
Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage - FactCore
https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/the-impostors-advantage/
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gregd
I've been coding off and on professionally for over a decade and I STILL feel
like an imposter.

I still have to look stuff up constantly.

I still watch how-to code videos everywhere.

Don't know if I'm alone or other people just can't bring themselves to admit
that.

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heavenlyblue
“Over a decade” is a small time being a professional. You’re what, about 35 on
average?

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gregd
I'm 53. I have a 25 year IT career and the last 10 of it has been coding and
sql server mostly.

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hnarn
I work with developers and I sometimes joke with them claiming that they’re
not “real” developers because they don’t know every function in the standard
library and constantly have to look things up. This is such a nonsensical
level of expectation on a developer (that they would know all functions by
heart) and is also a really dangerous way to work, because it breeds
complacency and, in time, deviations from the norm (because the norm changes).

There are many things that perhaps legitimately should make people feel like
“impostors” even when they aren’t, but the need to use reference material
definitely shouldn’t be one of them.

Unfortunately many people in our business still equate knowledge or competence
with “knowing things by heart” which is really unfortunate, because I think at
best it tells you very little about the person, and in the worst case you may
be hiring someone that through arrogance will make mistakes because they don’t
care about double checking crucial parts of their code because they too feel
that they “should” know what’s going on.

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rvnx
What if you are actually an impostor and write such to convince yourself you
aren't ?

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ZainRiz
Shhhh, I’m trying to convince myself that’s not true (author here)

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dekhn
I was an academic, but not a particularly successful one, and constantly felt
imposter syndrome. Over time I realized a few things- most people in my cohort
had a similar amount of trouble establishing their careers, and when I look
upon their academic careers, and also see how much fakery is involved in
modern PR-focused science, I actually think I dodged a bullet.

Instead I went to industry where I felt like an imposter for years, then built
a system that worked really well, and got to work with some absolutely
fantastic people who were far smarter than me. I still felt like an imposter,
but at least I was well paid and respected.

Finally, now in my career I get paid huge amounts to debug complex ML systems
in production when they break. Almost nobody else has the skills to do this;
almost nobody has the interest in doing it; but I've spent 20+ years focusing
on exactly this kind of problem. I don't feel like an imposter any more.

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habitue
I liked this. I also like how the moral of the story wasn't "You're not an
imposter, you had it in you the whole time and just needed confidence", but
rather "Yeah, you're an imposter. But you're always going to be an imposter
and so is everybody else, so get used to it"

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anotheryou
And yet _I_ might be a real imposter %)

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dredmorbius
Imposter syndrome, n. 1. To suffer from delusions of mediocrity.

[https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104429659613796075](https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104429659613796075)

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belval
I liked this article, aside from the "I'm totally getting fired" it echoes how
I felt in most jobs I had.

I like to think that it's something anyone who isn't absolutely full of
himself will experience.

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ZainRiz
I suspect anyone who tries to stretch themselves past their comfort zone
experiences this

But different people have different comfort zones

(author here)

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ravedave5
Interesting, but some of this might be someone who's made it far enough that
they can reason out of imposters syndrome, rather than it being wrong those
first few years.

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ZainRiz
Author here. For what it’s worth, that first promo I talk about was when I was
just two years out of college.

It was many years later that I started realizing that maybe it wasn’t a fluke
mistake

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neltnerb
I never have worked a job like that but I definitely think I came out of MIT
with that attitude. Maybe mostly by luck and falling at so many things I
tried, but I was convinced that basically the world is made up of people about
as stupid as me, each of us in our own unique and special way. Liberating.
Sophomore level philosophy but still, the world is made up of stupid people
collectively doing our best to not blow it all up.

I definitely also use the "if I have this question at least ten other people
do but are afraid to ask" logic lots of times, true or not. It's a lot easier
to be unafraid of failure if you don't consider yourself good at it ^_^. Way
easier to learn if you're willing to look like an idiot, the hard part is
getting people you already know to change the context in which they interact
with you. That is the main reason I switched labs between undergrad and grad
school - not being the "undergrad helper" for the first three years of grad
school. I bet moving over to Google did similarly for you.

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ZainRiz
Dude, so much wisdom in this comment. I’m saving it

Yeah, regarding perception, yeah, I have definitely noticed a jump in
responsibilities every time I’ve switched teams, and a bigger jump each time I
switched companies. But I hadn’t quite realized why that was happening until
my previous manager mentioned out the perception bit when I was preparing to
leave Google

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oschvr
Great article. Resonated within me.

