small brain: Dunning-Kruger effect
normal brain: 'imposter syndrome'
galaxy brain: healthy self-doubt
Healthy Self-Doubt
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#52It’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?
I read you. Impostors bad-mouthing themselves? That's a contradiction in terms pure and simple.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#53For 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…
> What I discovered was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their knowledge.
Is that "would not" or "it isn't a priority"?
In a consultant role, a lot of what I initially saw as my value was transferring as much knowledge as possible to my clients' staff. I prided myself on how much I was able to boostrap a team to self-sufficiency and how many years it was before I ever heard from them again.
I was mostly wrong. For the vast majority of my clients' staff, my value lay in achieving some deliverable for them, and the value stream ended "dead right there". For technical concerns, it was way faster for clients' staff to treat me as a DSL Google for the particular problem space I was parachuted in to assist with, than for them to read the material I wrote for them. I did a long stint as a technical writer to put bread on the table while sharpening my coding/design skills in college, did a few user and developer guides for commercially released products that were well-received, so I am pretty sure the written material I leave with them is not lacking, as I re-use those skills weekly in my sales activities.
It is an incentives and culture problem. People are heavily incentivized to short-term results, and long-term cognitive wealth is heavily discounted. It takes an active, conscious effort by an individual to work against that pressure and actually go beyond the process described in documentation if they get good procedures that not only explain what to do, but in a manner that doesn't interfere with streamlined procedure-following, the reasoning behind what they are doing so they are equipped with a model to handle edge cases that come up during operation of the procedure.
In most average IT offices, there's probably 1 out of 10 who are like this to varying degrees, from the curious intern to the Free Electrons. They're a delight to work with and share with.
The best part of sharing: I get to learn and push my own boundaries as I get to play with a new friend in the model space to discover new corners I missed earlier. I like feeling I'm the dumbest bloke in the room in a creative atmosphere when there is no pressure on to fix something quickly; that's when I learn the most, when my mind is on fire.
I can see for someone like those on your team of brilliant mates, it can be hugely demoralizing over time to write and try to actively share, only to realize that only the rote part of it is ever used by the majority. That evolves over time into de-prioritizing that sharing to just the rote parts, and then as other teams ignore even that finding it easier to open incident tickets and loop them in, making only half-hearted attempts at sharing the rote parts.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [..] 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…
The more we learn about neuroscience, the more we learn that your conscious brain is merely the CEO, and that the brain is contradictory often competing sub-organizations with differing priorities and relative power in the organization. Dysfunction comes from an over-powered HR dept, etc.
I largely agree with the essence of what you are saying, which is that there is no "inner child", although some people may be more capable of "reinventing the wheel" internally, which may allow for some new optimization for the overall structure.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wi…
I don’t care if someone can bang out working binary tree on a whiteboard with the fluidity of Bob Ross, but I do care that people know that data structure and associated algorithms exist and could implement them given a dev environment, google, stack overflow, and a day or so.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#56People always talk about this imposter syndrome thing for themselves.
I think it's hard to look at yourself. You gotta look at other people. Do you think this is necessarily true? Do tons and tons of stupid people think they're smart and tons and tons of smart people think they're stupid?
In general I've seen some of the former and almost none of the latter... mostly people know their place and how good they are relative to the entire ecosystem.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#57For 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…
> What I discovered was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their knowledge
I'm someone who has spent a lot of time training up juniors. TBH I dont have a lot of show for it. I really wish I spent my time trying to learn things myself, many of the people I've trained have much better careers than I do. I'm guessing your group of successful smart people are that way because they don't waste time trying to share their knowledge.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wi…
I don’t care if someone can bang out working binary tree on a whiteboard with the fluidity of Bob Ross, but I do care that people know that data structure and associated algorithms exist and could implement them given a dev environment, google, stack overflow, and a day or so.
> data structure and associated algorithms
That's the thing. 99% of programming is Big Data (and windows, thereof), so everyone is on about that.
I tend to write stuff that is on a much more humble scale, like device control software, or systems that are used by thousands (not millions) of people.
I guess that I could say that "Any programmer should know about ring buffers," as that was a staple of my device driver stuff (I came up through hardware). In point of fact, only low-level drivers need concern themselves with ring buffers. Even programmers dedicated to writing device control software don't have to mess with them. The same with hardware handshakes, IRQs, etc.
We tend to view everything through the lens of what we know.
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [..] 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…
> Nitpick but it's "median" not "average".
“average
noun 1. a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.“
Re: Healthy Self-Doubt
#60For 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…
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