Ask HN: How do you overcome imposter syndrome? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you overcome imposter syndrome?

12 pointsfdneng20 comments

I’ve been working at YC-backed startups since graduating from university. I’m now at a company building a deeply distributed systems product, and I’m surrounded by incredibly talented engineers who seem exceptionally strong at what they do. They often have knowledge and intuition about things I barely understand.

Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.

On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?

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Some of it may never go away, as there is always more to know and you’ll never know it all. That’s what the team is for; together you can know more than any one person alone. Each person ends up having their areas of expertise.

Some acceptance of this and realization that you’re part of that team will come in time. When I first started working I felt like I should quit before they figured out I didn’t know anything. I felt like I always had to go ask other people questions. At a certain point, that dynamic flipped and I was spending all day answering questions from other people. These days, it’s more balanced. There are things I go to others for, and I think they’re brilliant at what they do. Those people also come to me for help on things I have more experience in. It’s a give and take. When you start, it will be more take than give, but that’s how everyone starts.

Imposter syndrome is a thinking trap. A couple of things you can do to help:

Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.

For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.

The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.

People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on thinking and rumination. I fall prey to circular thinking myself. This can unsettle my wife at times as she is not this way inclined. I can incite worry, while I move on and probably forget about the very concerns I have been raising.

I have been learning to quieten my ruminations by keeping a journal. This stops all the meanderings escaping. A kind of triage so to speak, where important thoughts get revisited and the rest stay in a journal no one will read.

I can relate. It sucks, but it also keeps you grounded.

Think about it. There are things that you're able to do but you will never do because you think you can't. There are also things that some people cannot do, but they'll half-ass it the whole way to hell because they think they're doing just fine.

Knowing your own shortcomings is a superpower, it keeps you on your toes, also keeps your goals realistic. Being unaware of your shortcomings is also a superpower, assuming you're isolated from the consequence. Mercifully, my experience indicates this does not happen very often.

The right path is allegedly somewhere in the middle.

Well you're about to do one of the hardest tasks any human can do, which is raise a child. It takes a ton a patience, care, and work to do it right.

You're company will hopefully be tuned into this and be reasonable and show you some grace through a life changing experience. You also need to be kind to yourself through the journey. You will have to make adjustments, but it will be worth it.

As for imposter syndrome, everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. Just keep learning and doing your best and you'll be fine. The fact you're asking this question at all is a good sign.

Congratulations!

I have never in my life felt imposter syndrome between 30 years and 10 jobs. I was honest at the outset about my strengths and weaknesses and they hired me knowing what they were getting.

For me for instance, I’m very honest about not doing web dev and failing miserably every time I tried (of course I know JS). I want to be filtered out if that’s a requirement.

When this might have been a problem in the past, I basically always reminded myself that there was nothing i could not do. Whatever problem or obstacle I faced, I always overcame it. And that always gave me confidence. Plus, allow yourself to say "i don't know". It's actually a good sign of a sr programmer if he has the balls to say this to a boss, customer, other devs,... because a jr would feel dumb but a sr feels confident in that he does not know but also that he can learn.

It goes away over time and with experience. As you become more situated in your current company your confidence will grow and you'll become more productive.

'Are you contributing enough' is a less important question than 'are you passionate about the field and do you like what you're doing'. If you're just in it for the money and uninterested in learning that'll make it much harder to reach a higher level of productivity.

Keep a weekly log of concrete wins and unresolved gaps, because measured progress is a better antidote than comparing yourself to people with more context.

You just do what you are supposed to do, learn, grow.

There’s nothing you can or should explicitly do about imposter syndrome feeling per se.

But what you describe doesn’t sound like this. So it’s a good move to first identify the problem correctly with help of others.

Tell yourself everyone else feels the same. If that is true or not is impossible to prove, so just assume it’s an universal truth and move on with your life

Don't compare yourself to others. That's a game you cannot win; you can only lose.

Every person that you run into in your career knows something that you don't, or knows it better than you. If you are prone to feeling inadequate, you will never be able to look at people and not see areas that they know better than you. That's why comparison is a game that you can't win. But the thing is, some of them are doing the same to you. They see the areas that you know better than them, and they may be feeling inadequate too.

Instead, look at your situation as one of great privilege. You get to learn from people who know more (at some things) than you do. You get paid to learn from people who know more than you do. You get paid to learn things that make you more valuable.

Enjoy that privilege. Embrace the opportunity. Soak it up. Learn as much as you can from those people.

there is a reason you are there. this highly functional team includes you, you are also integral part of this team. over my long career I’ve had couple of moments like this and just remembering that I am part of a team and that I was chosen, instead of 1,000’s of others always got me through.

For me, it never got away. Just be aware of your quality and skills.

Years ago, when I was just getting started as a freelancer, I was trying to figure out how much to charge. The answer I got was "as much as you can get away with". I got paid obscene amounts of money for simple work, but the other side was happy and felt like it was a good investment.

See, if you convince everyone around you that you belong in that seat and deserve that salary, then you do. Let people expose you as an impostor, and if they don't, then maybe you do belong.

Imposter syndrome is the result of pretending to be something you know to be false. That might come from getting in over your head by dishonesty during a job interview or it could come from an employer setting unrealistic expectations and you lying about compatibility to retain employment.

To solve for imposter syndrome the following steps must occur:

1. Apply introspection. Know exactly why you are not qualified and try to figure out how you got there.

2. Talk to your supervisor about this. See if they can work with you or help you with training options.

3. Stop being afraid, because it’s time to man up. Realize you have some work to do to catch up outside the office. If you are so unqualified that you can never catch up then it’s time to start exploring other options much sooner than later. Don’t put this off hoping it will fix itself, like a coward.

I spent 15 years as a JavaScript developer. That is the land of perpetual imposters. Nobody knows what they doing in JavaScript as your regular corporate employee and will lie through their teeth about it while putting on a face saving show and simultaneously crying on the inside. The constant insecurity was so toxic.

By being an impostor.

i am sorry, but this might not be imposter syndrome. others might work on more advanced stuff than you and might be more experienced in their domain. that is not imposter syndrome.

but either way, don‘t worry. it won‘t take long after birth of your child, until your outlook on most things will change profoundly. just ignore it for a while. your life until now was the intro. the real part is yet to come.

best wishes to you and your family. love yourself and keep enough room to be the father you want to be. everything else will fall into place. good luck.

I've started viewing imposter syndrome not as a lack of confidence, but as a signal that I'm pushing into a territory where I'm actually learning. The day I stop feeling it is probably the day I've stopped growing. It also helps to remember that most of the 'experts' we admire are just better at hiding their own uncertainty while they figure things out in real-time.

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