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Show HN: Impostor Roster – Suffering from Impostor Syndrome? You're not alone

impostorroster.com

117 pointsvcavallo95 comments

It always reassures me that even Albert Einstein appeared to suffer from impostor syndrome.

“the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”

Source of the quote is here, about three quarters of the way down: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/time-bandits-2

Did he actually suffer from imposter syndrome, or was he being humorously humble?

Yeah I think it's the latter.

Don't be so sure. Einstein, in spite of all his achievements, was human. He made mistakes and misunderstood some things. Overall he understood physics more deeply that any of his time, but from his point of view maybe it came so naturally that he never felt he had totally "earned" his recognition. That said, he was known for humility, but that doesn't mean it was disingenuous.

Isn't that the point of "impostor syndrome"? No matter where you stand, your measurement of your ability is subjective to whatever standards you personally hold, which may be different from an objective assessment? And maybe there is no true objectivity? Maybe it's all... relative?

Einstein already made his most significant contributions by age 26 and spent the rest of his life arguing against quantum theory, the dominant school of the 20th century. Most modern physicists regard the latter portion of his life a waste in way of contributions.

That’s a little misleading — the latter period started around age 40. E.g. Bose-Einstein statistics was from 1918, which would be age 39 if 1905 was 26. The EPR paper was many years later still. Also, you can’t leave general relativity out of his most significant work.

If you read his biography by Walter Issacson, he was considered fairly mediocre for many years in his youth and quite heavily internalized it.

I can really understand why such great minds could have imposter syndrome. They put so much thoughts and work into their findings, and stumble upon so many obstacles, struggling for months or years to make it work, to finally reach a result that makes so much sense and eventually seems simple to them. In the end, they just think anyone with the same dedication, work and curiosity could have done it, and that they actually took quite some time to figure it out, and that the theory is actually imperfect and could be better, and the only reason they did it is because of some random hindsight anybody could have had...

What they forget is that their journey has only been possible by a combination of intuition, skills, dedication and raw intelligence that together form a genius other people just don't have. But they do have a point in the fact that people probably underestimate the amount of work and struggle necessary to reach their results. Imposter syndrome is when you think you put too time and work to realize how logic a series of deductions is, while most of those are actually clever and their accumulations put you light-years ahead of those wouldn't didn't make them, for whom it's just magic.

As a plagiarist he had to suffer. Don't tell me you have no clue what I am talking about.

He probably wasn't at all. https://www.quora.com/Was-Einstein-a-fake-and-a-plagiarist

I didn't know that there was an accusation because we was Jewish. I meant that he was plagiarist and it has nothing to do with his origins and beliefs.

Would you mind elaborating or giving a source for that?

Neil Armstrong also apparently suffered from imposter syndrome:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-ad...

Honestly, I could understand why. Einstein is regarded as one of the best scientists in history, when there are so many other great scientists. He might have been a genius, but even he would question whether he was the best, especially since he did most of his best work at an early age.

Just looking at the software entries and when I see "still can't X effectively" I'm left thinking, "And neither can anyone else".

One of the most interesting things I've discovered as I've gotten older is that I sometimes have a great success and then I think, "Awesome! This is the way to do it!" Then I try to duplicate that success and... it doesn't work. Now I'm left wondering whether my previous success was because of my actions or in spite of my actions (or not related at all).

So frequently we read from people who are really good at promoting themselves and they say "This is the new super sauce!" They really are convinced themselves, but that's mostly overconfidence. It's worse when the thing they discover makes tons of sense, but doesn't really work the way you might imagine it would.

It's an exciting time to be a programmer because there is still so much to discover. It's also a stressful time because everyone sucks badly at this stuff. Those who think they've got it figured out usually (in my experience) have either very low expectations or very poor observations skills ;-)

We need a Dunning-Kruger roster, but I'm not sure how people would realize they belong on it.

You've got it backwards. Try to name someone who shouldn't be on it. Being overconfident because you lack understanding/experience is just another word for "young".

Sometimes I wonder if the current state of software/programming will, in the future, be seen similarly to cuneiform or hieroglyphics, in the sense of it being an archaic, overly complicated form of expression needlessly reserved to specialists. Coding might be something everybody is required to know in the future, like reading or writing are now. What I envision happening is that whatever become the popular languages will sacrifice similarity (in the sense that even across functional/imperative/OOP/etc families, languages are in general low-level/explicit enough that coding in them is similar) in favor of a highly opinionated programming style designed to make it easier to program in.

For example, imagine a language and IDE designed in tandem to compliment each other. You could incorporate all kinds of visual models into the design of the code, and actually make it easy/automatic to include things like the standard library, which you could make very large. The language could require such a high amount of structure that once you learned it to a reasonable extent, there would only rarely be a need to look up how to do something completely new. If kids learned how to use things analogous to e.g. python/matplotlib instead of excel, or jupyter notebooks for science reports / presentations, just imagine how much more productive we could be as a society.

I'm happy knowing that even if we suck now, we can perhaps live to see a future where we don't suck. I just hope it's soon

You’re describing Mathematica. It’s lovely stuff but a bit of a closed system. And expensive too.

Impostor Impostor Syndrome: pretending to have impostor syndrome as a self-serving justification.

Imposter Imposter Syndrome Fallacy Fallacy?

Yes, the site title is misleading (imposterous one might say ...). Fun idea nonetheless.

Does the definition of imposter syndrome include the awareness that one should feel better about one's accomplishments? It seems ironic to self-diagnose imposter syndrome because that is internalizing your accomplishments - which is the precise antithesis of the Wikipedia definition:

> individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments [and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud".]

I've made a lot of progress since I realized that I potentially do not have imposter syndrome and instead have self-esteem problems.

I don't know. I mean, rationally, I understand my accomplishments, and register when people compliment me. But I used to have a hard time internalizing that. It didn't feel like it was really me doing it on an emotional level... If that makes sense.

Especially earlier in my career I'd attribute nearly everything to luck. Finishing that project on schedule, getting good marks on an annual review... It made leaving my first job hard because I thought I'd caught lightning in a bottle. But with each transition I was still getting good marks from managers and peers, finishing projects on schedule, etc. I began to accept that I wasn't a fraud who got lucky and would blow it one day.

Even though all along I was able to rationally deduce it, it didn't feel intrinsic. Is that imposter's syndrome?

I’ve always wondered this same point. Not trying to be disrespectful to people who feel this way. But yeah idk, sometimes it feels like the term is thrown around too loosely. Anyway, irrelevant to conversation.

>Does the definition of imposter syndrome include the awareness that one should feel better about one's accomplishments?

Knowing how you should rationally feel and actually feeling that way are two completely different things.

Impostor syndrome is mostly marked by the feeling of being a fraud which can run in parallel to feelings of "I know I'm smart, but I feel so dumb compared to everyone else."

It's a constant self-doubt in spite of knowledge of what one is capable of; self doubt that one should be in a particular position, because while one knows what they're capable of, they think they should be capable of more when comparing oneself to one's peers.

One doesn't need accomplishments to feel like an impostor and a lack of notable accomplishments doesn't mean that one shouldn't be in a particular position.

"Someone in the Strawberry field for 10 months still can't forever."

I love this. Thank you whoever sent that in

I... don't get it. :(

e: Oh, a beatles reference. Ok.

I believe it's a Beatles reference. Strawberry Fields forever

A reference to The Beatles song.

In the getting references business for 31 years. Still not getting references.

Also a great one:

"Someone in the Out field for 36 months still can't catch a fly ball reliably"

I'm definitely going to add a "funny" tag (and hide them by default) because there are some great ones - but it does detract a bit from the overall goal

I somewhat suspect the funny tag will become a ghost town pretty quickly. The reason people add these funny lines is because of their juxtaposition with the realistic ones, and I think making it a recognized, expected thing with its own "space" might be missing the point.

That's not to say that something shouldn't be done about the troll-y submissions. Just making the point that a change to a system may have an unintended effect on how people use the system.

Maybe just lower contrast for those items or something. Would be nice to keep the site “useful” along with the funny stuff

Hm... "Someone in the Computer Science field for 2 months still can't solve the halting problem."

Some of the most ambitious among us suffer from this syndrome XD

We added a twitter account now https://twitter.com/impostor_roster so feel free to comment on posts there!

This is a serious issue and I'm really glad someone's making an attempt to make people realise it's not uncommon. I am slightly ashamed to admit however that I completely lost it at "Someone in the Roller Coaster field for 13 months still can't get off mr bones wild ride.".

Context: https://imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl

haha yep, as the creator of this site I'm now trying to figure out the best way to keep the fun stuff while also keeping the site helpful.

for about 20 minutes at the beginning of the HN traffic there was a beautiful moment of 100% real posts and supportive comments here. and then...

Cool, good job all the same! When I looked it was still a healthy mix of fun and serious :-)

This is really refreshingly candid, and frankly uplifting. Thank you for your efforts.

So much better than the "failure resume" that was a thing a few years ago, which often looked like a thinly veiled brag.

Thanks, I’m glad you appreacite it. Warms my heart :)

"Someone in the Devops field for 60 months still can't explain what devops is."

Can anyone explain what devops is? It's always struck me as being a meaningless buzzword.

It's maintaining all the infrastructure required to manage a large dev team.

pretty much, its the new "Agile"... and people use the term often have no idea what it means. to me 'devops' a focus on automated deployment (in prod as in dev) and integrating prod. operations teams more closely with the development silo

Portmanteau of developer + operations, where infrastructure and application life cycle are coded using engineering best practices in a way that is repeatable and debuggable. Someone in devops will know tools such as Chef, Puppet, Virtualization, Containerization, Load Balancers, Network and Application Firewalls, IAM. Basically all the stuff that supports running an application. Application and System level cross cutting concerns.

Dont pretend you couldn't give the same answer, imposter.

Here's a little blog post I wrote about it on the eve of deploying: http://vcavallo.github.io/blog/2017/03/01/launching-the-impo...

Thanks for checking it out! Please add something!

Edit: If anyone is interested in keeping up with any changes and developments to this site (a redesign is coming soon) you can sign up for the newsletter at http://exnil.io where I will be announcing that and other fun stuff)

I absolutely adore this. Watch out for the trolls though — they're coming.

Thanks! and yea, they’re already here... it’s good though, inspires me to think of a good lean way to keep abuse down without adding user accounts and stuff.

Maybe add a [humor] tag

Yep I'm thinking I'll make a tag like that and hide them by default and have a toggle to show the goofy/obscene ones. Which means manually adding that tag, but since relatively `0` people have posted (compared to, like, the internet) it should be ok

Looks like the trolls have arrived:

> Someone in the Presidency Of The United States Of America field for 12 months still can't tell you what the emoluments clause is .

I mean, the troll is not wrong, but it definitely takes away some of the charm that this website (briefly) had.

Manual moderation is _fun_...

I'm leaving anything but explicitly elicit stuff for now.

"Someone in the White Girl field for 240 months still can't even."

Love it.

You should allow hyphens and dashes in the inability field. There are words that I would like to hyphenate but which I can't.

This was a quick and dirty way to prevent abuse. will reinstate when I'm not panicking :)

I feel this warrants an entry.

I'll add it

http://www.impostorroster.com/post/sanitize-fields-thoughtfu...

Apologies for being "that guy" in the skriptkiddie field who still can't write an xss<script>alert(1)</script>

Someone in the inability field for 20 minutes still can't hyphenate.

I hope this speech pattern becomes a meme

Too bad the site just reduced to jokes and spam after it was posted on HN.

You should make a " you are not alone" voting button instead of comments

I'm thinking of doing both. Definitely needs a voting feature.

You need to allow special characters in the inability field.

My field was "Python" and my entry was "I still can't remember the argument order for json.dump()", but it gave the error "Inability Only letters, numbers and spaces allowed for inability field".

Agreed. I did that as a simple way to prevent abuse. I'll have bring back special characters.

Here’s how I remember: dumps() takes no file-like argument, thus for dump() and dumps() to be consistent, the object to dump() must come first.

That argument would make as much sense if you replaced first by last.

Optional arguments are almost always trailing arguments:

    dumps(obj)
    dump(obj, fp)

Might be implemented (in a Pythonic way) by the same function:

    fn(obj, fp=None):
        ...

Another way to think about it is that you're dumping from obj to fp. The thing I always get backwards is C's memcpy(dst, src, len) which I've always thought has its first two arguments in the wrong order.

Where is the Dunning-Kruger registry? Cause I know exactly what that should look like.

This site was frighteningly reassuring. Thank you.

I hope this becomes the new FML/TFLN

That’s the idea! :)

The argument order for ln one really made me happy today..

I only feel an imposter when people ask me how much I want to be paid.

I have this nagging feeling that my imposter syndrome is forced, fake, that I really am an imposter, other syndrome suffers have it, I don't.

Add it! "Someone in the Impostor field for X months still can't accept that other people feel the same way"

Thanks for making this!

Thanks for checking it out!!

Perhaps you can add a comments section below every post (?)

Definitely on the shortlist now!

there's this for now if it helps: https://twitter.com/impostor_roster

I've added comments now :D

This is good work. Keep it up.

Thanks for the encouragement. Will do. And feel free to add comments on the github repo if you have ideas

i still can't.. get past the google captcha to post my reply

Hm... is it just because their captcha is hard, or does it seem broken? if it seems broken submit a github issue or contact at the twitter link on the site

gonna guess just hard, but after the first 2 or 3 screens i just said fsck it. does it intentionally try to cut tiny bits of the edge off each 'correct' frame to get good training data?

i did try the audio too though and had no idea what it was saying.

When did we stop calling it "the peter principle" ?

We didn't. The Peter Principle refers to a completely different phenomenon-- "Rise to the level of your own incompetence."

What do people who rise above their own incompetence feel if not imposter syndrome?

Impostor syndrome means the person feels incompetent despite not being. If one is actually incompetent, then feeling like so is just having an accurate perception :)

Plus, I'd say many don't even realize they're incompetent.

I find that a lot of people who say they suffer from imposter syndrome are really just humble-bragging.

They 100% know that they are good, but it's socially better to show false modesty.

Uncouth and Unware

Exactly!

I suspect that "impostor syndrome" is just what many people feel when the comforting illusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect starts to fall apart.

Actually, the tests made by Dunning and Kruger that led to the coining of that "effect" also showed that competent people tended to rank themselves below their actual level - exactly as described by the Impostor Syndrome.

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