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Healthy Self-Doubt

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Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#41

Post by heavenlyblue »

blickentwapft wrote: post #13

It’s strange. In the tech industry, whenever you express any self doubt, people read that as you saying you have impostor syndrome. Why is that?

Because as opposed to what many people like to think, and even though tech is a purely desk-kind-of-job; tech doesn’t actually require deep intellectual thinking.

Tech is the least risky engineering discipline and in the huge majority of jobs requires the level of a plumber work with almost none of the liabilities of physical manufacturing.

So of course a lot of us have impostor syndrome as we’re simply not doing anything special (but also the job doesn’t actually require anything special either)

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#42

Post by kubanczyk »

bArray wrote: post #17
Negitivefrags wrote: post #3

Imposter 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.

> [..] most people really do suck at their jobs. If fact, 50% of people perform below average! 50% of the population also have below average IQ. > Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out > and are actual adults. I believe that everybody has an "inner child", but most functioning adults have built layers around that inner self to enhance their behaviour to that of what we externally perceive as an "a…

> 50% of people perform below average

Nitpick but it's "median" not "average".

> everybody has an "inner child", but most functioning adults have built layers

And that's the point where I'm scratching my head. What do people even mean by that? As I observe the "inner child" in others and then apply the new theory to myself it's freaking obvious that the adult part is doing all the reading, all the predicting, all the planning, all the outwitting of the child, all the building, all the self-updating, all the $dayjob. Who is writing this text? I am - the adult part. I am who has 99% of control of the communication at this moment. (At a different time the show can be 50% mine. Or 1%. But when writing, the inner child is mostly shunned, I think he cannot even write too well at all.)

And so I protest calling me "an outer shell" that you think you can just simply "re-learn". I am no shell. And I'm definitely not outside! I am the first class citizen, I just happen to have a very silent/weird/energetic/stupid/shy roommate. If I try less, he will have more control. If I try harder, he will have less. Balance. But the balance that is maintained solely by me, i.e. by the adult part - the inner child is not able to do that!

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#43

Post by jstummbillig »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #3

Imposter 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.

Certainly. But then again claiming that most people suck at their jobs does not particularly scream "has sorted shit out", when in fact, on average, people are average at their jobs -- so maybe at least in some of these cases there's still some room left for healthy self-doubt.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#44

Post by formerly_proven »

bArray wrote: post #17
Negitivefrags wrote: post #3

Imposter 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.

> [..] most people really do suck at their jobs. If fact, 50% of people perform below average! 50% of the population also have below average IQ. > Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out > and are actual adults. I believe that everybody has an "inner child", but most functioning adults have built layers around that inner self to enhance their behaviour to that of what we externally perceive as an "a…

> If fact, 50% of people perform below average! 50% of the population also have below average IQ.

That's not necessarily true and for IQ I think it's only true because IQ measures are normalized to an average of 100 and a normal distribution with a set standard deviation.

For example if out of ten people nine perform at 100 %, and one performs at 95 %, then the average performance would be 99.5 % and 90 % of people would perform above average.

If you swap average for median, then these are true by definition which doesn't really tell us anything about the distributions (so the people by way of measurement) involved.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#45

Post by ecocentrik »

draw_down wrote: post #28
TopHand wrote: post #23

For 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 ab…

Fear of redundancy might be another reasons technical skills would not be readily shared by skilled employees. It's not something you typically see in startups but large corporations are full of people who actively protect themselves from perceived redundancy by obfuscating their skill set.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#46

Post by tomrod »

TopHand wrote: post #33
tomrod wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposter syndrome or job security? I've seen both.

I learned a long time ago that if you share your knowledge freely with your co-workers that only increases your job security. I postulate this plays off imposter syndrome. Your co-workers think to themselves, if this person is willing to share that knowledge, what are they holding back?

I learned the same, and follow such. I've also seen orgs where there is no version control because the culture encouraged people to consider themselves as sole sources of indispensable knowledge, irreplaceable. Those tended to be toxic places, but as such they show a counterexample where their specific job security was from not sharing their knowledge and experience.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#47

Post by eplanit »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #3

Imposter 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. To claim to have Imposter Syndrome is really a form of humblebrag, and often a way of seeking validation. "No, you really _are_ smart and capable"

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#48

Post by x87678r »

TopHand wrote: post #23

For 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…

I've seen a lot of people waste time on writing documents that just sit there unread. No one wants to RTFM, esp one written a few years ago that is likely not accurate.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#49

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #29
TopHand wrote: post #23

For 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.

> should know better about something

It's been my experience that this is quite subjective.

For example, the standard leetcode binary tree tests.

When I mention that I'm not particularly good at them, I will usually get some variant of "Well, this is basic stuff that any programmer should know." –often delivered quite condescendingly.

But I've been writing ship code for over thirty years. I have a public portfolio with hundreds of thousands of lines of ultra-high-quality code, dozens of articles on software development practices, and multiple shipping apps for years (I write code every day –my GitHub ID Activity Log is solid green).

It's just that I started as an EE, and have been primarily self-taught. Since I have never encountered a binary tree in my professional experience, learning them has not been a priority. I'm certainly not interested in spending time learning impractical (to me) stuff, at the expense of learning what I consider the important stuff.

I'm also constantly trying out stuff I don't already know. It makes life interesting. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#50

Post by kubanczyk »

knightofmars wrote: post #35
philosopherdog wrote: post #18

Imposter syndrome is where you actually have the skills and/or knowledge but don’t believe you do (irrationally). Most people are simply incompetent. That is not imposter syndrome. Having a rational sense of your actual abilities is tough because beliefs affect confidence. So most people seem to be encouraged to over inflate their abilities. The syndrome is not imposter but over inflation.

"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clar…

Yet the question is not "am I stupid or clever?", the question is should I take advice from the army's central Hitler's opponent whose decisive moment of the career is described by Wikipedia like this:

> Hammerstein repeatedly warned President Paul von Hindenburg about the dangers of appointing Hitler as chancellor. In response, Hindenburg assured Hammerstein that "he would not even consider making that Austrian corporal the minister of defense or the chancellor". Barely four days later, on 30 January 1933, pursuant to a request by Hindenburg, Hitler formed a cabinet as the German Chancellor [...]. Hammerstein was forced to resign from his office on 31 January 1934.

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