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Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

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Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#121

Post by vinchuco »

gowld wrote: post #5
munin wrote: post #3

It's funny how grad school is designed to bring out the impostor in you, kind of like a negative image of the different kinds of "impostor" listed. Obviously each of these is false in their own way, but these are messages that you will be given / experience during your PhD, so it's no wonder how people come out the other end thinking like this: 1. "The Expert": your advisor/other professors/students will make fun of…

It sounds like you attended a toxic grad school. Was your program in Chemistry?

It sounds like you lucked out.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#122

Post by philbarr »

Does anyone else get that feeling like, "am I the only one who sees what a load of shit this is?" I don't think it's imposter syndrome per se, but it's related. It's like, "I'm the only one who can see the truth."

An example: years ago my old crooked boss brought everyone in to his huge office to tell us why he couldn't afford to give people the pay rise they'd been asking for. With a straight face and with his Aston Martin parked in plain sight behind him. He gave some sob story about how a friend had come round his house to ask for a loan and how he was so poor he could only afford to lend the guy £800, even though his wife didn't want him to. It was pathetic. At the end of the meeting I walked out and duly started laughing, only for people to reprimand me, "he's doing his best for us! Didn't you hear the story about his friend?!"

So since then I've learnt to keep my mouth shut. Just yesterday I was in a meeting where we were giving estimates on things we knew nothing about. On the way back I glanced at people's screens and there must have been a hundred people pushing numbers around on excel spreadsheets for presumably no reason.

Quite possibly everyone else is just keeping their mouths shut too. And now we all go around doing pointless shit all day, every day.

Just now I saw a hare run across the field outside the office and thought, "you lucky bastard."

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#123

Post by eeZah7Ux »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #34

Aaaand self promotion: https://vadosware.io/post/the-cure-for-impostor-syndrome-is-... tl;dr - Stop claiming to be an expert at things you haven't delved into deeply. Conversely, if you've delved into a subject deeply, there's a high chance you won't feel like an impostor. If you don't have time (or resources) to delve into something deeply, and understand thoroughly, accept that fact and move on.

Absolutely false. Being aware of your need to learn and improve is perfectly normal and healthy.

Impostor syndrome hits experts, often when they are at their peak, while beginners rarely experience it, hence the name "syndrome".

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#124

Post by ponderatul »

Depends on individual circumstances, but there are hypotheses you can test on your own on yourself.

1. Quit watching porn. Articifial stimuli can lead to behavioural addiction which can fuck up your mental wellbeing and leak into other aspects of your life. Plus, it's another 100 billion dollar industry that makes money by exploiting our human nature.

2. Try acting classes. Acting involves among others, status games. For some exercises you will have to lower your status( act like a baby, dog, retard, or just do stupid shit) for some you will have to elevate your status. But for both you will be exposed, in front of people, and if you give it enough time you realise how you've been acting a certain status and how that takes a toll on your wellbeing. And maybe you should allow yourself to act retarded from time to time, even feel stupid, and that there's nothing wrong with that.

This is just from personal experience, with skin in the game.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#125

Post by ramblerman »

onion2k wrote: post #90
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #54

Stop treating being an impostor as something bad. See yourself as con artist who succeeds in senior developer, architect and management jobs without the required skills.

Impostor syndrome is bad because you fear being fired for not being able to do your job, or being dropped as a speaker because you're not worth listening to, or your career stalling because you can't compete with other people who seem to be better than you. Suggesting that sufferers accept that might actually be true is not helpful.

> Suggesting that sufferers accept that might actually be true is not helpful.

On what are you basing that? It's an interesting insight. Thinking of the world as one big pool of impostors might be equally relieving.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#126

Post by eeZah7Ux »

philbarr wrote: post #122

Does anyone else get that feeling like, "am I the only one who sees what a load of shit this is?" I don't think it's imposter syndrome per se, but it's related. It's like, "I'm the only one who can see the truth." An example: years ago my old crooked boss brought everyone in to his huge office to tell us why he couldn't afford to give people the pay rise they'd been asking for. With a straight face and with his Aston…

> "am I the only one who sees what a load of shit this is?"

Disillusionment.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#127

Post by Cakez0r »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #116
jaggederest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

I've seen your interviewing approach in action and it works brilliantly. This is pretty much a step-by-step of the way my last hiring manager interviewed and he never failed to build very strong dev teams.

Re: Is there a fix for impostor syndrome?

#129

Post by eeZah7Ux »

optimalKEK wrote: post #115

Imposter syndrome immediately goes away as soon as you make your employer more money than they are paying you.

You are touching on something that most post ignored.

When a significant number of employees suffer impostor syndrome that's a symptom of an overly competitive environment.

Reminding your employees that they are expected to be the best engineers in the world once a day it's a good way to delay promotions and salary raises.

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