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Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

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Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#121

Post by nl »

deanCommie wrote: post #77

A lot of the discussion here is treating impostor syndrome and qualifications as binary: You're either qualified or not. And your evaluation of your skills is either above your actual skills or not. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always do…

I've said it before: I wish I was actually good enough to have ok imposter syndrome.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#122

Post by andrewaylett »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #8

I guess I just don't really believe this. It sounds nice, and it might even be a good falsehood to tell yourself for personal motivation—but that doesn't make it true. Yes, of course if you're an actual fraudster intending to commit fraud, you're probably comfortable with committing fraud. But feeling "impostor syndrome" colloquially means second-guessing whether you're good enough to deserve your position. There are…

>second-guessing whether you're good enough to deserve your position.

Often with an element of "what will they do when they realise".

I've come to understand, though, that I'd been worrying about the answer to the wrong problem. I know I'm not as good as I could (maybe should) be, and I know that for any given metric I have peers who can and do outperform me. But the word "expectations" is a loaded one: when suffering from imposter syndrome it's important to stop worrying about what expectations I have for myself and instead look at the expectations set in the specification for my role.

I also remember that the company spends quite a lot of money on me every single month. So when they tell me that they're really happy with that arrangement and that they believe that I'm meeting their expectations, that helps me to set aside my expectations.

Conversely, if your manager tells you that there's a problem and you're not meeting their expectations, they are definitely correct that there's a problem. They might not be correct in their diagnosis, but you can't simply ignore the issue.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#123

Post by rhacker »

jldugger wrote: post #87
deanCommie wrote: post #77

A lot of the discussion here is treating impostor syndrome and qualifications as binary: You're either qualified or not. And your evaluation of your skills is either above your actual skills or not. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always do…

Total derail but: > I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. Does anyone other than a MS employee put an M in FAANG?

OUTED!

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#125

Post by _Nat_ »

The anecdote at the start of the story seems off-target since that scam-artist wasn't an "imposter" of the sort discussed in "imposter syndrome".

To compare:

* Imposter-syndrome is when someone worries that they're incompetent/unworthy/whatever, when others probably wouldn't agree. They feel like others would look down upon them if (what they believe to be) the truth of their incompetence/unworthiness were to be revealed.

* An actual imposter would be someone actually incompetent. For example, someone who got hired to a role that they're actually bad at, but their incompetence hasn't been realized yet.

* The scam-artist discussed at the start of the story seems to have been more malicious than incompetent. While this would make them an "imposter" in a sense, it's not really what "imposter syndrome" is about.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#126

Post by exporectomy »

Rd6n6 wrote: post #23

The basis of this claim is that the author knows many smart people who feel imposter syndrome, and met one fraud who seemed extremely confident. It’s not exactly the scientific evidence readers were hoping for

Worse, that one fraud wasn't really an imposter in the usual sense of being incompetent. He was actually highly capable at his job. Of course he was confident in his abilities when he was creating so much success.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#127

Post by yissp »

jldugger wrote: post #87
deanCommie wrote: post #77

A lot of the discussion here is treating impostor syndrome and qualifications as binary: You're either qualified or not. And your evaluation of your skills is either above your actual skills or not. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always do…

Total derail but: > I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. Does anyone other than a MS employee put an M in FAANG?

I've seen people on 4chan /g/ include the M, but it being 4chan, they rearrange the acronym into something offensive that I shan't repeat.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#128

Post by nostrademons »

jldugger wrote: post #87
deanCommie wrote: post #77

A lot of the discussion here is treating impostor syndrome and qualifications as binary: You're either qualified or not. And your evaluation of your skills is either above your actual skills or not. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always do…

Total derail but: > I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. Does anyone other than a MS employee put an M in FAANG?

I still think that the acronym should be "FN MAGA". Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon are the big-4 companies, with notably larger market caps than Facebook and Netflix, and those 4 are more broad platforms/conglomerates while Facebook and Netflix are closely associated with a single app or small set of apps.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#129

Post by Shish2k »

FooHentai wrote: post #103
deanCommie wrote: post #77

A lot of the discussion here is treating impostor syndrome and qualifications as binary: You're either qualified or not. And your evaluation of your skills is either above your actual skills or not. But it's more nuanced than that. I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company. I have impostor syndrome all the time. Why? Because I measure myself against 1) role models that are ahead of me in many ways - I've always do…

>My fallacy is that there is a billion things that I am good at, but I don't consider them difficult (how could they be, if I am good at them) It's like the paradox of AI, which is that as soon as we've reduced something previously regarded as 'intelligent' to something that can be coded in software, it ceases to be thought of as intelligence any longer.

I wonder how long until we run out of types-of-intelligence to automate, and realise that “humans have a unique spark (a soul?) that makes them fundamentally different to machines” was a dream all along...

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#130

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> It's a hard feeling to get over, but every time I feel it, I think about Brazil. He could confidently state something that's objectively not true and would double down if you questioned him about it. I know because this happened to me. I doubted things I knew to be true because he was that confident and that persuasive. I'll never know what was going on inside his head, but I don't think he spent a moment questioning himself.

That sounds exactly like Steve Jobs.

His RDF was amazing.

I used to say that he could not only convince a cartographer that the world was flat, but sell tickets to them for a boat ride to the edge.

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