Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
zapier.com
zapier.com
But it's more nuanced than that.
I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always done that, and it's how I grow, 2) against those with strengths in areas that I have weaknesses.
I think my impostor syndrome is absolutely fact-based. I am not as good in the technical areas I care about as those I measure myself against.
My fallacy is that there is a billion things that I am good at, but I don't consider them difficult (how could they be, if I am good at them), or I consider them insufficient to a fully rounded engineer, if I don't also have the skills that I know I'm missing (but some of my peers are not).
It doesn't help that I'm the epitome of a 'Generalist' - I'm good at a lot of things, but I don't know if I'm the BEST at anything.
I get lots of positive reinforcement - from my management chain, and from those more junior than me. But it never resonates. I always think "damn, I've actually fooled them all". And then I feel guilty that the management is putting so much trust in me, and that the juniors actually look up to a fraud.
The only feedback that resonates is from my technical peers. Luckily I get this just often enough that I don't fall into a catatonic mess of anxiety. And sometimes I believe it...
> but I don't consider them difficult (how could they be, if I am good at them)
I've struggled with this over the years. As a kid, once something clicked it felt like you had leveled up in some way, and now had a new skill. As an adult, I have a hard time not looking at everything I'm capable of and thinking "it's so simple, it obviously just works like this".
It's as if I have no spectrum of [I don't know this at all] and [I'm an expert at this], my self reflection that leads to impostor syndrome just sees them as [I don't know this at all] and [This is obvious].
FWIW, not FAANG, but Senior Firmware Engineer for a household name with FAANG affiliations.
The way you fix this perception is teach the skill to someone with zero foundational knowledge of the skill’s background requirements. Or write if there is no person around. There is always documentation going begging.
IMHO, one of the biggest oversights I see in the industry today is the lack of inward-facing technical writer and editor teams, sitting alongside pair programmers and/or agile stand ups. Skills transmission works through a highly opaque diffusion membrane of tribal knowledge (reaching its peak form in StackExchange), and synchronous, people-intensive discussions, where insight is rarely if ever captured and memorialized.
Powerful, effective documentation prepared by professional programmers with professional communications skills asynchronously transmits insight and not just information. We have incredible tooling now, but ironically do not staff them.
One way to calibrate your imposter syndrome is write lots of documentation. In it, make sure you call out references for further to skill stacks you consider prerequisites lest you dilute your focus and the the prose becomes too unwieldy. And call out references to what you have used to learn meta information and abstractions beyond the current documentation’s focused skill band. If that list will routinely take an average practitioner at a particular skill level more than a year to absorb, then you have a fair baseline. Now update the documentation each time someone asks for clarification on a point in it. If there are lots of readers and few questions, then you possibly have a reasonable grasp of the material.
We've also been pushing hard to get a full time technical writer, someone who specifically doesn't get screwed three months into the job with "Ok, you write docs, AND do a little coding work on the side in your down time". No, we've clearly got the workload necessary for a full time writer, let's bring someone on board and really let them become that core differentiator.
I started my career in software 20 years ago with a good attitude and an “HTML for Dummies” book. It made me very cognizant that I was outgunned by a lot of my peers so it made me ask a lot of questions - half of them I’d figure out just figuring out how to pose a question while walking over to someone else’s cube.
I’ve gotten “better” as an engineer and there’s less I “don’t know” but I’m still always wondering, even on “simple” stuff if there’s not a “simpler” way to do it.
> I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company.
Does anyone other than a MS employee put an M in FAANG?
According to Wikipedia at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
Edit: Not popular maybe, but appropriate still.
That being said, it's hard to compare directly. I know many M folks, and some F, G, A and A folks. The M folks probably work at most 75% of the hours of the others. I for one would much rather work a standard 9-5 and make a lot than work 996 (not that extreme, but kinda) and make downright absurd amounts...
Not meant as a snide/flippant remark; this shit is what keeps me up at night.
Or the Bezos quote about “imagining myself 80 on a rocking chair – will I regret not doing this?”
As a young adult mostly lacking in wisdom of my own, I’ve found myself coming back to these quotes time and time again. Their philosophy is sound.
If you don’t want balance, then you should go all in. In general, people should take more risk. This is especially true in tech where the downside is often vastly overstated – even if you fail completely, you can get a new job in two days.
My advice to anyone at FAANG feeling unfulfilled is to quit and take a risk to do something awesome. Even if you fail you’ll still grow more than you would working for a megacorp with a recruiting funnel that intrinsically selects for conformists and rule followers.
Also, did you get a lot of those participation trophies when you were a kid? I read a take on those recently, along the lines of, "if the adults always praise everyone, then their praise is meaningless and can't be trusted". Ie, a recipe for impostor syndrome in later life. I certainly experience that. Anytime I participate in an activity that I'm naturally talented at, I figure it's just not that difficult and I've done nothing special.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+...
Not to pick nits or anything!
They were an OS only, non-internet company, compared to the rest. When the acronym was created, it was still that way.
Even now, they make most of their butter from OS installs, although yes, they have branched out a lot.
Originally: Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell
Then (in 2007): Apple, Research in Motion (Blackberry), Google, Amazon
Others were major market movers and shakers.
There’s never been any good reason not to include Microsoft except that for a long time it was considered old and stodgy.
Netflix doesn’t make sense in terms of market cap, and it also doesn’t make sense in 2021 when it’s more a media company than a technology company. Don’t get me wrong, they totally nailed it on a ton of tech fronts, and deserve their technical accolades…it just looks strange next to the others.
Oh, thinking about Netflix, I just figured it out. It’s about SWE salaries, and not really related to much else.
…although if that’s it, then Amazon doesn’t really deserve it’s spot any more than Microsoft.
Which isn't bad -- I assume Disney also has a number of highly-paid SWEs -- but for me the difference between FAAMG and Netflix is that (as far as I can tell) Netflix doesn't employee a giant pile of SWEs doing blue sky research / doomed projects only tangentially related to the core business.
FAANGMULA
and
TARANTULAS
fun meme
There are also a handful of sub $100bn marketcap publicly traded tech companies that pay on par of FAANGs and may have more enticing vesting schedules too. Greater upside as well.
But yeah, that's all FAANG is and I'm amazed anyone thinks it's anything more standardized or meaningful or precisely defined. It's shorthand for the biggest and most influential companies in the tech industry at the moment, at least from the perspective of people on the outside looking in. If someone wants to the throw an M into FAANG I totally get it.
Depending on what you're discussing when you're listing those companies, it may make sense to include them.
FAANG is about the pay, not the prestige of the company. They pay so far above the rest of the market that they are really only competing for talent with themselves. Average total comp at Netflix is well north of $500k for an individual contributor.
- MS: $185k
- Amazon: $230k
- Google: $267k
I work for a large media company as at Sr director level equivalent engineer. The pay is certainly not north of 500k
You'll actually notice that none of the FAANG are on the top 10 of that list. FAANGs definitely pay well, but these days "FAANG" is outdated, IMO. I've seen it "FAANGMULA" sometimes (FAANG + Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb) but even that still leaves out other high payers like Stripe, Box, Bytedance, etc.
In the U.S., financial services shops that figured out tech is money. Or, rather, that time is money and tech shrinks time. Think banks’ trading groups, hedge funds, etc.
Along with those, a larger sector of FS bitten with the transformation bug. Even in the non trading related financial services, if a company’s emphasis is on figuring out how to tech before getting eaten by challengers or juggernauts, the pay may indicate how existential the need.
On the other hand, many in the financial industrial complex haven’t realized this yet, and are still trying to “take costs out”, doing reductions in force of knowledgable workers, offshoring any roles not understood by the executives, etc., or paying bottom dollar domestically for coders and IT support, rather than well enough for software or systems engineers.
Large companies are likely to have a mix of these models all at the same time, so understand what type of group you’re looking at.
Also note that financial titles are often inverse ranks of engineering titles, with SVPs below directors and VPs as the junior-most roles.
Note(1): Pro-employee compensation disclosure laws are starting to get passed where (a) you don’t have to say what you used to earn, and (b) a company may have to disclose the comp for your role and similar roles the moment you ask, not after you make it to offer. Check the laws governing both your zip code and the company’s and know your rights to help even out information asymmetry.
Note(2): Performance multipliers are worth paying for. Automation is worth paying for. Anything thought through and written once to do work, that then does that work many times in less time, or for many people in less time, or both, is worth paying for. FANG code runs at staggering scale. FS code makes staggering money in milliseconds. Look for places where each line of code is multiplying output — how many fold drives how much that code, and its engineers, should be worth.
Never heard of FAAMNG though.
FAGMA or FAAM have been suggested as updated terms in light of the metrics / characteristics that initially led to the term FA(A)NG being coined.
These terms were certainly not originally intended to describe high salaries for engineers ;)
because I wouldn't put video streaming service among tech behemoths that create operating systems, compilers, programming languages, databases, put shitton into ML research and many, many other
I'm not saying that video streaming is easy, but I believe any of those could do it easily from technical standpoint.
Google, Facebook and Amazon already do, idk about Apple and MS.
It's like the paradox of AI, which is that as soon as we've reduced something previously regarded as 'intelligent' to something that can be coded in software, it ceases to be thought of as intelligence any longer.
If you look at something like chess, which was often thought of as very difficult, the first thing we designed that was really good at the game made us realize that you needed next to no logic to win if you had a computer fast enough to try a billion moves. But we thought object recognition would be super easy, far less than AI tier, and we still can't do it reasonably well.
I'm much more convinced that humans suck at estimating the hardness of problems, and not very convinced we keep cheating the classification of AI.
This for sure. I find too often that I’ve been at this stuff longer than actual teenagers that blow me away nowadays.
I don’t think this is why you feel like an imposter, rather this is a rationalisation for why you feel like an imposter.
It’s possibly to do 1 and 2 and not feel like an imposter, so this can’t be the whole reason. It might be necessary for some people some of the time, but it’s not a sufficient explanation.
You even called yourself out on it later in your comment where you say it’s a fallacy.
I’d hazard a guess the real issue is some kind of underlying generalised anxiety.
So this is the sticking point for me: is it really _impostor syndrome_ if it's not disproportionate and negatively impactful? What you're describing just seems like normal, mostly healthy, reasonable critical self reflection?
To me the syndrome part of it is the overwhelming runaway thoughts part.
I feel like it's not unhealthy - exactly as you describe. I've spoken to many peers who all feel the same at one point or another.
So is it that we don't have impostor syndrome because we've normalized it? Or is it the same feelings but we are just better at dealing with them?
I think it's the latter. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. With seniority comes the burden of that knowledge. You can easily become lost - where you can no longer measure your output by direct lines of code written, and you also get exposed to more and more top minds that make you feel small.
I think the feelings are exactly the same that a junior engineer faces at their first job where they are overwhelmed and feel like everyone else is smarter than them.
The difference is that once you've been through it enough times, you have the confidence that the emotion isn't valid, and you have competence to fall back on eventually.
I ask you that because it is much simpler to answer to a binary question like, do I have imposter syndrome? Or put in other words, am I modest?
You can make the link with how people see themselves. A lot of very attractive people tell you they are not very beautiful, and spend their time trying to get validation from others. But they internally think they are the top 5%.
My opinion is a lot of those things exists because people are not honest with each other. So you can't really trust what people tell you about you. And you are always wondering how people see you.
Anyone who has survived a round of layoffs is very familiar with survivor's guilt, which manifests as an intense form of impostor syndrome. "Why was it X instead of me? How did I manage to trick my way into staying when X (and Y and Z) went?"
It doesn't have much to do with your honest self-evaluation. It's kind of unavoidable. Whether or not it's accurate doesn't really matter.
That's an interesting thought experiment. Though not as straightforward as it sounds like at first.
For example, I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I'm also pretty expensive.
But more importantly, companies don't have a good handle on people's performance. They have biased estimates, at best. See https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ for an exploration of this topic from a hiring point of view, but it also exists to a lesser extent when people are already working for you.
For example, one could be better than 90% of employees, but if they're highly specialized on a team/product that is getting phased out and they don't have transferable skills to move internally, they may get laid off even if they're not in the bottom % of whoever was getting laid off.
It definitely is an interesting thing to think about, but I agree that there are some holes to the logic.
Hiring too. If you’re not in the magic club of universities or don’t have an in, your abilities don’t matter at all.
I got a FAANG position without completing a degree. All my peers had degrees in CS. I thought I didn’t belong because I lacked formal accreditation. Having skill wasn’t as measurable as having a degree.
Thankfully, I’ve learned to see getting there while self-taught as validation since then.
The result: they are even further behind than they were with me, and occasionally people still contact me from the old company for tech advice. I guess it was imposter syndrome after all!
Never once were exit activities well-considered and useful.
sometimes I think most management failures are because they are acting like they are supposed to and not how they should
Did they say you were useless and changed the notice to 9 days, or are you inferring the former from the latter?
I'm currently sitting on three job offers - I originally thought it would be easy to choose, but I find myself absolutely paralyzed right now with an inability to make a decision on any of them because I feel as though I will be expected to know more than I think I know, or to perform at a level beyond what I feel comfortable performing at. I've had a lot of great feedback from my peers and those in more junior roles, as well upper management, but still do not feel confident.
How do you if you are capable of moving from a familiar set applications and systems to one where you've never worked with any of the applications and only know the system by theory?
Some folks are pushing me to move entirely out of code and into management but my passion is writing code, working in databases, and designing systems but the opportunities I have before me now pay more for management rather than getting my hands dirty in the code.
Can't sleep or eat because of constant anxiety over "what if I can't perform to their expectations and get fired?"
- How do others deal with this?
If they sent you an offer, I'd just assume I don't have a clear enough picture on what they will expect of me and when, and just trust that they did their due diligence in my evaluation.
Of course, if it doesn't work out, you had three offers so you'll likely be able to get a new job no problem.
If the company fails their 'job', you end up with the black mark of a missing block of time on your resume, plus the major hassle of switching jobs and re-interviewing. It isn't "No problem" as you say. It's a major problem that could set you back by months.
And read this: https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-brea...
2. I think career progression and satisfaction is all about balancing and trading off playing to your strengths, then focusing on your weaknesses.
If you only play to your strengths, you won't grow in breadth enough. You can become a top subject matter expert, but your utility will be limited to that domain.
If you only focus on your weaknesses, you will become well rounded, but not good at anything, and you won't stand out from the pack in any way.
Only you know which of these two you more need today. Good luck with the decision :)
3. Someone else already mentioned - it's not your job to determine if you are qualified for a position. The company hiring you is. If the work is interesting to you, and they're making you an offer, and you didn't lie - then you are qualified. Learning and stretching yourself would be part of the job.
4. Nothing I say above will fix a foundational anxiety like "what if i'm not good enough and get fired". What helps me with this class of extreme worry is to consider the worst case scenario, visualize it, and recognize that ultimately it's not that bad.
So what if you get fired? Again, assuming you didn't misrepresent yourself, the company would be just as guilty of the mismatch in fit as you. You won't be blacklisted. They might even be willing to give you a referral. But if not, you got 3 offers once. You can get 3 offers again after you get fired. The worst case scenario isn't that awful.
I'm saving your reply into a Word doc so that I can use it going forward. What stood out specifically was your first sentence - I'm not tired of writing code and still feel more passionate about developing rather than managing. It pays less but I feel as though I will be happier in the end.
In any case, I wanted to thank you kind stranger, for your words!
Edit: phone auto correct
You have fooled them, but you discount the fact that they have fooled you too.
for me, my imposter syndrome comes mainly when I look around and see everyone working hard and struggling to do stuff well and I feel like I'm not even in 2nd gear and doing as well.
So I think I feel like I'm only putting in less then 25% effort and getting 100% of the normal results (relative to others) - it feels wrong,
it's like finishing a test or exam too soon and looking around seeing everyone only half way through the same exam. I then start to worry what have I done wrong?
with many years of contract work, I've realised It's not me!!
I used to try and hide it since no-one likes a smart arse - especially a contractor. but now I do blow a my little trumpet now and then
I really do think I have ADHD and I do become obsessive about things,
my job is my hobby, so I probably put more time in to things than what i realise,
but I still do feel like an imposter occasionally (less so with getting older)
Seeking better opportunities I migrated to web development, and boy, it's hard to be a novice again. Everyone I worked with was better than me at everything. It's hard to feel like the impostor when you know you're the less skilled one.
Now web development doesn't pay that well, so the natural path was cybersecurity. Still learning, and I feel like this will be my last career change because it takes years to stop feeling dumb and start feeling like an impostor again.
I do work with a lot of cybersec people and boy are they under a lot of pressure with badly designed applications - saying that it's amazing how many of the sec people do not even bother with learning the very basics eg like how TLS really works
Does cybersecurity pay better, at least in certain markets/contexts I was under the impression that doing web dev would land you several thousands more salary wise, though I'd certainly settle to work on the parts of security I'm not smart enough to lmao.
To be honest, I feel the change came before I felt proficient at web development, but I'm happy because I was always complaining about unsafe practices, and now I get to write the policies.
But more and more I get that I m put in places where nobody cares what I ll code but that instead I ll enthusiastically push everyone around, make them try new fun ideas, and have a general blindness to boredom - I guess being an idiot means everything sounds fascinating and I unblocked more than a few dead end just trying or proposing stupid ideas.
To survive I took brainless jobs and I find myself in a different form of pain, being eroded by uneducated, learning-resistant cogs.
Right now reading you say "measuring my self against people ahead of me" feels tempting, even after all the problems I got. It's a bit like exercise .. my brain needs it or it shrivels.
ps: I didn't know generalists could fare well
pps: have all your workplaces well accepting of your working style ?
re: PS. I should clarify. I was a damn good programmer who could pump out clean, readable, maintainable code, faster than most. But only once I found myself in a job I loved surrounded by people who encouraged learning, were curious, and loved to teach me. You gotta find your tribe. Don't let your brain rot.
I have a corollary: badly managed companies make good people go bad.
Even worse is the delusion where you believe awareness of bad influences protects you from the consequences...some things can not be mitigated. For example “the culture of mediocrity” :<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257623179_The_Cultu...>.
If you present yourself as the BEST (in the world?) at something, then you are an imposter.
If you present yourself as a perfectly rounded engineer, then you are an imposter.
But if you present yourself as good at the billion things you are good at (even if you find them easy), then you are not an imposter.
5 year old little brother looks up to 8 year old big sister, and turns to her for guidance and protection - and it is right that he should do so.
There are extremely capable athletes with terrible ego problems and there are people that legitimately fall into death spirals. There are those that talk the talk but don't walk the walk, as well as those that quietly sweat away in their pursuit of mastery.
Lacking confidence in something, judging oneself, etc are just being human. Pretty much everyone goes through that. Sure, some might project confidence in the face of the unknown, but that's just one of many coping mechanisms we have. "Laughing to not cry", screaming in fear when startled by a spider, YOLO, panic lies, etc are other similar mechanisms where we do seemingly illogical things in response to the respective stimulus.
And of course, people are multidimensional and topics/disciplines are multidimensional. You can't possibly be great at everything, but most are certainly capable of getting very good at something (even if that something is being a generalist in software engineering - which is itself a form of specialization in the grand scheme of society). And you might experience impostor syndrome at work but still be one of those people that think they're above average drivers or some such. Or you might experience it and be confident about your looks. Etc.
When you consider that reality isn't a flat 2D grayscale spectrum, it seems fairly normal that one would experience discomfort with their lackings when compared against one of infinite arbitrary scales.
IMHO, you could leverage that uncomfortable feeling positively (e.g. seeking the right people to help you, etc as you said), negatively (e.g. give up) or in a beside-the-point way (bragging about the cup being half-full). None of this has really anything to do with acting maliciously/destructively like the article seems to suggest, though.
Imposter syndrome would involve feeling like all your past achievements were pure luck, you have no merit, and your collegues were going to find out.
There's nuance to the definition; people use the term like they use the term OCD. Not understanding what it actually means. Vanity.
Just because some attribute exists in normal doses in most people, does not mean that it can exist in debilitating doses in a minority.
Of course, a big difference between imposter syndrome and the aforementioned illnesses is that imposter syndrome is not in the DSM-5. But if you look at the history of the DSM-5, you will notice that adding a new illness is a very slow and politicized process. And a large number of psychologists are treating it a bit to seriously for it to be just a "humble brag".
That doesnt mean everybody talking about their imposter syndrome would really classify as having it. Similarly people who checked webmd and now believe that they have cancer, also do not necessarily have cancer. That still doesnt mean that every cancer-sufferer is a fraud.
The variety I'm referring to is the one that comes from people like the one I originally responded to, who, by all accounts, is a successful functioning member of society. So, yeah, I think it's fair to say "claiming impostor syndrome is just describing a normal feeling" in contexts where the person is clearly not overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction.
Even if there is such a thing as actually crippling impostor syndrome, that's not what I see being brought up in these kinds of discussions.
I originally understood your comment to mean impostor syndrome is never used in a valid way. I have seen these statements being made about mental health disorders, including very serious once like depression. I think they can be really damaging, since they convince people not to seek help. This is why I disagreed.
Since when one's employer becomes a secret?! And in fact, a principal engineer title in these corps mean vastly different skill and prestiges.
For example, a principal engineer in Google is usually treated as equivalent to a Google director. While a principal in Amazon is just a more senior engineer than a Senior engineer. Because there is no staff level at Amazon, while Google has staff and senior staff...
In msft, a principal probably means just a senior engineer in other places.
I see you've rediscovered Rothbard's law: "People tend to specialise in what they're worst at." (Because anything too easy seems like it's not worth doing)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/27/change-...
The terrible part is mostly because I got too many roles and zero help to grow (I'm often the icebreaker of a tech or role), which lead me to myself doing the actual criticism to ensure I'm doing my best.
On the other hand this kind of continuous self-doubt is stressing, so reading a comment like yours is a relief :)
Thanks for writing it :)
I think I sail the same kind of ship as you, at work I'm like a jack of all trades and pretty isolated. Took me long to realize it wasn't my fault if management put too much on my shoulder and I have no peer to share with. It's a management issue if our bus factor is 1 on many project.
While I often get praise from my CEO the impostor syndrome is part of my daily routine.
Out of work, I'm currently in the process of finally releasing to GitHub a half-baked side-project I invested 100+ hours of personal time but was really too ashamed of to publish. It's not perfect, it'll never be and it's ok. Maybe it will even help me migrate to a better workplace.
Lot's of comment int his thread ring a bell for me!
Thank you all!
This reminds me on a cartoon in which a rocket scientists plays down his work "it's not brain surgery, after all", while in the next picture the neurosurgeon says "it's just brain surgery, not rocket science".
I just do my best and hope that's enough. If not, they can always fire me. Why worry about it?
I keep writing shit code - i am just lucky it doesn‘t look or run like shit, so nobody realizes. And i charge way too much for things that make my clients rich and work pretty good but are actually not good enough. And these idiots are falling for it happily and come back. I always thought of myself as an honest guy, though it seems that I am not. But then: who is.
Honestly: I just hope some day this feeling parts.
Yes, of course if you're an actual fraudster intending to commit fraud, you're probably comfortable with committing fraud. But feeling "impostor syndrome" colloquially means second-guessing whether you're good enough to deserve your position.
There are absolutely lots of people who are better at their jobs than they think they are. But I have to imagine there are also lots of people who are just as bad as they think they are, if not worse.
It may alleviate the thoughts if you knew for sure that you are not an impostor from a source you can trust or perhaps it will require therapy. Or maybe you can actually push through it, as you said. Anxiety, depression and low self esteem however can take a strong enough toll that simply pushing through and dealing with it may be too difficult without help.
So an outsider who says "just deal with it", won't know the ratio and magnitude of negative to positive thoughts, someone else might have.
Everyone has doubts, but frequency and strength may vary.
I cannot see how this logically follows in every circumstance that someone feels like an imposter. If you're expected to learn something by someone but don't learn it, because of motivation or other reasoning, but are then put in front of other people by your superior with the assumption that you have gained that knowledge in the meantime, you'd both feel like an imposter and actually be one.
My bias is to believe that if I don't feel that I'm qualified for something, then claiming that it will all be fine in the end is dishonest, and a fully realized version of the imposter syndrome with actual consequences for failure. The bias itself, as in most always feeling like an imposter no matter what your qualifications are, is what I would consider the intent of a concept like imposter syndrome. But it is still possible to go too far in the other direction and mistakenly believe you're simply worrying too much.
I feel that hiding behind a notion of imposter syndrome erases notions of personal responsibility when things actually go wrong, e.g. when one really is an imposter, or acted similarly without awareness or ill intent. The word "imposter" itself seems to imply that you must have ill intent to be a true imposter, which almost nobody actually is. "Unqualified" would probably be a more appropriate word, and would probably make people more hesistant to use this kind of terminology when discussing a lack of skills or confidence.
Can you say where your sense of personal responsibility comes from? Did you have any personal influences or role models who taught you this protocol? Are there any examples that come to mind that you can succinctly describe here, in a way that shows relevance to the main points you are making?
I don't always feel that I have the necessary skills to make properly reasoned arguments in general, but instead tend to have a habitual drive to just say whatever is on my mind in the hopes that it will be heard but not necessarily challenged, maybe in the way some bloggers treat their content as a feed of stream-of-consciousness thought. When someone does want to discuss what I say, the dynamic for me changes and I feel the urge to respond more carefully, which wasn't usually something I considered when first commenting.
In many cases, I am tempted to just not respond because it is the easiest option, but I feel that would essentially mean not taking responsibility for my own words. Actually debating someone is not something I'm used to, and is at times frightening to me, but I still feel that I ought not to ignore it when I am the cause.
Also, I think that I have a tendency to try not to say things with the intention of starting arguments, leaving the more subjective statements to the people that happen to find something relatable in what I consider to have actually happened to me, regardless of value or intent. But, as in this case, there are exceptions.
So my sense of responsibility has a long way to go, admittedly. And I might or might not be justified in my anxiety in wondering if what I'm typing out right now makes enough sense in the context of my other comment, but the way I'm feeling right now, it's hard to tell.
This is also one of the reasons I'm rather disillusioned with journaling if what I journal isn't my lived experience, which so long as my memory is capable enough usually isn't something that someone else would question. If it's something that can be debated, writing down my thoughts or opinions and leaving them in the confines of my private journal makes it sound like I'm just agreeing with myself.
My guess for how I developed this way of thinking would be my upbringing. There were no labels I could use that carried any value as far as protecting my sense of self-worth went. I wouldn't even consider the people I knew to be role models. Success or failure was solely determined based on whether I did something correctly or not, not how I approached the problem. Even with the labels that I've been given today, ones that are in my mind much more justifiable than the ones I gave myself long ago, that mindset continues to rule a lot of my life. I tend to accept the mistakes I make as my responsibility to correct, but because I prevent myself from entering into situations where mistakes are likely (as in, areas where I feel unqualified), I'm less tolerant to getting over mistakes after they've happened, because I've insulated myself from mistakes and their impact.
If none of this supports my original points, my belief is that it would be because of my lack of knowledge, regardless of what I was thinking when I impulsively wrote my first comment. By commenting, I tend to think that whatever fears I have about speaking in a public space are outweighed by me contributing another viewpoint or experience to the conversation, so I look past my fears and decide to comment. If my expectation was to have my thoughts taken seriously by others, maybe I would feel more justified in believing that initial anxiety was actually warranted the next time I intend to press "reply", and I would be better off not trying to be a part of a conversation I myself am not prepared to take seriously.
Anyway, I hope that, in some sense, this response was worth listening to. And I don't intend to come off as condescending or unwilling to converse with you; that was just the first thing that entered my mind.
I think the dialog you describe would be familiar to other people from their own thoughts.
Often with an element of "what will they do when they realise".
I've come to understand, though, that I'd been worrying about the answer to the wrong problem. I know I'm not as good as I could (maybe should) be, and I know that for any given metric I have peers who can and do outperform me. But the word "expectations" is a loaded one: when suffering from imposter syndrome it's important to stop worrying about what expectations I have for myself and instead look at the expectations set in the specification for my role.
I also remember that the company spends quite a lot of money on me every single month. So when they tell me that they're really happy with that arrangement and that they believe that I'm meeting their expectations, that helps me to set aside my expectations.
Conversely, if your manager tells you that there's a problem and you're not meeting their expectations, they are definitely correct that there's a problem. They might not be correct in their diagnosis, but you can't simply ignore the issue.
But there may also be nothing you can do about it either. I think a huge part of the problem is that I suspect the typical experience of hearing "there's a problem" is that by the time anyone is saying that, things are already in motion you may not be able to fix anyway.
What does this mean? What qualifies as "good enough"?
If you're not fired, you're good enough for your boss.
There are billions of people from poor regions who would put in way more effort than you. Many of them are smarter too. You make $100K / year to spend 35 hours / week drinking coffee and writing JavaScript, they make like $10K / year to spend 60 hours / week physical labor and getting yelled at. You'll never be good enough for them.
Also, there are 7+ billion people in the world. That means there are millions if not billions more talented than you. You're probably not even the most talented in your group.
But why does any of that matter? Literally nobody is good enough by those standards.
There's no objective "good enough". Those people from poor regions who work their asses off deserve more, you don't deserve less. In my eyes, don't be an asshole, contribute to society in some way, and you're good enough.
Except maybe one objective "good enough": if you're not fired, you're good enough for your boss. Honestly, some bosses have unrealistic standards so even that doesn't count.
Having a job or even launching a successful project does not mean that one is good enough - especially in software where having a job doesn’t convince anyone to offer one a job without grueling interviews and where most of the software produced is riddled with bugs and security holes.
If one considers the hiring practices of top companies, they are absolutely claiming that the great majority of applicants are imposters.
> If one considers the hiring practices of top companies, they are absolutely claiming that the great majority of applicants are imposters.
It’s a logical fallacy that leetcode is only to filter imposters. And separately, gamification of interviews can definitely lead to real imposters.
The "imposter" of "imposter syndrome" believes others didn't figure what they really are, that they're flawed, underskilled, will fail, etc. ; and that makes you somewhat of a fraud, i.e. an imposter, because they're secretly not the skilled person that was hired.
The "actual imposter" from the "imposter syndrome" would be someone who actually lied about their skills and flaws, or at the very least don't have these skills. I don't know if these "imposters" have the imposter syndrome or not - but for the sake of argument I would assume that they have the same doubts as everyone else and that they do have imposter syndrome.
The "actual imposter" who the author is mentioning is a con, someone who was secretly malfeasant and there for their own benefit. What's more is that from what the author is saying, they seem pretty skilled, and confident. So of course they don't have imposter syndrome: they fixed an organization, bring in money, their plan is going well.
Wait, does that mean this is saying I am an imposter? Oh no, what if I am?
But wait, wasn't that thought imposter syndrome? That means I'm not an imposter.
Wait, now I'm back to not having imposter syndrome. Oh no.
*laughs in Sinhalese*
1. If an animal is a dog, then it has four legs.
2. My cat has four legs.
3. Therefore, my cat is a dog.
The problem is the conclusion is the result of a reversal of the conditional statement. Similarly, you've said, essentially,
1. If I am an imposter, then I will not feel like an imposter.
2. I do not feel like an imposter.
3. Therefore I am an imposter.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
ETA: If your comment was a joke, then forget everything I wrote – which does not mean that if you forget everything I wrote, then your comment was a joke. :-)
But how are zebras on topic? Am I missing something
That being said it was probably just a joke and now we’ve both overanalyzed it lol
Actually, this wikipedia article for has got a specific section about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional
Edit: I also just learned abou the 'Wason selection task' from that link. Cool stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
"B if A" or "If A, then B" interpreted as
A -> B
The fallacy would then be to do the following
A -> B
B
------------
A
On the other hand, iff is interpreted as A <=> B
i.e. A -> B and B -> A
So you can get A or B if you have B or A respectively.
"if and only if" is "p->q and q->p" (also equivalent to "p->q and not(p)->not(q), the more intuitive sense of the phrase), it basically establishes equivalence: any proof that requires p also requires q and vice versa, any proof that guarantees p also guarantees q and vice versa.
For anyone with even a passing knowledge of symbolic logic, what you provided is clear. But the explanation wouldn't be required for those people who are going to be familiar with that Fallacy anyway. It's for those who aren't aware of it. In that case, the symbolic version is of no help and the longer verbal explanation is important.
But oh no, I think the edit window has closed for @ARandomerDude
It's more like a paradox where you start to loop. Similar to a sentence such as "I always lie".
Or it's kind of like a Dunning-Kruger where the premise would be that:
1. Smart people think they are dumb.
2. Dumb people think they are smart.
So you start to loop between those never being able to figure out if you are actually smart or dumb.
With that being said: if someone is feeling bad because they think they're an impostor, first they should:
1. Reflect if they really are 2. If yes, improve 3. If can't improve, either embrace it or quit
The claim here was "no single counter-datapoint can possibly exist", so in this case, one counter-datapoint is indeed sufficient to prove the claim false.
A constant feeling of "Am I as good as people think and I say?" is only imposter syndrome if the answer is yes. Otherwise, yeah, you're an imposter.
I've spoken with and mentored many new software engineers. Some of them tell me they're struggling with imposter syndrome. Do I tell them they're wrong and they shouldn't feel that way, baselessly invalidating their beliefs? No! I look for evidence that they can write code. Some live coding, a project that's not a copy-pasted tutorial, just something.
Then, the conversation goes one of two ways. If they can code, then we have a talk about expectation setting. No one knows everything, everyone expects a junior to make lots of mistakes, googling stuff is fine, etc. If they can't code, it's more like "Yeah, you're right. Your feelings aren't just valid but pointing at a truth. Let's work on teaching you to code."
Let's say I'm race car driver, but I feel like I'm no good. Some day I'll be found out. Do I have imposter syndrome? Who knows! Let's look at the standings. If over a season, I sometimes crash, sometimes end up in the middle, and sometimes get on the podium, yeah I'm definitely a race car driver. My worries of being found out are baseless. But, if I'm always coming in dead last and I barely even race anymore, then these concerns seem pretty grounded.
The unfortunate reality is that most things aren't as clear cut as the standings of a race. You can still look outward for external evidence, instead of inward to your own feelings. What do I think someone in this position should be able to do? How good do people with similar experience (very important qualifier) in this role tend to be? How am I compared to that?
I don't think it's healthy and I don't think it's useful to just sweep these feelings under the rug. Which is what you're doing when you share them with someone else and they reactively tell you not to worry. I have never seen that work for myself or anyone else. You have to face these feelings honestly and openly, see if they match reality, and adjust accordingly.
Soooo much this. The right response to "I feel like an impostor" should always be, "okay let's run over some heuristics to see if that doubt is justified". Some people actually are impostors, while some are just mis-judging themselves.
Reflexively dismissing all doubt as impostor syndrome is how you create the Elizabeth Holmeses of the world. Earlier comments on the point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214306
If you think you're bad at coding, and people can tell right away in a short coding interview, then you're not an impostor, you're just bad at it. If you're coming in last in every race, then you're not an impostor, everyone knows you're bad. If you're consistently on the podium but you tell yourself you don't really deserve it and those races were all flukes, that's imposter syndrome.
It is healthy and normal to question your own abilities and how you represent yourself, but it's not healthy to question to such a point that you ignore all positive evidence. If you mentor someone who's great at coding, and you tell them that, and they still think to themselves that they're actually bad and just got lucky this time, that's impostor syndrome.
tldr: "Am I bad at this" and "am I a fraud that has everyone fooled" are very different.
On Google performance reviews scores could range from 1 to 5, with 2 being "meets expectations". A 2/5 sounds pretty bad, but the description sounds like the person is doing their job fine and is not an impostor. So what does it actually mean? But that depends from manager to manager anyway. IME many of them end up inflating and "exceeds expectations" loses meaning.
Point being, I think you need a lot more context to determine what "good job" actually means. If feedback is sufficiently detailed you can make a pretty good estimate right off the bat, but unfortunately people are bad at giving feedback in general. So especially when new to a team and you don't have any priors for how they use language, it makes sense to have some doubts.
I'm sure this can become pathological, but is the unhealthy version actually as prevalent as all the talk about impostor syndrome?
To compare:
* Imposter-syndrome is when someone worries that they're incompetent/unworthy/whatever, when others probably wouldn't agree. They feel like others would look down upon them if (what they believe to be) the truth of their incompetence/unworthiness were to be revealed.
* An actual imposter would be someone actually incompetent. For example, someone who got hired to a role that they're actually bad at, but their incompetence hasn't been realized yet.
* The scam-artist discussed at the start of the story seems to have been more malicious than incompetent. While this would make them an "imposter" in a sense, it's not really what "imposter syndrome" is about.
A young grad student is suffering from a bout of impostor syndrome.
One day, the student (after weeks of mustering up the required courage) walks into their professor's office.
"Professor, may I ask you a question?" says the grad student.
"Of course" says the professor, barely looking up from their papers.
"What do you think about impostor syndrome? I...hear that most grad students have it at some point."
"Balderdash! I can tell you the vast majority of students here do not have impostor syndrome!" says the professor.
"Really?"
"Of course. For it to be impostor syndrome, they'd actually have to be good"
This implies narcissist never gets impostor syndrome. In other words narcissists are impostors which is actually true.
In a deeper sense, I feel like there's also a growing desire to express vulnerability, and so hearing people talk more openly about this stuff doesn't mean it's a trend or that it's invalid in some form, it's instead bucking the trend of dealing in silence.
The truth would sit somewhere between those angles.
IMO it is a defense mechanism (as is having unchallenged confidence). Claiming you have imposter syndrome is a way people with a 'fixed mindset' to avoid confronting harsh realities.
Whenever they make a mistake or lack knowledge in something, their whole identity of being an expert, high performing individual or "winner" gets challenged and they experience a loss of their identity. Claiming imposter syndrome is an extremely self-indulgent way to keep their positive identity in tact by rationalizing that their bad feelings in light of failure are somehow false and that all competent people feel the same way. In some ways, someone with arrogant, unwarranted confidence is doing the exact same thing in a different way.
The original sin so to speak is tying success to one's identity instead of viewing it as the multivariate and stochastic process that it is. In order to achieve a goal or a result, you will necessarily have to be thrown into foreign situations where you know close to nothing and start off as a beginner. The outcome doesn't care about your self-righteous "imposter syndrome", you either get the thing done or get someone else to get the thing done. If this involves being humble and studying something, do it. If it involves putting your ego aside and deferring to people who demonstrably know more and learning from them, do it. This calculus has no space to cry about imposter syndrome.
The people who harp on and on about imposter syndrome are more likely to justify insecure behaviors that don't move you closer to the end result in my experience. To iterate, the end result doesn't care about your feelings or self-identity, develop a growth mindset and focus on achieving the outcome in the most effective way possible instead of worrying about who is an "imposter". If you fail at a job and are unable to deliver, there are many factors at play, most of which were already probably predetermined before you accepted the role. The best thing you can do if you find yourself in this situation is to fix it instead of behaving defensively.
and who cares if your work environment or your boss or is bad. you either worked hard enough or you didn't. if it were me, i would have simply worked hard enough to overcome such challenges
How a smart person performs a skill is “obvious” to them, but they often can’t explain their process, or sometimes their explanations don’t fit their actions.
Smart people subconsciously learn difficult skills, and they themselves are often completely unaware of their hidden thought processes or don’t understand how they make their choices.
The next level up are people that consciously are aware of their abilities, and can teach their skills to others. Not so many people can do that.
Fraudsters looks a lot like a great employee! To avoid this, implement healthy segregation of duties. Trust is great but also the fraudsters greatest weapon.
Talented people get imposter syndrome in part because it's hard to find good metrics to be confident in when people around you say "It can't be done" and then don't believe you when you say "It can be done. I know because I've done it."
Talented people often find their limits by slamming into a metaphorical wall at 100 miles an hour because they have so often heard "You can't do that" when they could that actually hitting their limit is the only real test. But doing that comes at a psychological, emotional and sometimes social cost. It hurts like a bitch and not something you want to keep doing.
It's easy to steal from other people. It's hard to study something for years, contemplate how it works, find a way to benefit without shafting other people.
And if no one believes you, no one adopts your thing. If it doesn't get adopted, you have no proof you are right.
Etc.
It can be hard to do something original in the real world. Much easier to be a con artist and to feel confident you know exactly what you are doing because all the other fools bought your BS and people are still buying it.
Actual imposters van have imposter syndrome (though it will be relative to being an imposter, not the thing they are pretending to be.)
> because they are talented at the only thing that matters to them: Screwing over everyone else for personal gain.
(1) Just because you are an imposter doesn't mean that is the only thing that matters to you.
(2) Just because you are an imposter doesn't mean you are talented at it; there's lots of talentless imposters who aren't very successful at it.
(3) And, most importantly, just because you are talented at the thing that matters to you doesn't mean you can't have imposter syndrome relative to it.
The thing that this particular comment brought up was the mindset of someone not beset by imposter syndrome.
So, from that post:
* Able to determine their own self-worth
* Does not compare themselves to determine their value
* Does not see failure as a bad thing, rather they see it as an opportunity for growth
* Confidence in their ability to deal with anything that may come their way, regardless of whether or not the outcome is favorable (like getting fired, for example)
* Does not worry about things they have no control over and accepts them instead
* Knows that doing their best is all they can do
* Does not derive their value from the opinions of others
* Does not let fear control their actions
---
I'd like to blame social media for the prevalence of some of the problems that establish a contrary mindset to the above... but... get off my lawn.
But the problems you solve on the job rarely if ever resemble those problems.
Perhaps we have a lot of impostor syndrome because we have a lot of people who aren't the right fit for their job. (This has been my personal experience.)
That sounds exactly like Steve Jobs.
His RDF was amazing.
I used to say that he could not only convince a cartographer that the world was flat, but sell tickets to them for a boat ride to the edge.
I ask myself this question constantly, because I haven't landed a job in over a year, but I rarely compare myself to others because I don't really believe in it.
Your feelings of "inadequacy" are there you to motivate you to get better at what you do.
If you label these feelings in a way that makes them seem like some sort of psychological ailment that needs cured .. you are just making life harder for yourself.
Of course, if you have reached your limit and can't get any better .. it makes sense to just accept that.
If you _can_ get better and you it, then these feelings will stay there as long as you are not working on improving yourself.
Very rarely are coveted positions acquired by merit alone, getting there required some degree of Machiavellianism, some amount of self-promotion, and some level of calculated risk taking.
Imagine hiring/promoting someone who wasn't in that headspace -- it would be a major risk because of the risk that the person's ego is not going to be able to handle it.
Humans telegraph subtle signs of Machiavellianism during the selection process as a way of conveying a lack of naivete.
But humans also telegraph hints of impostor syndrome to counteract the possibility that they be perceived as overly Machiavellian.
Statistically, most social, business and political leaders are high in "dark triad" personality traits. This is not an accident. Such traits are considered ethical and acceptable in moderation.
So per the article, a real "impostor" is someone trying to deceive. By definition, impostor syndrome is someone who is not trying to misrepresent her skills/qualifications.
I suspect that a psychological test that measured the desire to conceal dark triad traits would find a correlation between such concealment and the deliberate display of insecurity about impostor syndrome.
Imagine Usain Bold holding his head in his hands and saying "I don't think I'm really the fastest, how did I get here?" It wouldn't happen because Bolt has nothing to gain from saying that to anyone.
Reverse imposter syndrome is when you think you're good enough to be there, but you're not.
At s company gets bigger and bigger, the talent level has to revert to the population mean. Especially when all FAAMNG companies also covet the highly talented, no one of them can fill its hiring goals without lowering its standards.
If I get asked how good I am at something I try to elaborate on how I was able to use it to solve all my problems but I’m aware there are components that I have never had a reason to touch. With reason, I could probably figure it out like I have before is my mindset.
Tech careers are, hopefully, about growing - yes using new technologies, but also trying out new roles like management, architecture, sales, building a company...
The more senior tech people get, the more they are doing outside the box they were initially hired in, until they are not doing that thing at all.
As a result, everyone is doing some percentage of things they have little experience or training in, while they try to backfill that experience and training. Often there isn't someone better at it around either - that's why they ended up doing it in the first place. As soon as they actually get good at it they are pulled and pushed onto the next step.
So, most people don't know what they are doing part of the time. I wouldn't want to label that imposter syndrome. We need to recognize our real limitations so we know what to learn and can control the risks.
The author provides an incorrect definition of the term “impostor” to work around this problem.
This extends to other things as well. When they say we are going to start using technology X. They don’t want to hear, “I don’t know it but I can probably get up to speed in a couple of weeks.” They want to hear,”oh ya, I’ve been working with that on my nights and weekends for about six months now. They’ll usually know no one knows it because they’ve been looking foe people for the last couple of months but can’t find anyone who has worked with x.
This is just silly. The author of this article is perpetrating a logical fallacy of equivocation revolving the multiple semantics of the word "impostor".
Impostor syndrome is the fear that one is an undiscovered incompetent, promoted into their position by luck.
Impostor syndrome is not the fear that one is a literal impostor: someone who consciously takes on a false identity and lies to get what he wants, yet is somehow not aware of this! (That would be pretty serious psychiatric disorder!)
Impostor meaning "incompetent person in an undeserved position" is different from "someone who lies and disguises their identity to gain what he wants".
Of course impostors of this second kind, the conscious liars and pretenders, know what they are. That is completely irrelevant to impostor syndrome.
Impostors, the incompetents, often do not know they are incompetent. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
However, incompetents sometimes do know that they are incompetent.
Whether or not you think you are incompetent actually has no bearing on whether or not you are. All four combinations of think/are are possible.
If you suspect you're incompetent, you've avoided the Duning-Kruger effect; but that doesn't prove you're competent. You simply could be right.
I find the real issue is that being an expert no longer matters in most roles, so true experts increasingly have disappeared except in a few, mostly academic or skilled trade areas.
This is glaringly obvious in data science where I have been to many large, respectable companies where nobody understands any of the real fundamentals of what they're doing. It's just a bunch of automatons feeding data they don't understand, into models they don't understand, to be used in products they don't understand. But it's ridiculous to blame individuals for this. This is so pervasive in the culture that I have often found myself needing to guess which incorrect or not quite right answer to give in job interviews.
People working at places like this are right to feel that they don't know what they're doing, because they rushed through a boot camp to learn the basics and stopped there. At the same time they shouldn't feel like impostors because they aren't succeeding from some malicious intent, but because the system is broken. Most of them are dying for an expert to give them advice, but because of the broken system this is impossible.
It's not just tech either. We see this in "skilled" trades (to be clear, the quotes aren't because I don't believe these trades require skill, but because they have been transformed into something that increasing does not... even when it should). Plumbing for example used to be a field where it was a big deal to have connections with an experienced, expert plumber who could correctly solve your problem. Currently most "plumbers" are giant companies with a few real plumber's having their "assistants" who can hardly tell a leak from a faucet looking perplexedly at the drip in your ceiling take care of all the calls.
If you really care about knowing something today, the burden is all on you to learn it and there will be no reward other than your personal satisfaction. It may even cause you hardship from time to time when you have to pretend you don't understand something to do your job in a satisfactory way.
Imposters aren't even the thing they are faking at, so comparing them to that is totally absurd.
They likeky see themselves as being some degree of successful criminals/social system hackers or as successful impostors. Or maybe they don't feel successful. But they obviously don't see themselves as a legitimate but inexperienced employee struggling to legitimize their presence. Why the hell would they??
Good impostors can fake impostor syndrome as well.
To all fairness I managed to deliver in all of these cases, so I maybe don't fit the role of an "actual imposter" very squarely.
People who suspect they may be a narcissist, are not a narcissist.
Guess what? We are all imposters, all of the time! Our whole lives are filled with times we are thrown into situations that we have no idea how to handle, and the act of just living them makes us imposters.
Like who wasn't an fucking "imposter" the first day of kindergarten? Do you stress about that? How about first day of high school? Your First date? Yes without a doubt you could be classified as an imposter in all of these cases.
And yes...at times during work you are going to be expected to know more than you do, and its your fucking job to deal with those feelings and get shit done. That doesn't make you an imposter, it just makes you someone who need to learn something they don't know yet.
Why in the world would you bother to think that your being an imposter? I don't understand why you would waste even 5 seconds stressing about this.
You were almost surely hired not only for what you know, but for your perceived ability to quickly realize what you DON'T know, and then to research options and select the one that solves the current issue.
It's called "learning",,,not "imposter syndrome".
It is never the case that someone finds themselves in a situation where they correctly judge that they're in over their head?
I always doubted myself in this role.
But over time and with a lot of practice, I got better at both. Actually, I'm quite good at it.
It helps to internalize that they're both just social games.
;-)
The only way to be an impostor is to be aware that you are one.
"Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome"
"Rabbits who are pretending to be ducks don't get anxiety over when they will lay their next egg"
But now that you've let the cat out of the bag, we might learn how to fake it. ;)
The first category is often full of narcissists, who think they know more despite evidence, or literal cons like described in the post.
The second category is people who are unfortunately correct about their situation, but perhaps they should be happy they've got the job they've got. If they detached their sense of worth from their work they might be a lot happier.
The third category is people who think they're in category 2 but are more competent than they know. They underestimate their own abilities, either because of a belief that their skills are misplaced and they won't transfer to what they're doing now, or they have some unresolved anxiety issue, or something traumatic happened in their past, or they're out of place in terms of culture and fit, or a dozen other reasons.
The final category is where we all want to be. Sometimes people in category 1, in service of helping category 3 and hurting category 1, try to make it seem like they actually don't know what they're doing. I don't think this is healthy though. If you know something, you should be proud of knowing it. Furthermore, if you have power, you should recognize it, if only because you should know before you hurt someone else.
IMHO this is why we've ended up in a society where no one takes responsibility for their own lives. Everyone wants someone else to take responsibility - usually either a company or a politician. Everyone wants to stop climate change but no one will stop eating meat or flying on planes. Everyone wants a more equitable situation but most people donate hardly any part of their salary at all, even if they could. People want privacy, and to use social media services for free, with an unending list of features. I could go on and on about what people will do to shift the blame onto someone else.
I don't want to say there's no such thing as structural issues, there are economic issues and political issues which legitimately need solutions that are global/social/political. Just because someone flies somewhere once a year doesn't mean that they should die from heat stroke. It also doesn't mean that a company should be allowed to pollute 1000x that single flight every minute of every single day. It's just that these are the logical consequences of a society where no one takes responsibility.
Deciding to not take responsibility because you think that you are not capable of being responsible sounds responsible/good/morally correct - but it isn't if you actually are capable of being responsible. And I guess that's my gripe with impostor syndrome, it feels a little like a dodge or like an excuse. I'm never sure how to evaluate that excuse, and compare it to other excuses, and which excuses are real and which ones are fake. I'd like to live in a culture where people with impostor syndrome were helped, but the condition wasn't glorified, so I could always presume the excuse was real. Maybe our culture should just be more clinical about these sorts of things.
The final question then would be, how to create a culture that is more clinical, or more objective about certain conditions. How do you talk about performance in an objective way? How do you talk about (mental) health in an objective way? We're really far off from being able to do that, but at least it puts everything into context. It also gives a fairly simple actionable plan to those with impostor syndrome - how can you objectively measure your results? How about other peoples results in a similar position? What metrics would even make up an objective evaluation? This is where you have to be very careful, after all, if you are in category 3 you are likely to design metrics that punish you at the benefit of others. You don't know as much about other people's mistakes as you do your own. You have to be very very careful not to do this. After doing this, you will know for sure if you are an impostor or not. Once you know, either way you won't be bothered by it anymore. You move into category 2 or category 4, and you can learn to accept what you are from there on.
Just don't sit in this in-between of pretending to be confident to other people but not actually being confident. That will eat you up inside. That will eat up the whole world, if we're not careful about it.
> IMHO this is why we've ended up in a society where no one takes responsibility for their own lives.
I'm not going to comment on this sentence and the many lengthy paragraphs after it, because I find it to be a distraction from the core theme and purpose of this comment page.
throw149102 -- I'd like to see you discuss your thoughts somewhere where you can get good engagement. I don't think this thread is a very good place.
I think your criticism is good - I think there is something I want to express between the relationship of a society that takes responsibility for itself and a person who takes responsibility for themselves, but what I wrote is off from what I'm really trying to express.
I hear statements like this on TV often, like "Trump clearly believed himself he won the election". That makes me wonder, isn't an impostor someone who's trying to con us all the time. So of course they would do their best to make us think that they believe their lies themselves. But if we think they do then that probably just means they have succeeded in conning us into thinking that.
I would think that in fact you can NOT be an impostor unless you can make it look like you yourself totally believe what you are saying.
What I'd like to know is what the evolutionary reason for this is.
Hate to admit that this has appeared in some of my social bios before...
Anyways, what would the objective of this dispassionate perspective be? Is it possible to have an objective, dispassionate perspective without it being so constrained as to be useless, or optimizes the wrong thing?
Tribes without sociopaths get killed by other tribes' sociopaths.
First to recognize the Hollywood villain you describe is not the typical case and that an appreciable fraction of the population will be blind to various hues of of the emotional gamut most of us (I hope) are aware of.
The evolutionary pressure is to not cycle through hundreds of complex, cascading emotional states before deciding to act.
> "Brilliant people tend to doubt themselves"
but leave out half the situation.
Yes, real imposters get imposter syndrome when they start to cross the line from "clueless newb" to "expert" in a field. How they react determines if they are an imposter or not.
If they stop and figure out what they do/don't know and what they do/don't need to know, they cross over into expert and hopefully get some humility.
If they don't stop and just plow forward, YES they are an imposter.
Your average person would come in off the street and are white belts. I could literally f-ck them up with the smallest flick of my hand. I've been through thousands and thousands of rounds of sparring, bag punching, etc.
But lots of imposter syndrome. I just thought I sucked no matter how much time I put into it.
They were Mossad spies who went out to kill people.
And they were useless (this is part of the story)
But they still got a movie about them and they did kill some people. Being useless doesn't mean you can't do interesting things, that bits in your hands.