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Comment by shrugger | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the whole impostor syndrome thing has gone too far. At this point, we have legitimately talented developers questioning whether or not they are 'good' enough and it is actually quite frustrating to see.

I sort of understand it from the students' perspectives, because they have a professor to compare themselves to and aspire to, I think in that scenario it spurs self-improvement but in the workplace it seems like it would only be counterproductive at best to compare yourself to other coworkers or even other people in the field.

I remember when I first started, I never thought "Shit, will I ever be as good at Scheme as Sussman?" I just worked the exercises and kept moving forward.

Nowadays, there seems to be a real strong pressure to be aware of all the new technologies, newest libraries, and all this material that nobody could ever possibly have time to completely understand, and it drives people crazy, I think.

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> I feel like the whole impostor syndrome thing has gone too far. At this point, we have legitimately talented developers questioning whether or not they are 'good' enough and it is actually quite frustrating to see.

I'm not sure what you mean by "has gone too far". It's an effect; it's not like people are aiming to feel incompetent. You could just as well say that "This depression thing has gone too far" -- OK, but so? That's not a solution? Sweeping it under the rug doesn't cure anyone of it.

The solution to imposter syndrome is to make everyone aware of it, so that people who could otherwise grow into their role properly don't look around at the performance of their more experienced peers and simply give up. At my work we assign all new employees a more experienced mentor that they can discuss these issues in confidence with. It really helps.

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I wasn't trying to "pigeonhole" you. I was merely responding to your comments as they scanned to me, which is that they came off as dismissive of imposter syndrome.

I'm glad that your real opinion of the issue is the opposite, so it sounds like we are in agreement, but you didn't come off that way in your first comment, and I was just pointing that out.

Have to point out: we also have legitimately terrible developers using Impostor Syndrome as a political tool to keep their jobs and write whiny blog posts.

Everyone should have a healthy way of dealing with feeling inadequate, besides whining. (e.g. learning things)

It's even a meta-issue!

So, how do we find out which people are whining and which aren't? How do we encourage people to just learn and self-improve rather than sink to escapism?

If your answer to FOMO / imposter syndrome is "learn more" then you'll quickly find yourself mired in analysis paralysis. It's a strategy that simply doesn't scale to today's world where there is more to learn than can be learned. A better strategy is to develop a sense for the marginal value of learning so that you can decide at some point to stop learning and start working (or, equivalently, choose the right mix of the two). This still leaves the psychological problem unaddressed, so solutions that tackle it head on have their place.

The solution for dealing with actual imposters is to fire them. If, somehow, they manage to use "imposter syndrome" as a deflection (I haven't seen this play in the wild and I'm not convinced it's prevalent or even could be made to work), then gather evidence that they aren't pulling their weight and proceed to use it. If that doesn't work, it's not because of some stupid blog post, it's because there's stronger politics at play. Abort/retry/ignore as warranted.

I think that by "learn more" they meant ensure that you're always learning. It's not that you should learn everything, but rather just ensure you're always learning something, always growing. This is something imposters don't do.

> ensure that you're always learning

That's a good idea in general, but it doesn't address the specific problem of imposter syndrome.

> This is something imposters don't do.

If you believe that this is true then it addresses the problem of imposter syndrome. The danger is that you might then have to deal with cognitive dissonance if you were confronted with someone who ramped so slowly or started from so far behind that they couldn't be expected to make a net positive contribution to the team within a reasonable timeframe. It's entirely possible to try and fail, and while we should all admire the "try," that doesn't mean you or your employer should be on the hook for funding it.

I find "hang around people who are more awesome than you and absorb as much as you can" to be a tangible proxy for "learn more"

That addresses the learning part but not the imposter syndrome part. I suspect it would put you at greater risk for imposter syndrome if anything. It probably even puts you at greater risk for being an actual imposter.

No, I mean you do it in reverse: if you find yourself surrounded by awesome people and feel like an impostor, ignore that and focus on learning. You may or may not be an impostor: but does it really matter when you can learn?

This is how I've coped with possibly-impostor-syndrome-or-actually-impostor-idk-lol anyway. YMMV.

I'm surrounded by awesome coders at work and have frequently felt like an imposter. The best way I've found to address it is to tackle it head-on: Just get it out in the open and talk about it. It turns out that most of my outwardly-amazing coworkers also feel the same way occasionally.

And, of course, don't ever let imposter feelings getting in the way of diving headlong and trying things anyway, even if they seem impossibly difficult from the outset. It's mostly mental barriers; I've tackled dozens of tasks that were imposingly difficult from the outset. There hasn't been a single one yet that I didn't end up making appreciable headway on.

I have no idea if "terrible developers whining on Medium" is a thing.

What I am actually worried about are arrogant developers. They tend to cause the most damage, write the most "clever" code, have the worst communications skills, and will be the first to leave the team in the lurch and panic when shit hits the fan.

There may of course be arrogant developers who can walk the talk, but I'm taking from personal experience.

The ones with "Imposter Syndrome" - i.e. those who have a fear they're not quite good enough for the job - are more likely, again based on personal experience, to double check everything, to ask questions (from the rest of the team or Google), to write tests and test manually. They write "dumb" code that works and is well-commented and is as simple as possible. They have a desire to learn.

"Nowadays, there seems to be"

There was never a day when that wasn't true. Not within a couple lifetimes, at least. Might be useful to gather data from other areas. Software development suffers from a severe case of toxic neophilia therefore the solution to that problem found by philosophers 2000 years ago must be wrong solely because its old. The problem is human wisdom is deep and can't be reinvented every other year solely to avoid a disease, there's just too much. So we must operate without wisdom, or at least not be seen in public relying on wisdom.

Maybe 25, 30 years ago I had the privilege of working for a guy with a philosophy degree (at a workplace having nothing to do with software dev or philosophy...) and we had a long and interesting break time conversation one day on the topic of the subjective difference between reading about philosophy (or presumably googling it) vs the experience of actually doing philosophy by writing papers about new thoughts (presumably breaking new ground writing code). Some mixture of the way he dealt with it, or the way philosophers figured out how to deal with it 2000 years ago, was to not worry. The two activities feel subjectively different, because they are different, and as long as you get that "A" or get that paycheck it doesn't really matter. The same pride of a job well done to the best known abilities applies no matter if you're climbing via a staircase or a ramp, and sweating over them being "different" is a false enlightenment, its the wrong thing to sweat over. There is no solution because there is nothing to see there. In modern terms I guess it could be a called a toxic meme virus, it just eats up brain cycles producing nothing of value. Its a socially acceptable form of a mild anxiety disease.

There's a lot at play here. Tech startups aren't hiring as fast as they used to, VC money is starting to dry up, large tech corporations seem to be having bigger and bigger layoffs, advanced fields like AR and VR are pretty stagnant, if you frequent HN you'll likely be told the tech you're using is dated and wrong on a daily basis. How could anyone not feel like an imposter?

> large tech corporations seem to be having bigger and bigger layoffs

Yahoo and Intel were having troubles for a long long time. But other than those were there any other big layoffs recently?

Microsoft laid off 7,800 employees within the past year: http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/

Qualcomm laid off over one thousand employees within the past year: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/sep/17/Qualcom...

Here's a large list: http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-for...

And here's an article with more: http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-a-bad-month-for-tech...

At least here in Portland the most recent significant one was Jive.

Back when I was still living in DC, the big one was Living Social, which is still ongoing. It's sad, because DC doesn't have a huge startup scene, and its biggest one is in the discount daily deals sector and also hemorrhaging.

"Tech startups aren't hiring as fast as they used to" - I think they are hiring smarter than they used to, but I don't think some of it is entirely "ethical", most of what is done today is really through competitive programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming) or cheaper competitions (Kaggle), CTF, etc. Many of which were not really going on when alot of us decided to take up tech, it was a clearer path even if you were self-taught. Whatever form it comes in, it feels like AI will indeed weed alot of us out, which is a shame because it means no more "ideas" or R&D and more an "end result/goal and how fast can you get there" game (ie optimization).

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