Embracing Imposter Syndrome | Hacker News Reader

Embracing Imposter Syndrome

justindfuller.com

120 pointsiamjfu43 comments

If you use any kind of social media, you know that everyone else's kids are smarter, their house is tidier, their vacations are more interesting, and most importantly: They have absolute certainty that they're living their life right.

Whereas you have a messy house, misbehaving kids, you can't remember the last time you've been to a beach, and you're full of doubt about your own choices.

Why should it be any different at work? It's so easy to walk past someone else's desk, see them engrossed in whatever they're doing and think they're working so effectively, whereas yourself you spend 90% of the time trying to get focused and 10% in hyperbursts actually getting the work done. Kind of.

But this impostor syndrome, at work at least, is a motivator. If you're always the least smart person in the room you know you need to keep proving yourself and this drives your actual performance.

There’s a kernel of common sense truth to this idea: Even before social media, we only framed photos of the good times and successes. It’s not nefarious or manipulative. It’s just the nature of sharing the good times.

However, I feel like I’ve been seeing this idea abused more lately to try to normalize problem behaviors or dysfunctions. To extend your example: If someone sees photos of other people’s tidy houses on social media and their immediate reaction is to convince themselves that those houses are actually very messy and disorganized behind the scenes, they could be projecting their own issues with cleanliness and disorganization on to others. It’s much easier to overlook our own problems when we normalize them by projecting them on to everyone else.

While it is true that social media isn’t a perfect representation of people’a normal daily lives, it was never intended to be. If someone is misunderstanding social media (or a resume) as a 100% snapshot of people’s lives, that needs to be corrected. However, I think it’s also a problem if someone’s only coping mechanism is to imagine the opposite scenarios and project it on to that person.

The only lasting solution, in my opinion, is to learn how to be comfortable with yourself, on your own, without comparing to others.

"Learn how to be comfortable with yourself, on your own, without comparing to others."

This sums it up, and i think is the right approach, i would like to add to keep positive and always look out for improvement on yourself and the situation around you, without "forcing it" to the point of being toxic.

Well, the same principle applies to the golden glow of nostalgia. Oh, 10 years ago, how clear everything was, how optimistic about the future we were, how much younger and healthier our bodies were, blah blah.

It gets really weird when you mentally project the present into future nostalgia. A particularly lovely late-afternoon winter day with the kids playing in the snow. Sure we're frazzled parents; nobody got enough sleep last night, dinner is uncertain etc. But we won't remember any of that in 10 years. All we'll see is aww, they were so cute, everything was so OK.

“you're always the least smart person in the room you know you need to keep proving yourself and this drives your actual performance.”

Give or take locus of control and incentives, maybe. Some might think alternatively that it’s better to find a unique niche rather than try to compete where others are apparently more talented. Incentives matter a lot.

I know sometimes "imposter syndrome" is almost a badge of honor in tech, kinda like a humble brag about your self-awareness. But it can also be indicative of a vulnerable narcissist [1], so maybe it's not best to embrace it. It's still a bit of a self-centered perspective. Contrary to the author's conclusion, it might be better to overcome it instead. One way is to less strongly couple your self-esteem to the opinion of others.

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-nar...

Getting things done is a badge of honor for me, i don't care much for the concept "imposter syndrome".

But i will acknowledge that confidence needs to be built up, and doing so can trigger thoughts related to the imposter syndrome.

We can't all be in the top 5%, but i found that you can get very far with these skills.

1. Be able to relate an observation to something you have encountered earlier. For me that involves documenting a lot of what i work with and making it easily searchable. OneNote works great for this.

2. Do your best to remember something you have just learned from a colleague, it's always nice when you only need to explain something once.

3. Be curious. If something doesn't add up, you're most likely on to something important. Also, know when to stop as there are always other tasks waiting.

4. Learn how to search for information. Not just using Google, but also incidents, changes, issues, commits, logs and so on. Every data source matters.

There are other tips and tricks, but these are some of the most important skills.

I mean this sounds a lot less like imposter syndrome and a lot more like someone realising that they've only interacted with a tiny portion of the software development process after a long stint of job hopping. In this case you literally are an imposter, you are ultra experienced at the first year of a project and have no experience at t+1 onward.

Yes, that is also my understanding - imposter is someone doing without skills and it looks well on the surface vs imposter syndrome is someone struggling, feeling desperate and suffering in performance due to a mismatch of self perceived skills and self perceived skill requirements.

Software is a team effort where the individual contribution is only a fraction of the whole. Even worse we just extend what others have provided before. As it was argued in ‚No silver bullet‘ our work is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is doable. No wonder we feel small.

This describes my situation so well, that I've finally come to realize I am an imposter. Although I am an imposter voluntarily, since I job-hopped always for significantly higher salaries. I wonder how much longer I can fool companies into hiring me.

As long as you keep delivering

"After the “Mount Stupid” peak comes the “Valley of Despair.” This is where one goes after realizing ignorance. Accepting this was particularly painful for me, having spent quite a long time thinking I knew a lot. You see, my arrival to the valley was delayed for several years because I kept job-hopping before I could witness the consequences of my decisions."

I've seen this many times over the years. It's especially painful when the individual is repeatedly praised for his/her achievements by people which don't have to deal with future consequences either.

It's very common with consultants. The more benign cases lead to the "fake best practices expert" while the more pathological cases lead to the "unsuspecting pyromaniac hero firefighter" that achieves results by (unknowingly) scorching the earth it leaves behind.

I have battled impostor syndrome throughout my life. The anxiety is real. It is a suitable antidote for some elements of Dunning-Krueger, but is a painful way to operate day-to-day.

In terms of software or any other professional field, the only solution I've found is finding balance between tasks that stretch one's abilities (verifying potential for growth and meeting challenges) and tasks one can accomplish successfully/efficiently (verifying competence). Too high a proportion of either and the psychological slide begins.

Ah yes, impostor syndrome. I've been taught to be aware of it and to sort of ignore it by the techies (or I guess it's the media reporting on tech + techies who posts on their own personal blog). This has definitely been a factor why I've been fired at one place, because they believed I was too slow. If I'd have embraced the actual impostor syndrome feeling that I have, then instead of doing it away, I'd have worked my ass off to get to a level where they wouldn't think I was too slow.

One could argue that I might not be a good match with the company or something given there was a difference in expectations, but I wanted to stay there. Yet, I ignored the feeling of not being good enough and it was one of the big factors that led me to being fired.

I'm just one anecdotal point. But I read about some of the ideas on impostor syndrome, took the advice to heart, ran with it and got burned. I'm sure there are opposite stories as well.

Life is a nuanced tricky business. Receiving advice well might be even more tricky.

I watched a video by HealthyGamerGG where he described employees as all walking around with "score cards" in their head which he illustrated with two rows of tick boxes: a "promotion" score and a "fired" score. It works like those free-sandwich punch cards.

He said work is stressful in part because we have imperfect information which one is ahead or nearing full, and as social animals we are always trying to model what the counterpart of that scorecard looks like in our boss's head without knowing for sure. I think it's particularly insightful HealthyGamerGG doesn't simplify this to a single +/- score, but rather drew two separate rows. I've definitely worked in jobs where I knew I ran a high balance in both categories.

This hits home for me.

I find the most stressful aspect of WFH is modeling other people.

I never realized before how much I relied upon subtle social cues, especially to read negative emotions. I feel like Im flying blind when my sole interaction point with coworkers is video chat.

Thus my internal scorecard is all over the place.

There's nothing like deciphering someone's tone through slack right after you did something stupid!

Ahh good, I just opened a PR with print statements... they definitely don't think I'm an idiot now...

I've had coworkers bring up "impostor syndrome" when they're clearly just not (or kinder, let's say not yet) qualified to do their job. That's... super awkward. I think we all just need to be able to step outside ourselves and really gauge ourselves fairly like anyone else, neither being too harsh or too generous. But that's far more difficult than it sounds.

I think if the lesson you're taking from the whole imposter syndrome thing is "you don't need to improve", then you're not really learning the right lesson at all. Imposter syndrome is real, but it doesn't at all mean it's okay to be complacent, and it certainly isn't meant to encourage more Dunning-Krugerism.

> I think if the lesson you're taking from the whole imposter syndrome thing is "you don't need to improve"

No that's not what I learned from it. The reality is that sometimes I get a job that I shouldn't work 8 hours per day for but 12 to 16 hours per day for the first few couple of months in order to get reliably up to speed. Yes, that's harsh, but at least it means my job would be secure.

Instead, I did my best for 8 hours per day and simply wasn't good enough.

There are 2-3 related aspects to this: One part is to which degree the person's own mental model corresponds to reality. If they are out of sync, it will lead to pain, no matter what Dunning-Kruger says - the inability to plan or execute in a realistic way, will lead to collisions with reality. Another maybe more problematic part, is the 'understanding and agreement' the person makes with the people surrounding him, them relying on this communicated intent, and his sense of obligation to those promises.

  If I make unrealistic plans, and promise them to my surroundings, that is where insane levels of stress can come from, when I feel obliged by my promises to deliver pie in the sky.

To me, the greatest 'cure' regarding imposter-syndrome, is to work to grow with regards to communicating which aspects are deliverable, and which aspects are unknown. Remaining in the bubble of "I have to promise all problems have been forseen", leads to early death.

The third aspect regards humility, and the level of others. Realizing you have made camp near the peak of mount Stupid, already brings you further along than 50% of the people I have met so far in my 30year career. The humility is a good basis for working on it and improving. I have seen people have excellent decades-long 'careers', with Dunning-Krueger as their co-pilot, and they didn't all switch jobs before 3 years-tenure. Heck, I always leave a seat empty in my own car, for either Dunning or Krueger; I'm not sure many are immune to it.

I know this won't be popular but I think it is important which is why I am writing this.

IMHO, "imposter syndrome" is yet another pop-psychology nonsense fabricated to make money for the professionals, in the same category as "Just pay us $300 per hour and we'll listen to you and tell you how everyone you don't like is a narcissist".

If you have had to exaggerate and lie about your talents and capabilities to land yourself a job, you are a real imposter, in every sense of the word. It is not some "psychological disease" which is not representative of reality.

If you are in a culture/market, where you have to one-up your competitor's exaggeration of themselves to survive, you gotta do what you gotta do. You can accept it as it is and maybe at some point, you can get yourself in a position where you can be honest and survive (even though lying would get you much better opportunities)... or just embrace the fact that you are okay with being a liar and justify it in whatever ways it gives you comfort.

If you have a problem with lying, you will have a problem with it whatever you dress it up as... and it will continue to eat you from the inside even though you know all these fancy theories made up by psychologists. At least knowing and accepting it will help you get out when the situation favors you to do so.

How do you draw the line between exaggeration and whatnot?

The problem exposed by the imposter syndrome is not about lie at all. One day you are creating something, shipping products, feeling valuable and knowledgeable. The other day you start wondering if it was mostly the team around you, and what you've been doing wasn't that important in the large scale of things.

The imposter syndrome is about this kind of doubt. It doesn't mean what you wrote in the resume is a lie, or that your story about working on things is a lie. It just makes you reconsider your role in the events.

Is there something like "second-order imposter syndrome"??? => I feel and recognize my lack of depth and knowledge and see my superconfident team memebers to be even worse position?

"I know that I know nothing" -> Sokrates | father of imposter syndrome

If I rephrase that, it sounds like you’re saying “I’m pretty sure that I know nothing, but I’d rather that than think wrongly that I know everything.”

no, rather: "I’m pretty sure I will never know nothin, but how can anyone think otherwise?"

I know everyone is supposedly to feel like an imposter these days. I am stubbornly against it. So here's a contrarian take: Don't embrace it.

If you feel out of your depth, don't try to fake it. Openly ask for help and try to learn. When someone uses words you don't understand, ask immediately.

I may be biased, having had to spend time recently to clean up after colleagues who clearly had no idea how the frameworks we are using works. But instead of taking a day to learn, they winged it. It may not be directly related to the syndrome in question, but I strongly feel it is not something to celebrate.

I'm not even good enough to have impostor syndrome, I think I'm just an actual impostor

So you actually don’t care and there is no silent suffering, you’re just winging your way around? Some with the imposter syndrome would love a bit of that confidence

No. I meant the exact opposite of what you somehow inferred.

I don't feel like I'm good enough to even label these feelings as impostor syndrome, which I'd be able to reassure myself are just irrational. I just think I genuinely am not good enough or knowledgeable enough.

I know what you mean. Because of it, I've returned to school for a masters. Turns out I knew nothing and it's a good thing I returned to school! For reference, I've been a full stack web developer for 8+ years and I have a bachelors in engineering (not comp-sci).

One the problems that leads to feelings of impostor syndrome is the constant churn of development technologies and trends that happens in tech, year after year

For example I’m a longtime developer and have over 15 years in the industry but my knowledge of frameworks is only as good as the latest tech stack my company or team has decided to use - should I throw out all my objective experience with monoliths now that micro services are en vouge? Should I abandon my use of Gitflow as a git branching paradigm now that this team uses a single branch model. This project doesn’t use MVVM but they do want to use MVU. The debugging tool has changed and now we use a different bugtracker that I’m not good at

Ie the constant fluctuations in tech, processes and environment are enough to drive anyone to question their learned wisdom

Accepting constant change is a just a given for developers but it does lead to such stress

Sometimes it seems like everyone and their dog has impostor syndrome.

Yeah it's weird, right. I almost feel like an impostor for not feeling like an impostor.

I see people with less than 1 year of experience claiming imposter syndrome...I feel like the term has lost almost all meaning at that point. At some point what you're feeling is your actual inadequacies due to lack of experience. That's fine and normal, and a motivating factor to keep learning, not imposter syndrome...

I've seen the same... while touting themselves as an industry expert on social media. Overselling yourself on your resume, the interview, Twitter, industry conferences, etc., that's what an actual impostor is. I think another common case is simple privilege, connections brought you a little farther in life than skills would suggest.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's an actual phenomenon and it's difficult for the people who are dealing with it. But they're not being helped by the normalization of the idea. For most of us, you should be feeling like you worked hard to get where you are and totally deserve it.

I can relate.

Here’s my story: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

I find the fetishization of weakness and failure, the "syndromes" like the impostor's, difficult to relate to because I grew up (the contemporary times are overall better than the olden times, to be clear) when the examples of virtue, at least in theory, were self-control in the face of adversity, believing you could do it, and moving on quickly when things did not work out.

There are only a few things as refreshing nowadays as people who are comfortable even the situation is uncomfortable.

You're not good enough for impostor syndrome!

/joke

As a fellow imposter syndrome sufferer, I feel for Justin. There is a real sense of struggle underlying his writing. The part on rationality struck me in a certain way though. It is his sense of rationality as identity. I've felt this myself as I'm sure many others here have too. It's not exactly a healthy perspective.

Rational identity is a product of the enlightenment's masculinization of rationality[1]. With the genderization of modes of thought comes the social ideals and expectations that serve to mold people into themselves. Let's face it, ideal rationality is a human-denying mode of thinking rather than a human-affirming mode of thinking. It strips away our rich emotional capacity in a way that alienates us from ourselves. That's why I feel for this guy, I really do.

1. Bordo 1986 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-21388-001

Unprompted derision and self-exclusion from some flaw is a common emotional self-defense mechanism. Emotional flaws about intellectual pursuits aren’t excepted.

man i started basically my dream job in December and I am being absolutely crushed by impostor syndrome. It sucks because it does actually get in the way of performance if I don't monitor it closely. And then the self-monitoring breeds even more anxiety.

I like his, "OK, based on my experiences and connections I've made through research, I’ve covered a potentially small, but possibly sufficient set of scenarios. I am ready for critical feedback." self-guidance. I'll be using that.

Calling it 'imposter syndrome' instead of 'impostor syndrome' is ok I guess but it bugs me on some level. It might be because it reminds me of the dreaded shitposter syndrome...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com