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Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

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Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#111

Post by roselan »

After 20 years as a programmer with various employers/clients, I noticed the impostor syndrome when I was alone on projects (or in small teams). But when I was working with big teams in traditional fields like bank or retail, I felt something more akin to the Dunning-Kruger effect...

When alone, I compare myself to people in the videos I watch, People like Hickey, Carmack, Crockford, etc. I can't handle a candle to them! But when in BigCorp, intertia is massive, people souls have long been sucked out, and you feel shackled. This make you believe that you can accomplish way more than the median person (which is of course probably wrong).

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#114

Post by madaxe_again »

catach wrote: post #110
madaxe_again wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we are all impostors This, a thousandfold. I have struggled with impostor syndrome throughout my life - it doesn’t help that my 35 years to date look like a smacked out Mary Sue fantasy. In my previous business I often felt like I was pulling the wool over the eyes of the world - what right did I have to lead these people, to charge those people, to make these decisions? Well, none, and neither does anyone else…

Perhaps we feel compelled to assume that the people in charge know what they're doing since the alternative is deeply unsettling.

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree, and as far as I’m concerned, the reality is unsettling. In business, as I said, I found the leaders of mighty businesses to be often dangerously clueless - the larger the org the easier systemic inertia and process make it to hide at the top - in politics, the dunces of my year at school now sit in parliament.

Yes, this is purely my observation, but I’ve had a broad and global sample pool - and I inhabit a world in which almost everything is smoke and mirrors - yet I find these precepts serve me well, and the decisions and actions I make and take within this worldview produce expected results against the hypothesis.

Part of me just wants to hide under a rock - but we’ve muddled along this far, so on it goes.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#116

Post by PaulRobinson »

jaggederest wrote: post #39
taurath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every high performer at my workplace states regularly that they wouldn’t be able to pass the entrance exam at the place they currently work. It’s a cruel fucking environment.

In the last couple weeks I've had to decline 18 total hours of "challenges" and "work samples" from 4 different interview processes. I'm not sure at what point it became de rigueur to require applicants to complete on average 4.5 hours of work without pay, but I really, really don't think it's reasonable. I've even offered to show them my current projects in lieu of work samples, and no go. Baffling.

There's some trade-offs here, because there does need to be some sense of how good a developer they are if you're hiring them as a developer: the distribution of skills is so broad at each "level" (junior, mid, senior, principal), and cultures so different you need some way of understanding if they really do have 5 years experience of LanguageX, or 3 months of it repeated 20 times...

What I prefer to do is ask them to show me some example code they think is "good" (ideally their own, but perhaps from an open source project), and some that is "bad" (ditto), and write a paragraph or two on _why_.

Colleagues prefer to ask people to do coding exercises, and that's fine, I won't criticise, I've done it before, but I hate the fact we are asking people to do toy problems that don't represent real World problems.

My favourite process that I don't get to do much now (I have to conform to somebody else's policies these days), is just to sit and talk through a candidate's favourite project or problem.

Why did they choose that problem? What tools did they use? Did they consider alternatives? If it was a personal project did they write tests, and why/why not? If it was something they were paid to do, how did they input vs other people, etc.? Get a sense of them, try and build some empathy for what makes them excited.

Get somebody in a room with a coffee and just listen to what makes them not shut up about some code they worked on. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's better than asking for another todo list app.

And then I also like to do an architectural thinking exercise. "Let's pretend we're building [well known piece of software] from scratch. What do we need to build, what do we need to think about?". Go through it, you draw their idea on the whiteboard, not them. Ask which technologies they know about for each piece. Find the edge of their comfort zone.

All more useful to me and my assessment of somebody than asking them why manhole covers are the shape they are, how many windows there are in a nearby city or asking them to build a scaffold generated app that nobody would ever use.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#117

Post by ancarda »

eight_ender wrote: post #21

I've felt imposter syndrome badly before, even while I was climbing ranks and getting excellent reviews. Now I manage developers and, while not a cure, the best I can do is constant feedback, and to urge them to find their "superpower". This sounds terrible but hear me out. Years ago, after a string of programming jobs at, what I didn't know at the time, "boring enterprise" programming jobs, I felt like the top dog a…

What if your superpower is something very few people seem to care about, like security or privacy?

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#118

Post by upatricck »

cejast wrote: post #112

The worst thing about impostor syndrome for me is knowing whether you're actually suffering from it, or whether you're actually an impostor. It really is a vicious cycle.

What i think helps, is not even asking if you are an impostor because it can lead doubting yourself. We focus on doing our best work, then it will be to others to determine whether we are good or not.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#119

Post by abhirag »

karlta05 wrote: post #55

I'm not normally one to comment here but this is just an awesome topic. I have about 8 years experience in the industry. In the beginner of my career I did feel a bit of the impostor syndrome. Quite frankly, it was because I had this ideal of what a programmer ( or whatever buzz word title) should be. As I got on with my career I slowly realized no-body gives a shit. Its just HR that give those titles. I also found t…

"The humble improve" -- Wynton Marsalis :)

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#120

Post by kokey »

ztjio wrote: post #8

Funny story, in 15 years of professional software development I never experienced the sense of imposter syndrome until very recently when I decided after 12 years at one employer (on many satisfying projects) I needed to consider expanding my employment options. AKA I started looking for a new job. Once I got a whiff of the putrid state of hiring in our industry today holy hell... Sure, I’ve been successful at this f…

I've spent much of my career as a contractor and even before that I often changed jobs often early in my career since I had a good reputation in the industry I was in so I got approached often. You have to realise that it's a numbers game and it's not you, if a company overlooks you because they are not asking you the right questions then it's their loss. I often land in interviews at companies where their expectations are set by how young graduates see the industry and the role, which usually totally overlooks more experienced, professional and reliable candidates. I also now believe that the first interview I land won't lead to a job, since this has been true so many times. It helps, since I am probably a bit too nervous at my first interview in a while, but I also don't beat myself too hard over it and by the second place I interview at I am more relaxed. Also, don't write off jobs based on the job spec or the recruiter, actually upload your CV to a job site or apply for a lot of jobs advertised by agencies, even if it's not the best fit. It just warms up your job hunt nicely, you get used to talking to people outside of your company, you get used to articulating your strengths, passions and preferences and along the way you may discover a job that is a lot more suitable for you than you could have imagined.
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