I'm a phony. Are you? (2011) | Hacker News Reader

I'm a phony. Are you? (2011)

hanselman.com

34 pointsmemorable34 comments

I get a strong "pretend-humility" vibration from this.

e.g.

>> I've got 30 domains and I've only done something awesome with 3 of them. Sometimes when I log into my DNS manager I just see 27 failures

So, I'm sorry but yes you do seem phony after all.

Hard agree, I was just about to say that. The entire tone of the piece is kind of "I'm so awesome and then this...".

If I was a junior reading this with all the examples that were used, I would very likely feel worse than before, which defeats the claimed purpose of this write up.

This is a common technique used by such blog authors. An enticing title, an intriguing opening, followed by brag, brag, brag.

Unfortunately, modern day blogging is more about building one's 'brand' and boosting one's reputation, than imparting wisdom.

You say this is a trend in modern day blogging yet the article is from 2011. Also, I'm not sure Hanselman needs to brag to build his brand, it's pretty well established I'd say.

I've been following Scott's blog for, I don't know, 15 years? I can' remember one instance of bragging, but many instances of humble. I don't think this kind of criticism is applicable to his case.

Scott's concern with encouraging young programmers is, I think, completely genuine, and a huge part of his writing.

But the line between being genuinely humble and humble bragging is sometimes thin, and people have a different tolerance thresholds for the latter.

It's when he phrases this encouragement as "look, I also felt like an idiot at the start of my career, and look at all the awesome things I've done since then", it also comes across as a bit self-serving, even if unintentionally so. I think some people are simply more prone to pick up on that than others.

How else can you write this article, though? "I also feel like an impostor, and also I haven't done anything interesting" is much less useful. If you want to encourage people who feel like impostors, you basically have to say "I feel like an impostor too, and I'm doing well, or so I hear".

You could try to write it about somebody else.

This person I know and respect also truly struggled with this, and here's them telling their experience.

You don't have to paint a picture that the person did a exceptional awe-inspiring things despite impostor syndrome. You can write the article that says normal people run into this, it's Not Just You, and at no point does the article need to look like it's trying to prop anyone up. It can be about an average person, not even yourself, and it's still valuable!

>thinks having a large number of domains is a brag

I’m deeply ashamed of my long list of domains that aren’t used. I think anyone who thinks op is bragging is probably young and low key impressed

On another note I love the use of “tamp down” in the article haven’t heard that phrase in a long time

I don't give a damn if I am an imposter or the best amongst my peers. It's important I enjoy what I do and I learn new things I also enjoy. It's important I solve problems I enjoy solving and that I'm getting better at it in my own pace.

For every guy doing a task there's going to be another one doing the task faster or better and another one doing the task slower or worse.

There is a place under the sun for everybody.

People who think they are winners have more intrinsic motivation.

This means that they are more likely to become real winners at some point.

That’s how I look at it.

For any one of us that is a “Mel” programmer, there’s some kid, sitting in an Internet café, in Hanoi or Lagos, that will make us look like a sick sauropod.

I love designing and shipping software. I love learning new stuff. I’m not competitive, at all. I want to be good, but I really don’t care if I’m better than anyone else. It’s a luxury to be here.

It may not matter if you're a hobbyist, but when you work in a team and are constantly assessed by your peers and your manager, it's hard not compare yourself with others and wonder if you're at the right place.

Thankfully I am not good enough to have imposter syndrome

That unfortunately doesn't help me. I have imposter syndrome. Then I realize "who am I to think I deserve to have imposter syndrome? What have I accomplish for anybody to even think I might be an imposter?"

I have imposter imposter syndrome.

It's weird and uncomfortable seeing people turn imposter syndrome into a cool thing to have. Kind of like what people did to depression and other real mental struggles.

And I doubt people with actual imposter syndrome appreciate the typical "hey champ, I know how you feel".

Please note that unlike depression and other real mental struggles, imposter syndrome is not listed as part of the DSM. Certainly, it can be linked to depression and/or anxiety, but I suspect that most people who experience it are helped by knowing that others have the same experiences.

I'm not even human. I'm just wearing the skin of one. Trapped in this fleshy prison, I walk amongst you.

There should be a version of "rule 34" about DSM-IV. If somebody says "I am.. " then it's probably in the DSM.

This is basically "capgras" syndrome, often related to brain injury.

I think you mean “Cotard delusion”.

Yes, a better fit. There's probably a delusion for "think they understand how to apply DSM to casual comments"

Neither of these syndromes are recognized by DSM-5 due to their rarity:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34033319/

- https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.neu...

I see you suffer from "something is wrong on the internet" syndrome or xkcd's disease. The IV to V revision.. is that a sign of the organising principle at work, or a revolution /reaction in diagnosis?

Was the meeting where they voted on it like Brontosaurus or Pluto?

I upgraded the manual's version because that's what was referenced in the linked articles. But V is almost always better than IV, think "The Empire Strikes Back" vs. "A New Hope"!

I think that we (humans) are all a little (or a lot) phony, and none of us are phony in the least bit.

We are all making this all up as we go along. We all have difficulty with metacognition (this is my particular area of research) in certain situations (it varies for different people). And yet, being phony is part of the human experience.

There is such a disconnect between reality and consciousness that our brains trick us into thinking that our brains are accurate simulators of the world outside of us when, in fact, our brains interpolate and extrapolate a lot of the outside world, and then we act as though that inner simulation were a completely accurate rendering. See, for example, "phantom limbs", "filling in", the abject shittiness of memory encoding and recall (your brain makes up details that you are convinced really happened, all the time), and the variable time delay between sensation and perception. It is quite literally impossible to live in the present; our brains are modelling what it thinks must be the present by predicting how the world should be based on the most recent sensory input, but is in reality milliseconds in the past. And this ignores the fact that sensory input is itself filtered and incomplete at best.

I won't bring my own research into this, except to say that metacognition research would suggest that we all believe facts or theories about the world that simply cannot be true at all times. If that is the case, then how can we not be, at least to some extent, phony? At the same time, our counterfeitness of being in the world is exactly the same human experience that everyone shares, so if everyone is phony in the same ways, is anyone really phony?

The article gives two really good bits of advice. 1) "I think the more you know, the more you realize just how much you don't know." If you can bring yourself to understand that the disconnect between sensation, perception, and simulation exists, then you can also understand that you might not be absolutely correct in all situations. Embrace that, and be more humble. And 2) "Fake it til' you make it." Nothing to add there.

Anyway, I realize that my comment is a bit meta itself, but I couldn't help it, being the phony that I am. :)

The most frustrating thing about this discourse is the missing sense of proportion.

1. Starting things and setting them down does not make you a phony. It makes you easily-excitable. Thats okay.

You’d be a phony if you deceived someone, including yourself. You’d be a phony if you bought a domain, told someone “I’ll definitely have this site built by next Thursday” and wasn’t honest with yourself or others about your time-management error. Time management errors are okay, especially in hobbies. You’d be a phony if you were so unwilling to accept yourself that fear and pain pushed you to deceive yourself.

The emotion you’re feeling when you look at those 27 unused domains isn’t called “being a phony” it is called “embarrassment” and it is a normal human emotion. Avoid deceiving yourself by using emotion words to describe your emotions.

2. Someone telling you that you are a rockstar does not mean you are a phony. It means you’re talking with someone who fails to understand the importance of humility or wants you to wear a heroic Tony Stark costume to play out the Drama Triangle with them. Anger is appropriate to feel if someone pressures you to play along with their comforting self-deception. In response, you have a choice:

A. Find better friends. A good friend is willing try to see you for who you are: A person with some skills and some skill-gaps and a desire to learn.

B. Argue with them on behalf of humility and your need to be seen honestly. If you need a working relationship with them then you need to care about what constitutes that relationship. If it is respect for who you actually are, then they’ll be willing to call you an engineer instead of a rockstar. If it is their self-deception then the relationship is not trustworthy. You have a right to trustworthy working relationships but that right comes with a responsibility to speak the truth clearly.

C. Obsessively check your workspace for brown M&Ms and get swept up in disproportionate rage or terror if you find any tiny flaw[1]. If you let your relationships rely on you being a rockstar then you’ll set yourself up with no room for yourself or others to make mistakes. That is a neurological block to learning and deeply unkind to all involved.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Previously...

2011, 244 points, 62 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895300

Amazingly, there really is a (no remote) desktop support role available at Little Debbie:

https://jobs.mckeefoods.com/job-search-results/?primary_cate...

Interesting - a less sour response from 2011 HN. You can also see the negative comment that prompted the italicised update in the post - the modern counterpart of which now gets to the top.

What is the root of this? Is it because we're comparing ourselves against performative artifice? We expect ourselves to be as smart as the tenured professor that has performed some sequence lectures, relaying all the information for a couple dozen years and prior to every lecture also brushes up on all of it?

Or some speaker who does much the same. Or some online personality. And the media at large has such compelling emotional content, it's so beautiful and gripping, almost as if it's scripted, but we suspend our disbelief...

We never see ourselves naked. It's always a presentation of the best. I think we should definitely extrapolate the expectation of every banal and questionable aspects of ourselves on to others, even if it's translated into some other area - and no, it's only more admirable because the grass looks greener on the other side.

It's natural for people who explore a lot of topics to feel this way. There's a certain kind of person that you'll find a lot of here on HN who is constantly exploring stuff. Inevitably, not everything is explored to deep familiarity.

It's a natural consequence of the T-shaped skillset: you've heard of everything but you don't feel like an expert in anything. Even the thing that forms the height of the T, anyone who drills down anywhere knows there's further to go.

Typical microsoft employee

For a long time I felt Scott was a phony, but he legit walks the walk. But for some reason, his delivery and the vernacular he uses comes off disingenuous to a number of readers / viewers.

just enough education to perform

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