If you feel like an impostor, chances are you are. Embrace it, relish it, learn, and you’ll become not an impostor.
Healthy Self-Doubt
21–30 of 129 posts
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#22If you feel like an impostor, chances are you are. Embrace it, relish it, learn, and you’ll become not an impostor.
I feel like this comment is actively harmful.
I know some ultra competent people who still feel like an impostor. They aren't. Suggesting that they are makes it harder to get out of it.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#23For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning curve I set up a wiki where group members could publish articles that they thought may help others not to have to re-invent the wheel. What I discovered was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their knowledge. I often wondered if even these brilliant people suffered imposter syndrome and that they didn't share this knowledge for fear they would be found out.
What I did learn from the most brilliant members of the group was to never be afraid to ask a question, even if it sounded ignorant. Never be afraid to expose a gap in your knowledge. If you don't, your missing an opportunity to increase your learning.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#24If you feel like an impostor, chances are you are. Embrace it, relish it, learn, and you’ll become not an impostor.
I feel like this comment is actively harmful. I know some ultra competent people who still feel like an impostor. They aren't. Suggesting that they are makes it harder to get out of it.
Are those people you know in the majority? The point could be made more politely while still being true.
More interestingly, steps to take in order to tell the difference?
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#25For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning curve I set up a wiki where group mem…
Imposter syndrome or job security? I've seen both.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#26I think there are different varieties of this that someone can experience. Many have piled onto the "most people suck at their jobs bit" (possibly because they feel like they haven't been pat on the back enough).
I feel like it can be difficult to disseminate exactly what it is that you may or may not be good at in a job, partly because the offered reasons are opaque, and partly because being good at a job doesn't necessarily depend on having a high level of whatever skill you were ostensibly hired for. Up until this year, most companies have normalized a standard definition of a job that selects for one type of person with some kind of skill that hopefully they'll be passable at.
I personally have been terminated 5 or 6 times from various software related roles, and have pre-emptively quit two other unrelated jobs in customer service and moving. I have at all times, especially during the interview gauntlet, been totally dissolutioned with either my own skills, those that someone is looking for, or what I'm looking to do. I'm fairly sure that if you were a bad programmer at a software developer job, you'd never know it unless you just found yourself intellectually dumbstruck when faces with fairly mundane problems.
At this juncture, I have no idea what I'd still feel like doing as a job, but I can pretty reliably guess when I'll depart of my choosing or otherwise, out of boredom, bureaucracy, or a terrible awful no-good sleep insomnia.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#27I constantly have self doubts, something in between Imposter Syndrome and OCD. I need to make sure I did the right thing, and even when I'm done what I had to, the self doubt kicks in, the OCD makes me look over just once to make sure. I'd say, this feeling is the exact opposite of walking away from what you've destroyed behind yourself like in the movies.
In the early days of my career I thought this was what is keeping myself from achieving goals but later I realized that my self doubt kept me from making a lot of mistakes that would cost a fixing. It's ok to have self doubts, it's ok to think you're not competent enough, or fear that you'll fail in general. I believe that's what actually makes you a good developer.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#28For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning curve I set up a wiki where group mem…
Perhaps they found the task of turning their brains inside out unappealing for other reasons. Maybe it was just more work, for example. Maybe they didn’t need their “brilliance” to be validated.
It’s also not really a straightforward thing to do, there are all sorts of questions around how best to structure info for the purposes of those it will be used by. All of this is a pretty big undertaking. The more I think about it the more I’m unsurprised people didn’t just hop to it.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#29For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning curve I set up a wiki where group mem…
> never be afraid to ask a question, even if it sounded ignorant
On the mentoring side, never make fun of someone asking a legitimate question.
I give my team shit if they should know better about something but legitimate questions are taken as seriously as possible.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#30Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs. I see a similar sentiment all the time where people say things along the lines of "Nobody really feels like an adult, we are all just muddling through" etc etc. Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out and are actual adults.
Yes, one particular pet peeve for me is the idea that the personal finance part of "adulting" is hard. It's really not. Live (far) below your means and invest the difference, that's it. Somehow 1.3B Chinese can maintain an average savings rate of 30%, but people in the west cannot help but live paycheck to payceck? Of course, few people are willing to actually go through with it, but it's not difficult to understand.…
Don’t assume that what’s easy for you is easy for everyone else.
There’s more to getting out of debt than just basic math. I’ve been trying to keep track of my expenses for more than 20 years but no success so far. I do have online banking and a list of contracts but there’s no way for me to figure out how much money I actually have left. Because for example, that yearly medical copay may be around the corner. I have no idea how to account for it, or how to spread it over the months while still keeping track of how much disposable income I actually have at any given time. And that’s just one example.
Please be aware that not everyone is financially literate.