
Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews - leeny
http://blog.interviewing.io/impostor-syndrome-strikes-men-just-as-hard-as-women-and-other-findings-from-thousands-of-technical-interviews/
======
twoquestions
It doesn't help that job ads are wanting "Top 3% only!" or "Only top 1% Ninja
Rockstars need apply!". Kind of reminds me of the market for singers or
concert pianists, you _absolutely need_ to be the best, even imperceptibly
worse makes you unemployable.

Should those of us who aren't top 5%/didn't go to a top school just find
another industry, one where sub-perfect work doesn't actively make other
people's jobs harder?

~~~
ravenstine
There's another similar problem that I'm seeing that I don't think has been
pointed out before.

Recently, I've been applying for web developer positions and am coming across
applications with these sorts of questions:

\- What's the coolest thing you've done both in life and at work?

\- What are your dreams?

\- Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I certainly do have answers for these questions, but I can't tell if they're
the ones that employers want to hear. And are these things for other random
people to know?

There are things I've done that _I_ think are cool, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that most people will think they are cool. Honestly, there
really isn't anything about my life that is conventionally cool, even by the
standards of the nerdiest nerds. Should my life have been more unique and
exciting by this point?

The same can basically be said of my dreams, although I do not aspire for big
dreams. I haven't made enough money yet to even think about anything more
grandiose than simply living comfortably. Do my dreams need to be more
exciting? Should I be shooting the moon? I feel like any honest answer I give
to the question will sound disappointing to any startup.

Should I see myself anywhere in particular in 10 years? Beyond making more
money and taking on more responsibilities in my career, where should I be in
10 years? My field evolves so rapidly that I can't honestly predict that far
ahead, let alone 5 years into the future. But maybe I'm not cut out for what I
do if I can't see that far ahead?

I could very well be what's wrong in the picture, but it seems to me like we
are culturally intolerant of "normal" people who have a skill and want to make
a living. Everyone needs to have dreams, grand aspirations, and a little
clairvoyance. I tend to have pretty high confidence, but seeing this kind of
language when applying for jobs does stir up that feeling of imposterhood in
me.

~~~
alxlaz
I've made a point for myself to never ask questions like "what are your
dreams" or "where do you see yourself in 10 years" in an interview, ever. For
a long time, I've used these as a filter, too. Getting this kind of question
in an interview is a big red flag for me and a huge disappointment.

Let me elaborate a little.

My dreams are none of an interviewer's bloody business. I'm here to work not
share the things that give me hope in my darkest moments or the aspirations
that shaped my adulthood. I find this question very creepy and extremely
unprofessional.

I could maybe figure out a "lesser dream" to share, but then what's the point
of this question? To find out the most intimate thing that I'd be willing to
share?

Where I see myself in ten years is a meaningless question to ask after I've
had, what, fifteen minutes of exposure to a company's culture? Maybe I'm the
kind of person who sees themselves in management over ten years, but you've
got such an amazing working culture that you could convince the most ambitious
career builder to stick to engineering instead. Or vice-versa. Or do you
really want to hire the kind of people who get an idea in their head, and then
_do it_ , even if it takes them ten years and it's really, really, really bad
idea?

I've heard all sorts of ways to justify these things. That it's a way to see
if a candidate can relate to you and evaluate their empathy -- if anything,
this will say more about an interviewer's biases than about anything else. To
see if a candidate can communicate about abstract matters -- as if there are
not countless questions about ethics, aesthetics and epistemology in our
profession that you need to start prying into personal things. That it's a way
to see if they're "career-oriented", whatever that means, as if someone who
writes amazing code but wouldn't hustle for a promotion is a bad hire.

So far, it hasn't turned out to be a bad idea.

~~~
pmiller2
I see these types of questions as the sign of an inexperienced interviewer.
Given how many inexperienced interviewers one can see interviewing at tech
companies, I would call that a chartreuse flag at best due to lack of signal.

~~~
ricardoreis
_I see these types of questions as the sign of an inexperienced interviewer._

Yup - that's all it is. And you're going to have a certain envelope of
negatives (usually far worse than this) in any environment.

So while it does make the flag a bit bless verdant... to call it a "red flag"
seems to be a bit of a stretch.

~~~
FabHK
Props to both of you for the lovely synonyms for "greenish" :-)

(And as for the substance: agreed, and a capable interviewee should know how
to work around those questions and similarly silly ones, like "what's your
greatest weakness?". It's a two-way street. And while it's not a positive
datapoint, it's hardly a KO-criterion. (viridescent? aquamarine? turquoise? :)
)

------
daenz
It makes me thrilled to see that we're finally talking about data around
gender issues, regardless of what that data actually says. It seems like we're
finally getting over the taboo and we're mature enough to look at facts.

~~~
x220
Maybe in a couple years we can talk about statistics suggesting inherent
gender differences in academic interest without getting screamed at.

~~~
PunchTornado
it's almost impossible to prove that something is inherent to a gender vs
culturally embedded (education, norms, myths etc.)

~~~
Cthulhu_
It is possible though, there has been scientific research in the matter. One
interesting one is that gender differences in academic interest actually
increase when people are given equal opportunities, pay, freedom of choice,
etc.

~~~
PunchTornado
equal opportunities? freedom of choice? How can you control for these really
abstract concepts that involve thousands of variables. What constitutes
freedom of choice when you have the internet and articles that say males
should do x and women y? How can you say that something is inherited or
environmental? Even with biology, most of the disease imply both factors.

I've seen some of the articles about the Nordic countries and was not conviced
at all. They were saying that in Nordic countries women have more choice and
they have a lower participation in CS studies. And bang, they thought they
proved something...

~~~
x220
The Nordic countries are the most egalitarian countries on earth with regards
to rights, equal pay, and gender norms. The sex differences in many different
academic fields and professions persist and are even more pronounced than
countries which are more blatantly sexist. This is the best evidence
available, and it suggests that not everything is socially learned. This
suggests that some basic tenets of social constructivism are false _by its own
criteria_.

Rather than accepting no evidence, why don't you suggest a better way to test
this idea and explain why your test would be better?

~~~
PunchTornado
Rather than accept poor science I suggest not pretending to do science if you
can't do it in a rigurous, scientific way.

There is nothing wrong in saying that we don't know if coffee is good or not
for your health. Science is not there yet with its tools to test for this.
Instead of presenting studies over studies that contradict each other.

The same with inherited differences between genders. Science is not there yet
to tell us anything about it.

------
jarjoura
Of course it does, it's not a gender problem, who said it was? How many of you
have heard your friends and colleagues tell you, "wow I'm so lucky I got
through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again
today."

You shouldn't walk away from a good interview feeling like you nailed it. An
interviewer should push you to your limits and the more you know, the more
they should push. It doesn't mean you failed, it means you reached the limits
they could push you in the time you had.

If you're rejected from the role, most likely you didn't reach the bar they
needed you to be at, or you failed at the behavioral parts. Or, the
interviewers you had weren't properly calibrated, which isn't to say anything
about you other than bad luck.

~~~
joeax
Many of these people interviewing wouldn't pass their own interviews if the
roles were reversed. The bar should be high, but not so high that you leave
feeling demoralized.

~~~
xenihn
As an interviewer, I've been in this situation. I hate interviewing other
people and felt really guilty about it, but I didn't have control over what I
asked. I've also been in situations where I wouldn't be able to answer the
questions I'm asking if I hadn't just learned or reviewed them for the sake of
interviewing itself. It's so stupid.

------
tombert
As someone with no credentials or official training, and someone who also
works at a big megacorporation as an engineer, imposter syndrome hits me
fairly hard, especially during interviews. It's really hard to compete with
the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing, and I'm
usually interviewing for a job that has a strict requirement of a "bachelors
in CS, Math or Physics, Masters preferred".

I've managed to pull it off somehow, but I rarely go a day where I don't
wonder if I really should have as good of a job as I do.

~~~
mohaine
I've done 3 interviews in the last couple weeks where candidates couldn't do a
simple Python dictionary lookup. These were people with a Masters in CS and
have Python as their primary language.

I wouldn't worry about being an Impostor.

~~~
ramphastidae
Am I missing something, or do you mean they didn't know `myDict['key'] `?

~~~
mohaine
Yes. One candidate remembered to do it that way after some searching, the
other never did.

Both started out by looping over the items in the dict and stopping at the
correct one. Asking if there was a simpler way to get values out of dict
didn't help.

The third candidate really didn't get far enough to get the dict wrong so I
counted them as well but they may have known how to do a dict lookup.

Here is the exercise:

Given these dicts:

{"a":[1,2],"b":[3,4],"z":[5]} {"a":[66],"b":[77]}

Write a program in language of your choice that sums the common keys.

a and b are common so result is:

{"a":1+2+66,"b":3+4+77}

so output should be:

{"a":69,"b":84}

This exercise is stupid simple. Note this is in an IDE/Editor, not a
whiteboard.

~~~
tombert
I remember how I didn't believe that Fizzbuzz eliminates some crazy-high
percentage of candidates until I started interviewing. I think most of the
people I have interviewed are relatively smart people, but a lot of them
really haven't had a lot of need to practice their algorithms, so they don't.

I've had people fail the "tell me if these two strings are anagrams" thing,
with one person's response being to have 26 counters, one for each letter.

------
taeric
The practice interview point strikes me as odd. In large, because I have never
done one. Do folks really typically do that many practice interviews?

I don't even know how to study. I sometimes consider it, but have never spent
more than an hour prepping for an interview. :(

It worries me, because I know that interviewing is a skill. But are we not
setting folks up to over index on that skill such that they have difficulty
with actual job performance?

If anyone knows any literature into that general topic, I'd be very interested
in perusing it.

~~~
rconti
I've been successfully employed the valley for over a decade (and other tech
work before that). I've never done a practice interview, I don't worry about
my GitHub. I agree with the cargo culting comment.

Work on your network. Apply for jobs that interest you. Interview. Get job.

~~~
taeric
I'd love to see numbers to show how many this is a good guideline for.

That is, I think this somewhat describes me too. However, I don't know as that
I can give the advice of "ignore practicing interviews."

~~~
rconti
I didn't say NOT to do it, I just think people focus too much on it. And not
even the practice interview itself. I think this mindset that everyone has to
have an amazing GitHub and be a rockstar 10x engineer and do tons of practice
interviews _in itself_ keeps people from applying for newer and better
positions, and improving themselves on the job.

That is to say, it's a kind of meta imposter's syndrome. "I'm not even doing
the right things to make myself good enough to put myself in a position to get
a better job!" Which keeps people from even trying.

~~~
taeric
So, to those points, I'm pretty sure I agree with you. Curious if this is some
sort of survivor bias, though. In particular, how normal are we? If we are the
outliers through luck or some other factor, I'd kind of like to know.

------
user68858788
When I was younger I was able to go into interviews with the mindset of, "it's
their decision and it's okay if they don't think I'm a good fit."

It made interviewing easy, and in a lot of cases even enjoyable. Unfortunately
for reasons still unknown to me, I'm not able to get into that mindset
anymore. Interviews are extremely stressful now. No amount of rationalizing
will help.

~~~
crispyporkbites
probably because you have bills, expectations, and reality hits hard when it
wants to take a punch at you

~~~
user68858788
That's probably true. Another factor is that I have support roles on my
resume, and now it's really hard to be given a chance at anything other than
support. I had an easier time getting programmer interviews when I had no
experience, but that's another topic.

------
akulbe
I genuinely don't understand why there's any surprise here. Lack of confidence
/ fear / worry... it's a _HUMAN_ trait. Not a gender-specific one. Of course,
this would strike men just as hard as women. Why would there be any difference
at all?

On a related note... one of the best articles I've ever read on the subject...
it's a Seth Godin blog post.

 _HIGHLY RECOMMENDED_

[https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-
syndrome/](https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome/)

------
rhombocombus
I frequently wonder if my impostor syndrome was acquired in graduate school,
or if it's an artifact of working at a job that is primarily intellectually
driven. I didn't experience it until grad school, but I certainly still get
it, not just in tech interviews, but in my regular programmer/tech lead job as
well (making proposals, submitting high level features, etc.). I manage it
fairly effectively at this point because I know what it is and how it feels,
but it hasn't gone away and I doubt it ever will.

~~~
lsalvatore
For me, moving out of the corporate world and into startup territory has
removed most of the anxiety of feeling like an imposter.

When you can build and push major features of the product with little to no
friction or stressful performance reviews, you can truly hone software as a
craft.

95% of it is usually hammer and a nail, and the remaining 5% is a bottomless
pit of version upgrades, new conventions, external libraries, changing
requirements, performance bottlenecks, browser incompatibility, etc. No one
should or can be an expert of these specific nuances, but you can learn to
wrangle them all effectively at once.

------
kowdermeister
I've gone through interviewing recently and it was a rather frustrating
experience. I thought that the most challenging thing will be some tricky algo
questions I don't use in real life or never heard of it. It turned out that
the problem was to get to the tech interview at all by convincing the
interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim.
Didn't always work. It was mostly because they didn't care to assess my skills
because I think my resume sucks: I couldn't provide any big or even local big
names thus they probably went with someone who could actually namedrop. This
was in Eastern Europe, to add some context.

I finally got two offers, dropped the ongoing processes and accepted one, but
before I had some dark days thanks to these negative experiences. My takeaway
from this is that interviewing sucks, but one company will realize what you
can do and happily accept you as-is. I was lucky that I was not forced to take
a sub-par offer by giving it enough time.

~~~
commandlinefan
> convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience
> that I claim

Yeah, I read about "impostor syndrome" on here, and maybe the people in
question really are suffering from that, but I've never felt like an impostor:
I know I'm good at this; I've been doing it successfully for three quarters of
my life. Statistically speaking, I'm probably not the best that there ever
was, but I do know that I'm at _least_ good enough to do a phenomenal job at
whatever programming position I'm interviewing for. I personally suffer more
from "I feel like you're just sitting up there on your high horse looking for
any reason to reject me" syndrome.

------
dahart
“women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men do, after a bad
interview.”

To me that means that imposter syndrome is striking women much harder than
men, but that’s not what the headline was talking about. They’re defining
imposter syndrome as whether someone is mis-estimating their own performance.
Unfortunately, a lack of accuracy doesn’t necessarily demonstrate imposter
syndrome, in fact imposter syndrome is defined as self-doubt in the face of
evidence of competence. So, imposter syndrome wasn’t measured here at all.

The data shows women estimate their competence as well as men, and perform as
well as men, and then when there are any signs of trouble they bail _seven
times_ faster than men. To me that could very well be much greater levels of
impostor syndrome, or it could be much lower confidence, but to actually
measure it you’d have to actually ask questions about how people rate
themselves against others, not measure how accurate their responses are.

------
esotericn
Isn't this really just a fancy way of stating that (some) people tend to
become anxious when put into a high pressure environment?

The whole concept of 'impostor syndrome' seems to rely on unexplored
assumptions, like the idea that it even matters whether you should be working
at Google or not.

I think that's the key to solving it. Realising that actually, most of us are
just rolling through life trying to get by and be useful. The rest is fluff.

If you're playing in a professional football team, you're a professional
footballer.

------
bespoken
> Impostor syndrome

Does this refer to the company pretending they deserve better than you? I've
seen enough incompetent people at companies declining good candidates because
they are simply unable to recognise it. I've seen so many shitty companies
pretending they are top tier, it's just the arrogance of power. Only once
you're in you can see the flaws and mess it often actually is.

------
Bucephalus355
Worth noting that Scott Kaufman, psychologist at Columbia, has correlated
narcissism with Impostor Syndrome for quite some time.

Here is a pretty easy to read overview from last month’s Scientific American:
[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-
nar...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-narcissists-
more-likely-to-experience-impostor-syndrome/)

------
throw2016
This just seems so much myth making and gratuitous glorification so people can
feel special just getting a job. The famed difficulty of getting hired creates
a sense of elitism and exclusiveness and perpetuates a culture of insecurity.

This is very cult like, If people are indoctrinated to think that they are
part of an elite group they will be devoted and would look at leaving as a
step down. Cults are a great business model as the followers are very devoted.

It suits the agenda of employers to construct this and target individuals who
derive all sense of identity and self worth from their jobs and when employed
will work their asses off in a constant reaffirmation of 'specialness' just to
retain their sense of self worth. Very cult like.

------
akshayB
One of the biggest factors I think affects the outcome of an interview are
implicit bias in first few minutes. It can be related to gender, ethnicity,
age, religion or nationality. This can heavily influence the interview
process.

~~~
rjplatte
I think first impressions are key, no matter what.

------
jshowa3
I didn't see a link to the actual data. Be nice to see the sample size for
women.

------
g105b
Anyone would think that men... are equal to...

...

nah, doesn't seem to add up.

------
yarrel
Can anecdotally confirm.

------
ourcat
Who on earth said it didn't?

------
thomasedwards
“More experienced engineers are more accurate about their interview
performance...”

Dunning–Kruger effect returns again!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

~~~
thwy12321
Dunning-Kruger shows up in some front page discussion almost once a day. What
does that say about the "effect"?

~~~
quickthrower2
Its a HN cliche. Like "strawman"

~~~
jesseb
It's not unique to HN, Reddit has been rampant with both (and more) for as
along as I can remember.

------
black-tea
If everyone has impostor syndrome, does anyone have impostor syndrome?

------
jondubois
If someone thinks that they may be an impostor, then they probably are.

Firstly, it means that they think that our society is a meritocracy (or close
to it); this shows that they lack life experience/wisdom. Once you realize how
far society is from being a meritocracy, it's literally impossible to feel
like an impostor. There are so many successful people who are idiots that even
if you were an idiot yourself, you would still be within the norm; I.e. not an
impostor.

Another thing about people who have impostor syndrome is that it shows that
they feel insecure about their intelligence and/or abilities. Insecurities are
typically rooted in past experiences or traumas. Smart people often get
positive reinforcement about their intelligence; they don't have traumas or
insecurities when it comes to their intelligence.

~~~
myxozoa
This almost reads as satire.

There are so many assumptions here that are completely off base.... I would be
described as an intelligent person by most anyone I know and yet I have very
low self esteem, in fact many of the intelligent people I know are the same
way. These kinds of issues can't be distilled that simply.

~~~
jondubois
Self esteem is not related to confidence.

If you had very low self esteem and someone asked you what the result of 1 + 1
was, you would probably still be 100% confident that the answer is 2.

If your emotions or self esteem gets in the way of your logical reasoning,
then your reasoning skills were probably not that great to begin with.

------
mo1ok
Dang, I am so tired of hearing about imposter syndrome. I get it. It exists.
Maybe I'm more comfortable knowing that there are lots of things I don't know,
even as an experienced engineer? It seems like such endless studies and banter
about a relatively minor thing that is (in my opinion) easily gotten over.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
You shouldn't assume something is no big deal just because it doesn't affect
you personally.

~~~
mmirate
It is presumably a big deal to those whom it affects.

But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family,
etc.?

(And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at
those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other
way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)

~~~
jiveturkey
> But why is it a big deal to anyone else

it’s not. what’s your point?

~~~
mmirate
I agree it isn't. The person I was replying to, implied it inherently is.

