Comment by GotToStartup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GotToStartup | Hacker News Reader

"I have since found that many, many people I respect likewise worry they’re faking it. Anybody in my audience got the same issue?"

It’s funny, when I started out in the professional programming world I had a ton of confidence. I felt unstoppable. Back then, I didn’t know shit about programming but hey, how hard could it be. Then I started learning and slowly my confidence starting dwindling away. The more I learned, the less confident I became. I was humbled by the smart people I learned from. I realized how little I actually know. Now I’m noticing how big of an issue confidence has has become.

"I have found that actually showing confidence issues, on the other hand, does not do great things for one’s business"

I’ve found that showing lack of confidence hurts in most areas of life. The less confidence I speak with, the less people take me seriously though. It’s ridiculous. Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking it. It’s a huge internal struggle and it’s interesting to hear others perspectives on this.

Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking it.

I have felt the same way. It's very hard to fight away that feeling, but I can see the trance people go into when I cut away the "truthful", disclaimer-ed, somewhat more equivocal and/or safe speech, and start talking like an expert, like I believe I'm an expert even if I don't believe it - I see people fall into a trance and I'm selling them. That's what you have to do, but it can definitely feel.. weird. Fake or whatever word you want to use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

I know this feeling intimately, having tried a little consulting and having a serious ethical bend towards the truth.

The fact is, the better I get at programming (and math and science) the more I know I don't know, and the less confident I am about any given problem. The thing I make myself remember though, is that I'm damn good at solving problems. I may not have implemented this algorithm yet, or used this technology stack or programming language, but rest assured in a couple hours I will know what I should look out for and how I should proceed.

When I speak with the confidence in my ability to learn, something I have proven to myself, I no longer feel like I am faking or deluding some innocent luddite. I am giving comfort to somebody who needs my problem solving skills.

At least, that's how I justify it :)

I have the exact same problem. IMO what happens is you start to learn all the ways things can go wrong, edge cases, bugs, etc and you realize how fragile your code (and other's is). Throw on poor time estimates and you learn how difficult it is to produce quality, reliable software on time.

The way I think about it is if you do question your abilities and know you're fallible, you're ahead of 90% of the other programmers out there. Because you are thinking about all the edge cases, performance, reliability, maintainability, etc, you are going to create much higher quality code than someone who is 100% confident in their abilities.

Also, if you've seen quality code and worked with people smarter than you, you'll no doubt improve (as long as you're humble enough to learn from them :) )

So I think the reason that people have a wide variety of interaction styles is that they all have their own niche where they can be useful as tools, and also contribute to the greater good. E.g. society would probably fall apart if no one was willing to be an asshole at least some of the time, even though people who are often assholes tend not to benefit personally from their behavior. (Perhaps this is proof that altruism exists.)

That said, I think you need to figure out what changes you want to make in society, and then be cognizant of how your style of communicating works together with what people are doing in order to choose situationally optimal strategies.

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