I'm a phony. Are you?

I'm just glad I'm not the only one that feels this way; from what I can tell, this is fairly common. I wonder if this ever really goes away? It seems that for me, the more I realize I don't know (which is, of course, always increasing along with the things I do know) the more common it gets. Curse of knowledge, I guess.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

edit: changed DFW to David Foster Wallace.

Seriously, does he think that others know this stuff better? Being a phony isn't Ted Williams saying, "I only hit over .400 one time, I'm a phony". Feeling like a phony is when there's something you really feel like you should know, but for some reason you don't. For example, there was a time I thought I was really proficient in C, and then someone showed me some C code and there was syntax that had me baffled. It was bitfields. Up until that point I had never seen bitfields. Must've skipped that section in K&R and went years w/o ever seeing it. And this was before Google search, so I just happened to go through K&R and find it, and read up on it, before the code review session. I was five minutes from showing up to a meeting and saying, "What's that?" and having everyone turn and say, "Who hired this guy!?" -- that's feeling like a phony.

Is it possible that we really are frauds?

It may just be the nature of programming projects that nobody understands the full implications of what they are doing. And for the most part, what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is dumb luck.

So maybe you really ARE courting disaster every day, and there's something like a 1/8 chance every year that you'll do something so horrible that your clients or investors will hate you forever.

Look at the success rate of our industry. Let's set aside startups because that's widely acknowledged to be a field where much is unknown and unpredictable. Pity the non-technical CEO who just wants to computerize some filing system. It's common for 50% of these sort of routine corporate IT projects to fail. This is the thing we're supposedly good at. And yet they would never hire a plumber with a 50% disastrous track record. In fact, they probably would never expect somebody with a 50%-bad track record to even be able to stay solvent. But there are plenty of programmers or consulting firms out there with worse records than even that.

[Edit: Beaten to it by goblgobl....]

My mind always dredges that quote up when I start to question my abilities. (Which I've been doing a bit of lately, coding for a nearly 15 year old Windows NT system. Relearning things I haven't seen since the '90s....)

Certainly we all have moments where we question our abilities. Small crises of faith, where our self confidence withers away. It's just part of life. Part of the checks and balances of our brain.

I try to reason to myself that it's normal to feel this way as a programmer / techie simply because there is such a vast amount of stuff to know, that no one really knows even half of it.

What with the multitude of programming paradigms, languages frameworks, mobile dev, webdev, front-end, back-end, sql, no-sql,... I could go on.

In the past 1-2 years I've picked up Android and iPhone development, and am now doing a deep dive into ruby and rails so I definitely feel like a phony at the moment.

On the flip-side, just being able to pick up those skills and do a few successful projects with them gives at least some counterbalance to the phony feeling.

In my last year, I was taking Analytical Mechanics, Q&M, Advanced Electrodynamics, and Nuclear and Particle physics. I had the second highest score in the class on the first test, which included 10 grad students. I still wrote it off as a fluke, and I didn't do so good on the next test. Then I did it again, the next semester, and I still couldn't believe it. Everyone had better homework scores than I did... how could I beat them on the test? Then the same thing happened in Nuclear and Particle physics with an oral examination because my grades were low. I sat through 5 other students who had much better grades and were doing the oral examination for the A instead of an A- (I was fighting for a B-) They weren't doing so well for the most part. At the end, the professor, who knew I could do it, started going above and beyond what we hard learned into Solid State physics, just to see what I knew. I screwed up a bit on the paper final, getting stuck on weird problem that involved some hand waving for some radiative losses for an electron near relativistic energies. I knew I was below the curve. I went in to say bye to the professor on the last day, and he asked what grade I thought I deserved, and I told him a B- (I was in C territory before the oral exam and final exam). He ended up giving me an B+.

The last year was weird. It was really the first time I thought I could really, truly do physics. I worked with other students, and I realized that a large portion of the students who I thought were better students were better focused and better working in groups. These same students even thought of me as really smart (and still tell me that). Overall, I don't think I'm smarter than they are, but I do think we have different strengths. To this day, I still feel like I got lucky, and that my bosses didn't bother to check my GPA because of my enthusiasm for the position (and writing skills)

I do have ADHD, and I know for a fact that's a driving force in this because I have a hard time focusing on many tasks. I've gotten much better at it, especially after having a regular job with a regular schedule, but I still have a hard time believing where I'm at.

We all have moments where we think "right now I'm doing amazing work" which make us look at all the other moments - our normal working level - as in some way insufficient.

In reality it's probably not realistic to work at that level continually, but that doesn't mean that we don't aspire to it so instead of thinking "I work at a decent level normally with moments of greatness", instead we think "I'm great but spend a lot of time being mediocre".

And maybe more than that it's very possible the moments when we think we're doing amazing work might not actually be our finest moments, just the "neatest" ones. There are days when I burn through things on my to do list but I suspect some of the days that really move things forward are far bittier and less immediately satisfying. I can spend a day being pulled from pillar to post by clients and think I got nothing done but the reality is that on those days I might have made a couple of clients happy and unblocked a couple of things that were delaying projects.

The TL;DR version: I suspect we're bad at judging what our real standard is, both in terms of when we're actually doing great work and how often it's possible to do it.

I also simplified the problem, discarding issues of implementation efficiency and convenience/ease of use of the user model, and any tricky wrinkles that complicated it, to reduce it to something I could see. Being able to see that has given me a base to understand the other issues. I've noticed that some specifications use this approach: they have a very detailed underlying conceptual model, then add a convenience model on top. e.g. XPath specification (crazy ancestor, descendant, sibling etc axis -> defaults to descendant so you can just use unix-like paths).

I used to be much better at seeing things... but thinking back, my key characteristic at that time was to embrace not knowing things, embrace mistakes and learn. I was also working on areas that were built directly on top of existing models and approaches... whereas now, I'm developing the theoretical foundation as well. There's a kind of exponential explosion, with so many different and interacting choices at every turn. In some ways, an intuitive/insight approach is necessary, as exhaustively trying each alternative is not feasible.

tangent: In Breakfast at Tiffany's (the movie, not the story), there's some discussion over whether Audrey Hepburn's character is a "phony", but I never understood what they meant in that context. She's beautiful - how can that be phony? Or maybe that she's pretending to be urbane when she's rural?

As such, it is easy to minimize ones achievements. There are people off developing autonomous vehicles and doing crazy things with artificial intelligence, and I'm here developing lowly web/desktop/mobile apps. I guess phony is one way to describe it: If I were a "real" programmer, I would be working on "real" problems [1].

[1] i.e. problems in which I do not yet have experience solving. I imagine once I gain that experience and become confident in my work in those areas, they too will no longer feel like real programming jobs and I will set my sights on something else that is, in my mind, a "real" programmer's job.

When you think you haven't got anything done and you've just considered yourself the second worst, if not worst, programmer in the world, everybody else seems to praise you and be eternally grateful for your great work. But when you've been in the flow, hacked magnificent solutions, and feel you're on the top of the world, the best you can get is that everybody else doesn't even notice. The worst might be complaints or even direct criticism that you feel is totally unattributed to you.

Yeah, I suck most of the time. It keeps me learning, though, and I do know my value when I need it. I also try not to be surrounded by idiots: better be a small fish in the big pond than a big fish in a small one.

[D-K] describes everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots...

However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning’s main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty. For example...

So why does Google blog search finds zero mentions of this refutation? My guess: because under [the new] theory you should listen to those you disagree with instead of writing them off as idiots.

citations here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html

if you're having a crisis, i suggest you really try something else. you will either:

(1) love the new thing

(2) realize how much the new thing sucks compared to the old thing and rekindle the love with the old

(3) realize how much both suck and try something else.

one of my old mentors told me that the job i was loving as a fresh out will suck at some point, but to suck it up and do it because you get paid to have fun outside of work. i haven't regretted cutting any of these safety lines to do new things that make work (majority of how you spend your waking time) enjoyable ...

But, i submit anyway, and people end up buying the apps, and i never get an email asking for a refund, so i guess its just all in my head!

I guess the lesson is to ignore the cynics, even when the cynic is yourself.

The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women...

I found it to have the best explanation about where originates. Of course it has to do with your childhood. :-)

It drags everyone down..it can kill a team and certainly a project. It's a major reason I quit.

When you feel confident, how do you know if you are truly excellent, or suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect? Same when you are feeling incompetent, are you really lacking competence or suffering from Imposter syndrome? How do you know??

If you adhere to those rules the worst that can possibly happen is that you get better.

"Why I feel like a fraud"

http://blog.asmartbear.com/self-doubt-fraud.html

I've been wondering if the daily work is shaping us in this specific way.

How dreary to be somebody!/ How public, like a frog/ To tell your name the livelong day/ To an admiring bog!

These days, with the Internet and constant promotion of projects, I see that I'm just a talentless nobody.

We're now regularly exposed to the work of the tiny group of truly excellent programmers, and only the very best output of the masses of regular programmers. How can anyone who stays even slightly up to date (i.e. programming blogs and social bookmarking sites) feel good about what he/she does when bombarded by success stories of amazing sites/applications/services?