide under a rock - but we’ve muddled along this far, so on it goes.
And since we are forced to compete for work, we feel the need to present the best possible version of ourselves, which is inevitably just slightly beyond the level of "merit" we perceive ourselves as actually having. I believe this disconnect is the main cause of imposter syndrome.
I think it's also the cause of so much bullshit in business environments. Since labour relations are fundamentally antagonistic, people feel unable to communicate problems or inefficiencies for fear that it will reflect badly on them. Especially when that problem is "I am not good at doing this task". Workplaces try to introduce blame free cultures to avoid this, but they will always struggle, because a business relationship is necessarily judgemental.
And I don't think there's an easy way to fix this without challenging the idea, entrenched in so much of our economic and political discussion, that competition will always produce the best results.
It's often that you're not expected to do the "right thing" since the expector doesn't know the area well enough (i.e in software dev). The choice and risk are yours to take, and the better you get at this the better you really are.
If you feel like you're not being challenged, tell your manager! They may have decided you're doing "good enough" and aren't motivated to take it to the next level, but it sounds like you are. A strong manager/report relationship is one where the manager can sense when you have more in the tank and knows when to push and when to back off. If you don't have that relationship, start building it.
If you start reading management books you'll see that this is true. Most of them talk about how they're terrified of being found out but that this is okay, you'll grow into your role.
I have recognized that I feel impostor syndrome when I am surrounded by people who are great at what they do. Great coders, greatminds and great leaders. How could I possibly compete with these people, my subconscious says.
Well, this is how I grow. Steel sharpens steel. I have learned to accept that I am good at what I do, even when others are great at what they do. If I feel impostor syndrom, it means I am surrounded by people who, given management is good, will make everyone in the team grow and prosper. I will connect with the people I can learn the most from.
When I no longer feels impostor syndrome it is because I am surrounded by people who all treat me as their mentor or senior - and it is time to move on.
Years ago, after a string of programming jobs at, what I didn't know at the time, "boring enterprise" programming jobs, I felt like the top dog alpha supreme of developers. I sought out more pay and bigger challenges, and landed a job at a promising startup with 25 people.
This turned out to be my introduction to hard mode. I was dumped into a team with probably the eight smartest coders in the region, working on problems with huge scale, and immediately felt the fear. I cranked out code as fast as I could, as best I could, and still felt inadequate.
Then, months in, I discovered something that made everything better. My background wasn't in engineering. I went to college for Graphic Design, coding was a hobby from a young age, and a career I fell into. No one else was as interested in the UI/UX of our platform, they were deferring to me because I was constantly pushing code to improve it. This was my "superpower". That and, as it turns out, "boring enterprise" experience with Oracle, J2EE, and scaling also really comes in handy sometimes.
Years later I'm enjoying being a manager but the Imposter Syndrome is creeping back in. The difference this time is that I'm not scared of it, I see it as a challenge. I haven't found what my superpower is in this role. It causes anxiety yes, but also a drive to find a balance and purpose. If it turns out I don't have any special powers in management then maybe it's not the job for me, I'll step back and enjoy what I did previously. If I discover I'm good at it then I'll continue upward.
Everyone can rise to a position where they're incompetent. Imposter Syndrome is your brain being extra cautious. Sometimes it's off the mark, and sometimes it's exactly right. The key is that when you agree with it that you understand that's not a bad thing. Being an extra super great developer is just as useful as being a ground pounding monster of a VP of Development.
Might I suggest "specialty", "focus area", or "expertise". Maybe "competitive advantage" if you're talking to business types.
I like to tell engineers that their job is to be an expert. Find some area that we need more experts in. Read, experiment, troubleshoot, tweak, document, teach, and whatever else you need to do to be the person others rely on when they need an expert in that area.
Not sure it needs to be replaced.
I am a grizzled, experienced, and sometimes overworked 42 year old engineer. When HR start bandying around terms like "superpower" - like I'm, I don't know, an eight year old or something - I am not going to be impressed.
(I do however agree with the overall thrust of the eight_ender's post about finding your area of speciality. Not that you shouldn't stray outside it, but everyone on my team has strengths and weaknesses. When, for example, I'm looking for advice about SQL Server, I'll unfailingly consult with my colleague Mark, because he spent years working on Red Gate's SQL Monitor so knows SQL Server very well.)
My email address is in my profile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
I guess part of this is coupling the inevitable feeling of "I don't belong" with the idea that "I can belong". Knowing it's normal keeps me from being truly worried about losing my job (for the most part).
The best fix I’ve been able to find is to note and recall significant achievements: delivering projects, getting promoted, getting hired by top companies in the field, graduating with honors from one of the top schools. Think rationally about this, and there’s really no reason to complain.
The better one is at modeling another person the more accurate they will compare themselves to others, and from that the less severe their imposter syndrome will be. This is a learned skill.
>Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?
To outright nuke imposter syndrome permanently first some new vocabulary that will explain how to do this:
In Pali there is the word māna, which is sometimes called conceit, but is definitely not a standard use for the word conceit, and is very much not English. A quote to explain the concept behind the word māna:
"There is conceit or pride when we consider ourselves important. Because of conceit we may compare ourselves with others. There can be conceit when we think ourselves better, equal or less than someone else. We may believe that there can be conceit only when we think ourselves better than someone else, but this is not so. There can be a kind of upholding of ourselves, of making ourselves important, while we compare ourselves with someone else, no matter in what way, and that is conceit." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81na
These comparison cause many kinds of anxiety, including imposter syndrome. The solution to not create māna, but to instead create a kind of comparison that I think of as an "Apples and Oranges" comparison. It is seeing the differences in everything, in a way that has all of the benefits of a normal comparison, but one that does not construct a better and a worse. Everything is different. Everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages. With no better and worse, especially when this better or worse is attached to ones identity, there will be no more psychological stress in this way.
https://vadosware.io/post/the-cure-for-impostor-syndrome-is-...
tl;dr - Stop claiming to be an expert at things you haven't delved into deeply. Conversely, if you've delved into a subject deeply, there's a high chance you won't feel like an impostor. If you don't have time (or resources) to delve into something deeply, and understand thoroughly, accept that fact and move on.
Impostor syndrome hits experts, often when they are at their peak, while beginners rarely experience it, hence the name "syndrome".
I didn't mean to state that being aware of your need to learn and improve isn't normal or healthy -- but you can't learn about everything. You literally don't have the time to learn (and practice, and implement in production) everything as deeply and thoroughly to make you a tried and true expert. You have to cut and run at some point, if you want to get anything done. If you know anyone that constantly keeps every single piece of the actual "stack" (and I don't mean AWS + your apps, I mean down to the assembly at the very least) in their head, please direct me to them so I can learn how they do it.
I don't think widely considered experts experience the impostor syndrome in the same way that I see it explained. Experts on postgres internals don't wonder if they're experts on postgres internals... Maybe they worry if they're good application developers, but that's a different thing.
Um. I'm an expert on PG internals. And I get impostor syndrome on stuff related to PG internals.
If you do, could you expand on the parts of PG internals that you know the best (I assume that's what you've written/hacked on the most), and the parts that you feel you don't know enough to be an authorative source on?
A sub-point of my post was that maybe people should avoid statements like "I'm an expert at X" for a sufficiently complicated X. Maybe just say "I have a lot of experience using X's feature Y, and dealing with Z when it occurs".
I do.
> If you do, could you expand on the parts of PG internals that you know the best (I assume that's what you've written/hacked on the most), and the parts that you feel you don't know enough to be an authorative source on?
I've hacked, and in some of the cases authored, on many parts of postgres (I'm a committer in the project), including physical and logical replication, durability, locking, executor, JIT compilation, good chunks of the planner, ... There's a few parts of postgres that I don't know as well (SSI, some of the PLs, gin/gist/spgist), but even there I know a good bit.
But that doesn't really matter. Even on code that I personally wrote and committed I get impostor syndrome like feelings. I've learned mechanisms to cope and continue regardless. But I consciously have to do it.
I don't think you should disregard the fact that other people get impostor syndrome quite so blithely.
To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice.
The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us.
> To some coworkers I'm a programming expert. To a 30-year veteran sysadmin I'm a novice.
I agree with this -- but it was less about how others see you and how you see yourself. My point was that rather than claiming to be a programming expert, if you just get more specific about what you know, and keep good track of what you've learned/deep dove into at least once, and don't over-sell yourself, it is unlikely to feel like an impostor.
Regardless of your actual level of expertise, if you've literally taken the time to follow an interrupt through the kernel, or read the SMTP spec, you have those pieces of knowledge (though they may be rusty).
> The same goes for any skill or knowledge - musicianship, cooking etc. Only one person in the world is the best at something, and it's not reasonable to compare yourself to that person when there's billions of us.
This is kind of a weird claim and seems to contradict the first thing you said. Most non-trivial skills can't be boiled down to one person just being the undisputed "best" -- for the world to work that way, expertise would have to be some absolute-ish thing.
If I had to try and sum up your thesis:
Expertise is very much about perspective. An amateur may look like a superhero to one group, but a novice to another group.
If I had to sum up mine:
Expertise is how much of a finite space of known things you currently know.
The two theses seem orthogonal, I don't think we actually disagree.
You basically say "don't say you're good at something unless you really are", but have no threshold for this. This quote from your article highlights this:
> If you don’t want to be a fraud, or feel like one, do the hard work of learning(...)
There's no upper bound on the level of knowledge required here. Am I "good" with Python because I can understand basic syntax and scoping rules? Do I need to know all of the standard library by heart? Python 2 and 3?
Impostor syndrome isn't when you are a fraud, it's when you think you are but really aren't.
To go with this, an intended (but maybe not properly conveyed) second point of the post was to stop saying "I'm an expert at X" and start saying "I'm familiar with X and have used it to do Y, and deal with Z -- spending a long time debugging problem A when it came up".
The only way you can "know" a piece of code is by reading it, I would consider that table stakes, so for me "knowing" python means reading the interpreter code. But, I think it doesn't stop there because you could consider "expert"-level pythonistas to also include a working model of the system underlying to write super efficient python code.
The point was that rather than claiming you're "good" with python, get more specific about what you know about it, and it should be relatively easy to note what you do and don't know, and cut down on the feeling that there's a world you don't know (which there almost always is).
> Want to solve your impostor syndrome? Repeat after me (preferably in a tech interview): “While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on A, I have read about A and done X, Y, and Z with it so I’m confident I can solve problems with it and debug it when things go wrong.”
This line makes me cringe (and I wrote it), but the point I was trying to make is that we should stop boiling down language familiarity to terms like "good" and "expert", it's subjective, and depends on the application a lot of the time, just be able to recount the bits of knowledge you've gained with experience that you're sure about.
Whenever I do, I remind myself of a line from my first managing mentor that’s stuck with me over the years. He was(is?) this immensely talented guy who worked 70 hours a week, not because he had to but because he loved to, today he runs two companies he started on his own since then. Anyway, I was a fresh manager and had been mentored for about two months and I couldn’t figure out why he was always so confident in any part of the professional life. Having him as a mentor I’d seen behind the veil, he had the same amounts of uncertainty and doubt as the rest of us. So I asked him how he was so confident in his decision making and natural feeling of belonging. He told me “fake it till you make it”.
I may have misunderstood what he meant by it. But I took the combination of what he said and his own uncertainty to heart, and now I remind myself that everyone feels like imposters, so you just pretend to belong with the other imposters and eventually you’ll actually feel like you belong.
It’s worked wonders for me at least, but it obviously only works when you have the required credentials. If you don’t you need to own up to your mistake and get out.
Welles derisively remarked 'Confidence? Forget confidence. If you want to write, just do a lot of it!'
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the implication was that confidence as a prerequisite was bunk. You only get confident by doing more of it than others and realising that you're the expert now whether you like it or not. That's definitely been my experience. Every time I've been called an expert I wince because I know someone else who's better at it than me, or someone I consider more talented, or whatever. Every performance review I have is an argument with my boss where they have to reassure me I'm actually capable in my job title and among my peers. It's surreal.
I've also come to accept that marketing and pushing yourself out there is fine, as long as you don't get an unrealistic sense of your own worth. You realise there's a wide band of abilities and knowledge and you won't be able to cover them all. And that's fine. There's still value to others in putting yourself out there.
I tend to feel that you should compete with who you were yesterday and get assistance from others i.e. learning from them.
theimposterroster.com
Go out and talk to fellow entrepreneurs, hackers, company founders and people in the industry, and you will quickly find out that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE goes through a heartless grind and struggle to get things done or to make a difference. Connect with these people on a far deeper level than just making money or comparing tech stacks and identify what it is that gets them out of bed each morning with a spring in their step. If it is the same reasons that get YOU out of bed every morning, then sign them up as your support buddy so you can measure (and they can help you measure) the real metric that makes you tick. No room for impostor syndrome in this scenario at all.
I find the time and effort needed (as well as the mental stress) to make sure I am not missing out on anything is not worth the end result.
A quick scan of the front page gives me more than enough interesting material.
If something is worth your time, someone you know and trust will bring it up to you. The more people you talk to and interact with, the more likely you are to be offered up information that is actually significant to you. It is also more likely to have a real impact because human interaction is more "sticky" than a simple website post.
What you're doing now is akin to throwing a Bubble sort at the problem. It's slow, inefficient and a waste of time.
I had spent several years in this startup bubble - both physically and information-wise - and still do to some degree. So it happened to me that I talked to people I knew to some degree, that have very little technical technical understanding and then half a year later they tell me how they deep dived into some hard to get technology.
That frustrated me a lot and it took me quite some time to understand that they just went step by step through tutorials or fully finished boilerplates with doing very little on top on own initiative.
I remember this one guy even starting to blog about advanced Machine learning techniques on LinkedIn.
> Avoid blogs, forums, podcasts, social media pages, news sites that only
> focus on the 1% of startups that make it 'big' seemingly overnight.
I'm starting to think that Hacker News is one of them. Of course a lot of the information here is very new and up-to-date, and oftentimes I learn from articles and comments (obviously) things that are relevant for work and people like me working in this industry.
But on the other hand I get the impression that I was much happier fiddling around with technology before I touched this startup bubble and one year after started reading HN at least once a day.
My current job is mainly kata for me, because most code reading, tweaking and engineering I do is well within my abilities. I can both choose my challenges and deliver, which is just perfect. I'll still mention that it took me almost a decade to get here, intensively tinkering on 1980ies computers as well as a pretty broad range of "modern" programming languages. All while working outside IT, part time if at all.
Suggesting that sufferers accept that might actually be true is not helpful.
On what are you basing that? It's an interesting insight. Thinking of the world as one big pool of impostors might be equally relieving.
He said "See yourself as con artist...", not "See everyone as con artist..". Believing that most people feel this way may well be helpful. Believing that you're not good at what you do but you've successfully faked it definitely isn't.
I have about 8 years experience in the industry. In the beginner of my career I did feel a bit of the impostor syndrome. Quite frankly, it was because I had this ideal of what a programmer ( or whatever buzz word title) should be. As I got on with my career I slowly realized no-body gives a shit. Its just HR that give those titles.
I also found that I accepted the fact that I will just not know everything. I will never tick all the boxes of what a job may require...
So moving forward to now. I don't care at all for titles. I just want to code and I want to TRY write some good code. I compare myself to nobody else and just talk and learn from everybody. I have learned equally from a juniors as I have from a senior developers.
I continue to chug along with the mindset that I am a crappy developer. Therefore always interested in learning and always open to whatever somebody else has to add. I will never be the smartest programmer or the best programmer. That's ok because I will learn more from the programmers that are.
I'm just enjoying the ride.
(To be clear, this doesn't mean go around and blow hot air. It means to believe in yourself despite what the little voices in your head may be telling you)