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Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#4
I frequently wonder if my impostor syndrome was acquired in graduate school, or if it's an artifact of working at a job that is primarily intellectually driven. I didn't experience it until grad school, but I certainly still get it, not just in tech interviews, but in my regular programmer/tech lead job as well (making proposals, submitting high level features, etc.). I manage it fairly effectively at this point because I know what it is and how it feels, but it hasn't gone away and I doubt it ever will.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#7
post #6

One of the biggest factors I think affects the outcome of an interview are implicit bias in first few minutes. It can be related to gender, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality. This can heavily influence the interview process.

I think first impressions are key, no matter what.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#8

“More experienced engineers are more accurate about their interview performance...” Dunning–Kruger effect returns again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Dunning-Kruger shows up in some front page discussion almost once a day. What does that say about the "effect"?

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#9

“More experienced engineers are more accurate about their interview performance...” Dunning–Kruger effect returns again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I'm curious, with much of the interview process focused in the "soft skills", how many experienced engineers are actually wrong on their actual performance?

That is, they may be more accurate in how they did on the tasks, but do they understand how they impressed on the interviewers?

Of course, some of this is a bit of a curve ball. Many people would love to think that the soft skills are not important. My personal take is it is much more nuanced. Easy to focus on the obvious outliers that are terrible at the social, but amazing at the technical. Think Feynman. Most of us are not in that ballpark, though.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#10

I frequently wonder if my impostor syndrome was acquired in graduate school, or if it's an artifact of working at a job that is primarily intellectually driven. I didn't experience it until grad school, but I certainly still get it, not just in tech interviews, but in my regular programmer/tech lead job as well (making proposals, submitting high level features, etc.). I manage it fairly effectively at this point beca…

For me, moving out of the corporate world and into startup territory has removed most of the anxiety of feeling like an imposter.

When you can build and push major features of the product with little to no friction or stressful performance reviews, you can truly hone software as a craft.

95% of it is usually hammer and a nail, and the remaining 5% is a bottomless pit of version upgrades, new conventions, external libraries, changing requirements, performance bottlenecks, browser incompatibility, etc. No one should or can be an expert of these specific nuances, but you can learn to wrangle them all effectively at once.

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