Ask HN: How to get rid of impostor syndrome?

In reality, the solution is to work on your fears of failure, of looking ignorant, or of being a fraud.

To be clear, you always can (and hopefully will) be discovered ignorant. It happens often as you grow as a person. You should learn to tolerate that fear and see it as normal and human, rather than something to try to destroy with extra education.

You can also learn social skills that make those inevitable situations (where you fail or are wrong) easier to deal with. If you're intellectually humble and listen to your peers' ideas, you can share in the "blame" for the defeat.

The crux of that philosophy is that you should only worry about things that are in your control. Most things in life aren't such as the made up comparisons of you vs other people.

The other solution that helped me is just to get good at one thing (for me it was keyboard optimizations). So I have at least something I can say I am better than probably anyone.

BUT, now that you know (intellectually) that it's a normal mental illusion, it can be disregarded. This doesn't make it stop happening, any more than knowing about the blind spot makes it stop being a blind spot. But, you know not to listen to it, like you know that something disappearing in your blind spot doesn't really mean it's not there.

In fact, I now use it as a metric of whether or not I'm learning enough new tech, or if I'm staying with what I'm comfortable in too much (which is a path towards obsolescence when you're a programmer). When I get feelings that I recognize as Imposter Syndrome, I know (intellectually) that it means I'm working on new knowledge, and that's a good thing. It doesn't make the feelings go away; learning more about the new thing will eventually help with that (temporarily). But intellectually I know I've worked on enough projects to not be an imposter, more or less by definition, and I know that the feelings of "I don't know what I'm doing maybe I'm not cut out for this" are normal, and not an accurate guide to whether or not I am able to do this. They are, of course, an indication that I need to keep working on learning whatever the new thing is.

Trust in the fact that whatever state you're in now, you'll be in the other one soon enough.

Trust that this is true for everyone.

With mastery and experience comes faith -- that is, an attitude of trust that permits unfettered action -- in the fact that the oscillation will continue. There is not any guarantee that you'll always be a space-god and never a dog; just the promise that you'll always come back to the other state from whichever one you're in.

Get deep expertise in one or more fundamental domains where knowledge doesn't age out fast. Things like performance analysis, security, etc. that apply regardless of what language or framework you're working in. All that "useless" stuff taught in college that some HNers like to look down on turns out not to be so useless after all since they underlie everything about how software and computers work and evolve slowly. And if diving deeper into tech areas is not your thing, fundamentals in other areas like business, leadership, etc. also are timeless and valuable tools if you make the effort to add them to your toolbox.

If you don't want to feel like an impostor, get to a point where it's demonstrable, even to yourself, that you aren't. Sure, there's always someone better out there but there's always someone not better too and with effort, you can make sure that there are more of the latter.

If you know you will not be able to answer some things when asked about them - then you know you lack a specific piece of knowledge. That is not impostor syndrome.

Like, I still feel terrible in the moment, but the knowledge that this feeling will pass makes it bearable.

... actually, now that I think about it, the act of documenting my mistakes might be unusual. I keep a brief daily log of my activities, including stuff like time spent reading documentation or source diving for understanding. That helps my days with fewer (zero) contributions to the project still feel productive. Maybe that could help?

Now I look at the cloud computing space where there's hundreds of components, overlapping functionality, and nothing that easily helps me to determine what things are important to know, flash-in-the-pan fads, or long term career building skills.

But it's the same in other domains as well. There's too much Entertainment to hope to discover everything you might be interested in, there's expansion in social communication...and my monkey brain is hyperventilating over it as the things that made me feel valued (that I could take pictures, edit video, write software) have been commoditized so that my skillset isn't necessarily as spiffy as it used to be.

If I understand correctly, "impostor syndrome" is a term coined by ivy league university psych counsellors. It does not apply to the workplace. It refers to ivy league freshmen not thinking of themselves as geniuses and/or mistakenly believing you have to be a genius to be admitted to the ivy league.

That doesn't seem to be your problem though. It seems more like you feel that you're not learning anything permanently. That seems unlikely but... maybe it's true? Maybe your job is all about pointless details of framework X which you then promptly forget again.

Bringing fresh, but worldly, eyes to existing project can help see solutions to problems that are similar to solutions in other domains that weren't apparent to those on the project long term.

It's possible people are lying to you of course, but that's pretty unusual and you'd probably see other red flags to indicate things are just not right at your job. In normal companies with normal people, you should be able to use your colleagues as good measuring sticks to whether or not you're an imposter.

If you feel totally and completely lost still, consider therapy if it’s an option. If you have some sort of stigma against therapy, you need to throw it away. Just talking through what bothers you with a professional could help.

There are of course experts, but usually their expertise is constrained to fairly narrow niches.

Best of luck!

One of the nicest things about learning, is powering through the "Jon Snow Trough," and becoming a lot more confident. We often give up, at that point, and that's a tragedy.

One of the things that I always need to accept, is that there's probably some kid in a Hanoi Internet cafe, that can totally smoke my best, but that's OK. Maybe, one day, I'll benefit from her contributions. In the meantime, I just keep doing the best I can, with what I have.