What are the best ways to fight imposter syndrome?
When my students get jobs in tech (especially FAANG level) there is this feeling like they don't deserve to be there. This causes their mental health to suffer pretty significantly.
My current approach to helping is to just remind them that if they passed a companies technical assessment, they deserve to be there. It doesn't feel that effective.
Would love to know if anyone has successfully tackled imposter syndrome or has helped others through it. What works and what doesn't?
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadWhen I applied at Google, my screening interview consisted of a question I was already familiar with. Naturally I passed the interview with ease. Did I deserve to move on further or did I just beat the system? Feelings of imposter syndrome followed.
Meditation: As above, but quieter
SSRI medication.
Source: Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt.
Though a feeling of not deserving it may not be imposter syndrome. It may be something else.
I do wonder, do people with "imposter syndrome" realize how revolting they are needing affirmations of their self-worth in the face of their good fortunes?
I don't think it's really about my self-worth. I'm happy with who I am. I often talk about how truly fortunate I am to find something I like doing that happens to pay really well. I know several teachers who are smarter and harder working than I am, but the job market doesn't smile as much on their career.
It's further harder when you actually have been the imposter. In my case, I went to a small school and was one of the smartest people there. I worked for two small companies and was their little rock star. Then I landed a job at a company that was made of rock stars. Try as hard as I could, they were more experienced and probably more talented - I just couldn't keep up. A year and a half in, they told me that wanted to try filling my position again. They were super awesome, let me stay on while interviewing, gave me great references, and I found something more at my skill level. Still, I keep wondering about where I fit in at my current job.
I think the Peter Principle can apply to everyone. I also got promoted until I reached my level of incompetence. Fortunately, most of us reading Hacker News are in an industry where jobs at every level are plentiful. It's not too hard for us to take a step back if we need more time to prepare for a higher level. It still just hurts to have to fail, job hunt, and be the new person again.
I do not think it is commonplace for those who experience Imposter Syndrome feelings to freely discuss it with almost anyone, because it is essentially a fear of being "found out."
But I can really only speak for myself.
For me the single best remedy is mentoring/teaching others. Helping someone learn a new skill while pair programming can highlight not just the knowledge of the topic at hand but also a lot of ancillary things I've learned and boost my confidence.
Even if you are working with another skilled engineer there is something that they may learn or be impressed with and as a result I try to pair as much as possible.
As a bonus I find I am much more productive with another set of eyes/brain on a range of tasks, especially in COVID times.
Frankly, the best engineers I’ve ever seen have been the ones that are self-taught. They’re the ones who have the drive to go learn the stuff they don’t know, and build the systems they didn’t know they could build.
That's not a solution, but it is a treatment. Because you can't fix it over night.
For treatment 2 thinking exercises help me:
* Remind myself it's their problem if I'm the wrong guy for the job. Your boss/client/coworker will soon say something. And if they do you can't fix it. And if not then there is nothing you can do so why worry.
* Just get good enough at one thing to show one person how it works. Then remember that feeling of teaching someone else: the opposite of imposter syndrome.
No. No no no no.
This sets you up to under-deliver and lose people’s trust.
This means you won’t have enough slack if you need to ask for help and wait for someone to help you.
Berné Brown books help too.
That will pass as they become more and more expert in their field and become one of the higher-level top experts themselves.
I think it's a part of our industry and I'm not sure anyone can "fix" the problem for someone else. I think you just have to understand that 90% of your peers also feel this and of the 10% that don't 90% of THEM either don't realize they aren't that good or don't really care. The remaining 1% are who we compare ourselves to and shouldn't.
- It’s common for software developers to feel overwhelmed with the pace of things during the first few years of their career.
- You shouldn't feel intimidated by coworkers who are smarter. In fact, you can leverage their knowledge and experience to learn faster.
- It's a feeling, not a syndrome. We should move away from using the word "syndrome" because it's not a medical condition at all and that word has a negative connotation to it. It's just a feeling like stage fright or anxiety, and it's temporary and will eventually pass.
- It’s okay to admit that you don’t know something, or that you hadn’t considered some obvious edge case. In fact, admitting that you don’t know something is a sign of maturity.
- Identify your knowledge gaps. Write down things that you know you don't know. This could be things like topics, phrases, or acronyms that you’ve heard repeatedly, but don’t know what they are. Programming specific things could be OOP principles, scalability strategies, security practices, agile methodology, design patterns, kubernetes, etc.
- Close your knowledge gaps. Take 20-30 minutes each day and teach yourself one thing from your list of things you wrote down. After a few weeks you'll be much more knowledgable on topics you previously had nothing about. It'll help build confidence in conversations and open up new ideas and new things to add to your list.
Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more about this. Like I said, I wrote a whole chapter about this and many more on helping junior software engineers build up their soft-skills. My email is in my HN profile.
[0]: https://www.exponentialbackoff.com/posts/how-to-beat-imposte...
[1]: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior
Even if the job and company seem to be a perfect fit on paper, the reality can be very different.
Or, maybe there has been a change in management, and what was the perfect job at the perfect company has now put you into impostor syndrome.
There’s lots of ways to get to that point.
How can I prove that wrong? By setting those things as goals and working toward them. Any failure will be instructive. Either it's a gap in knowledge/experience/ability I can eliminate, or it's something I can't control. At any rate, I learn the truth behind my anxieties (I'm usually not as big of an imposter as I feel).