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Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

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Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#271

Post by deanCommie »

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?

LOL. Without revealing any further, I'm not at M ;)

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#272

Post by lhorie »

texuf wrote: post #264
lhorie wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an unpopular opinion: this whole thing about impostor syndrome honestly seems like a thinly veiled humble brag. The narrative seems to be "nobody's perfect, but I am aware that I have imperfections so brownie points for me". IMHO, there's no real correlation between confidence and ability. There are extremely capable athletes with terrible ego problems and there are people that legitimately fall into death spi…

I guess anyone can interpret it however they want. If you’re challenging yourself in your career, you will eventually find yourself in a position where you legitimately don’t know what you’re doing, and people are depending on you to figure it out. Early in my career I thrived in these situations, because they mirrored my experiences in college. Later in my career, the problems got bigger and I found myself wondering…

I think your description seems pretty spot on. But the way I see the term being used sometimes, it seems some people take it as some sort of shame-but-actually-pride badge (the connotation being that if you have the syndrome, then you're secretly not an impostor, hence a "humble brag")

IMHO, you could leverage that uncomfortable feeling positively (e.g. seeking the right people to help you, etc as you said), negatively (e.g. give up) or in a beside-the-point way (bragging about the cup being half-full). None of this has really anything to do with acting maliciously/destructively like the article seems to suggest, though.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#274

Post by deanCommie »

agumonkey wrote: post #250
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'm in a strange position. I'm burnt out on every side of every candles from trying too hard too long with no results (due to life chaos, lack of luck, bad choices, who knows). To survive I took brainless jobs and I find myself in a different form of pain, being eroded by uneducated, learning-resistant cogs. Right now reading you say "measuring my self against people ahead of me" feels tempting, even after all the pr…

re: PPS. More than you know, but going into detail about my weird and unorthodox working style would reveal too much personal info.

re: PS. I should clarify. I was a damn good programmer who could pump out clean, readable, maintainable code, faster than most. But only once I found myself in a job I loved surrounded by people who encouraged learning, were curious, and loved to teach me. You gotta find your tribe. Don't let your brain rot.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#275

Post by themulticaster »

btown wrote: post #257
saalweachter wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually use FAAMG instead of FAANG because I don't understand what Netflix is doing in there.

My tongue-in-cheek definition of FAAN(M)G is "does the company have sufficient resources and technical wits to have entire team(s) dedicated to stress-testing and breaking their internal systems proactively to ensure uptime and low latency?" Netflix with Chaos Monkey definitely applies, and Microsoft does as well. Arguably Salesforce would be there too, if not for their meme-worthy historical failure at the low-laten…

Could you elaborate on the low-latency part and the historical failure? I don't know a lot about Salesforce, so I'm not quite sure how they fit into FAANG.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#276

Post by caddemon »

jacobr1 wrote: post #166
burkaman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key part of impostor syndrome is that you think you're bad at something, but somehow nobody else can tell. You keep getting compliments for the thing you're worried about. If you think you're bad at coding, and people can tell right away in a short coding interview, then you're not an impostor, you're just bad at it. If you're coming in last in every race, then you're not an impostor, everyone knows you're bad. I…

To further your example, when the mentor gives the feedback that the programmer is _good_, they don't take it as evidence they are good, instead it is rationalized away. "The mentor only told me I was good because they didn't want to hurt my feelings, but of course she knows I'm really not," Or "The mentor only told me I was good because they don't really see how much time I spend googling things. Real Engineers shou…

Part of the problem is that the standard to say something is "good" can vary wildly, and often does end up becoming quite low. See inflation of grades, video game reviews, Yelp ratings, etc. If I see a 3 star restaurant I'm highly skeptical of it, even though 3 stars should be considered perfectly acceptable by intended definition.

On Google performance reviews scores could range from 1 to 5, with 2 being "meets expectations". A 2/5 sounds pretty bad, but the description sounds like the person is doing their job fine and is not an impostor. So what does it actually mean? But that depends from manager to manager anyway. IME many of them end up inflating and "exceeds expectations" loses meaning.

Point being, I think you need a lot more context to determine what "good job" actually means. If feedback is sufficiently detailed you can make a pretty good estimate right off the bat, but unfortunately people are bad at giving feedback in general. So especially when new to a team and you don't have any priors for how they use language, it makes sense to have some doubts.

I'm sure this can become pathological, but is the unhealthy version actually as prevalent as all the talk about impostor syndrome?

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#277

Post by ozzythecat »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #241
jcheng wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then does Amazon belong there? I didn’t get the impression it’s at the level of the others, but closer to Microsoft.

Amazon is lower than Google, FB, and Netflix, but still quite a bit higher than MS. According to levels.fyi for engineers all at the same level (~5ish YOE): - MS: $185k - Amazon: $230k - Google: $267k

This is the middle to lower end of Amazon L5 comp for an SDE. I don’t know about the other companies - it might be mid to lower end for them as well or maybe high end depending on where they hire at.

Re: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

#279

Post by Dylan16807 »

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 don't know.

If you look at something like chess, which was often thought of as very difficult, the first thing we designed that was really good at the game made us realize that you needed next to no logic to win if you had a computer fast enough to try a billion moves. But we thought object recognition would be super easy, far less than AI tier, and we still can't do it reasonably well.

I'm much more convinced that humans suck at estimating the hardness of problems, and not very convinced we keep cheating the classification of AI.

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