Senior Dev Imposter Syndrome
I see a lot of people struggle heavy with this lately. Some of you top level/ top salary devs; what does your day looks like, compared to a mid range developer? What are you doing differently or better?
The more I think about imposter syndrome the more it seems like it's more a result of the opinionated ratings that are the basis for titles in our profession. I've had interviews internally at my company where hiring managers and tech leads thought I was 1 to 2 levels above my current role. I've worked with tech leads on other teams who were surprised I wasn't a level higher when I was leaving. But then I've had other internal interviews where they thought I wasn't the best candidate even at my current role. I've had managers who wanted to give me the highest possible rating but couldn't due to politics. I've also had a manager who wanted to fire me but couldn't due to employment law violations on their part. This is all at the same company.
Imposter syndrome is something you should talk about with your therapist. If you want a quick cure, talk to some CEO's in real life.
My day looks like moving software forward: conversations with peers, reading and writing documentation, testing UI, and writing code. (My team is using a lot of AI for code, but it hasn't sped up the delivery of software.) I don't manage humans. It's not something I believe developers should do.
Just because you can't remember the signature for a particular function call or the syntax for a particular language feature doesn't make you an imposter.
Seniors should be good at shipping software. Mid range developers are good at implementing sections of the software that may one day reach a user.
I've seen engineers that are 25 year olds that call themselves seniors.
I've checked their past work and experiences and they are pretty much senior level.
So I guess they are what they say they are, it all depends on the quality of their work.
You should be fine if your work is above average quality.
It's OK to meet the standards of the job and not strive for greatness at your day job. The corporation you work for will not care.
When you have a ratio of job seekers of 2000:1 applying for and getting an offer for a tech job, and given the OP is talking about top level / top salary devs.
1000% yes for above average quality.
If not, then working in tech is not for you.
It is only going to get worse when AI kills more startups, businesses and employment in the future.
Hyper-productivity is typically not that challenging to achieve. It mostly entails watching what other people are doing and then doing something else, which is high risk and high reward. That tends to scare the shit out of people. On a typical software team these high risk and high performance people have to learn to sit on their hands and simply play the game until either they get bored or are exposed for not doing the same regular repetitive things like a mindless drone.