
I'm a phony. Are you? - icey
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx
======
daeken
If I had a dollar for every time I wondered when I was going to get fired for
incompetence, I'd be a millionaire. Most of the time I _know_ that I know my
trade -- I get a fairly regular stream of compliments from coworkers,
customers, peers on random projects, etc and I generally feel I produce a lot
of value. But the second something happens that points in the other direction,
even something minor like a slight flaw in a report to a client, I immediately
fall into the "how am I still around?" trap. I've gotten good at pushing that
down and moving forward until I feel good about what I'm doing again, but it's
tough.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one that feels this way; from what I can tell,
this is fairly common. I wonder if this ever really goes away? It seems that
for me, the more I realize I _don't_ know (which is, of course, always
increasing along with the things I _do_ know) the more common it gets. Curse
of knowledge, I guess.

~~~
icey
I got my first paid programming job when I was 18, and I _knew_ that I was way
out of my element. So I knuckled down and worked my ass off to try to figure
out what I didn't know, and how I could get better.

I'd change jobs every so often to see if I could try something bigger. Every
time, I knew I was totally out of my league again... So I knuckled down and
worked my ass off to figure out how to be better at that. I was certain that I
was going to fail miserably once my luck ran out. Eventually I was going to do
something so horrifically bad that I'd get laughed out of town and never work
again.

15 years after my first programming gig, and now I'm self-employed. I have a
few customers that are helping me pay my bills so that I can try something
bigger. I'm still pretty sure I'm out of my league, so all I can do is hunker
down and hope like hell I'm not incompetent and oblivious.

I don't have anything to suggest to you to help make the feeling go away, but
I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with it for awhile :)

~~~
srl
You've gone 15 years without ever having the misfortune of being stuck in an
environment where all you could do was think about how boring what you're
doing is (and, quite possibly, how incompetent those around you are). You've
spent 15 years challenging yourself, doing (I presume) interesting things.

Ordinarily I'd put some pithy seven-worder here about how lucky you are and
how "motivational speakers" probably shit their pants just looking at you, but
I honestly can't think of one that's good enough. Sorry, man :)

------
goblgobl
I find this happens when 1\. we fruitlessly compare ourselves to others, and
2\. 'worship' smartness. I'm reminded of a quote from David Foster Wallace's
commencement speech:

 _Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an
outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to
worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or
the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money
and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will
never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your
own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when
time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally
plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of
every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily
consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your
intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud,
always on the verge of being found out. And so on._

edit: changed DFW to David Foster Wallace.

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
Am I the only one who had to look up that DFW stood for David Foster Wallace?

~~~
goblgobl
Yeah, that could be confusing - I updated the post.

------
kenjackson
While I liked the general message, the post felt insincere to me. Like, "I've
got 30 domains and I've only done something awesome with 3 of them." or "I
used to speak Spanish really well and I still study Zulu with my wife but I
spoke to a native Spanish speaker today and realize I'm lucky if I can order a
burrito. I've all but forgotten my years of Amharic. My Arabic, Hindi and
Chinese have atrophied into catch phrases at this point. What a phony."

Seriously, does he think that others know this stuff better? Being a phony
isn't Ted Williams saying, "I only hit over .400 one time, I'm a phony".
Feeling like a phony is when there's something you really feel like you should
know, but for some reason you don't. For example, there was a time I thought I
was really proficient in C, and then someone showed me some C code and there
was syntax that had me baffled. It was bitfields. Up until that point I had
never seen bitfields. Must've skipped that section in K&R and went years w/o
ever seeing it. And this was before Google search, so I just happened to go
through K&R and find it, and read up on it, before the code review session. I
was five minutes from showing up to a meeting and saying, "What's that?" and
having everyone turn and say, "Who hired this guy!?" -- that's feeling like a
phony.

~~~
shanselman
It was written completely from a sincere place. I used to study linguistics
and 10 years ago was pretty darn good at languages. I see dudes like Tim
Ferriss saying they can learn a new language in three months (I question this)
and I speak to Europeans and Africans who have 5-7 languages. I used to take
liguistics classes and could converse in a numer of languages. Being good at
languages was part of my identity. However, we can't be good at everything. If
you don't use a muscle it atrophies and that's happening with my language
skills. That's what I was trying (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to express. I'm sad
that this part of my identity isn't working like it used to and it makes me
feel like an imposter.

I liked your C language example.

~~~
kenjackson
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize that aspect of your background.
I'm a typical American (well, US native to be more precise) -- we're lucky if
we know one language.

------
neilk
Let's abandon the therapeutic frame for a minute.

Is it possible that we really _are_ frauds?

It may just be the nature of programming projects that nobody understands the
full implications of what they are doing. And for the most part, what
separates the successful from the unsuccessful is dumb luck.

So maybe you really ARE courting disaster every day, and there's something
like a 1/8 chance every year that you'll do something so horrible that your
clients or investors will hate you forever.

Look at the success rate of our industry. Let's set aside startups because
that's widely acknowledged to be a field where much is unknown and
unpredictable. Pity the non-technical CEO who just wants to computerize some
filing system. It's common for 50% of these sort of routine corporate IT
projects to fail. This is the thing we're supposedly _good_ at. And yet they
would never hire a plumber with a 50% disastrous track record. In fact, they
probably would never expect somebody with a 50%-bad track record to even be
able to stay solvent. But there are plenty of programmers or consulting firms
out there with worse records than even that.

~~~
qntm
Well, if we are, then this certainly isn't the only industry in which
everybody is a fraud. Look at the people who make movies, or generate
electricity, or trade stock, or grow corn. Look at the people who run our
various countries.

It's a really unnerving day when you realise that _the whole thing is run by
human beings_.

------
cydonian_monk
This post and discussion reminds me of the David Foster Wallace quote: "[If
you] worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling
stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."

[Edit: Beaten to it by goblgobl....]

My mind always dredges that quote up when I start to question my abilities.
(Which I've been doing a bit of lately, coding for a nearly 15 year old
Windows NT system. Relearning things I haven't seen since the '90s....)

Certainly we all have moments where we question our abilities. Small crises of
faith, where our self confidence withers away. It's just part of life. Part of
the checks and balances of our brain.

~~~
goblgobl
It's an amazing quote.

Also, I can imagine if someone is extremely talented/gifted in one domain, its
extremely alluring to measure the world against that attribute. It can be
self-affirming 95% of the time, because you're better than most people. But
the other side of that coin is the 5% who are better than you, make you
question your talents and create insecurity.

~~~
cydonian_monk
The whole Kenyon speech is good material. The kind of commencement speech
everyone wishes they'd had. (I don't recall word one that Raymond Lane said at
mine.)

The parts of it about traffic come to mind /every day/ I'm on the way home.
Especially: "In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way:
It's not impossible... that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being
driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him,
and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more
legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way."

------
div
I often feel this way.

I try to reason to myself that it's normal to feel this way as a programmer /
techie simply because there is such a vast amount of stuff to know, that no
one really knows even half of it.

What with the multitude of programming paradigms, languages frameworks, mobile
dev, webdev, front-end, back-end, sql, no-sql,... I could go on.

In the past 1-2 years I've picked up Android and iPhone development, and am
now doing a deep dive into ruby and rails so I definitely feel like a phony at
the moment.

On the flip-side, just being able to pick up those skills and do a few
successful projects with them gives at least some counterbalance to the phony
feeling.

~~~
davedx
I actually feel really lucky RE: all the technology that's out there now. When
I learned to program, the only option available was 'BASIC', then years later,
C++. When I went to university (1997) I was surprised at how many other
languages there were, but it still was relatively simple compared to today.

I remarked to my partner who's also in IT that I feel sorry for people trying
to get into IT nowadays, because the number of languages, frameworks,
platforms etc. is so huge. It's awesome in some ways but it must be overload
for a newcomer trying to figure out where to get started.

~~~
div
I suppose to any newcomer my advice would be to go depth first into something
like RoR or Django.

Learn the framework and learn the language really well, then once you're
comfortable building things well (after a year or 2) experiment with something
else on the side.

The hard part is figuring out what is worth learning, and for this a mentor
can be priceless.

------
iqster
Don't let the title fool you. This is a really nice article and worth some
reflection. There is a google+ discussion thread as well:
[https://plus.google.com/u/1/113698589973698283456/posts/ShxT...](https://plus.google.com/u/1/113698589973698283456/posts/ShxT4F2Y2mm)

------
juiceandjuice
I had horrible grades in college. I retook more classes than I would have
liked, some for really stupid reasons. I felt like I was a complete phony
doing physics because, for some fucked up reason, it was what smart, cool
people did, and that I didn't belong there at all, I was just a poseur who had
some bright flukes along the way. More importantly, I almost worked entirely
alone along the way.

In my last year, I was taking Analytical Mechanics, Q&M, Advanced
Electrodynamics, and Nuclear and Particle physics. I had the second highest
score in the class on the first test, which included 10 grad students. I still
wrote it off as a fluke, and I didn't do so good on the next test. Then I did
it again, the next semester, and I still couldn't believe it. Everyone had
better homework scores than I did... how could I beat them on the test? Then
the same thing happened in Nuclear and Particle physics with an oral
examination because my grades were low. I sat through 5 other students who had
much better grades and were doing the oral examination for the A instead of an
A- (I was fighting for a B-) They weren't doing so well for the most part. At
the end, the professor, who knew I could do it, started going above and beyond
what we hard learned into Solid State physics, just to see what I knew. I
screwed up a bit on the paper final, getting stuck on weird problem that
involved some hand waving for some radiative losses for an electron near
relativistic energies. I knew I was below the curve. I went in to say bye to
the professor on the last day, and he asked what grade I thought I deserved,
and I told him a B- (I was in C territory before the oral exam and final
exam). He ended up giving me an B+.

The last year was weird. It was really the first time I thought I could
really, truly do physics. I worked with other students, and I realized that a
large portion of the students who I thought were better students were better
focused and better working in groups. These same students even thought of me
as really smart (and still tell me that). Overall, I don't think I'm smarter
than they are, but I do think we have different strengths. To this day, I
still feel like I got lucky, and that my bosses didn't bother to check my GPA
because of my enthusiasm for the position (and writing skills)

I do have ADHD, and I know for a fact that's a driving force in this because I
have a hard time focusing on many tasks. I've gotten much better at it,
especially after having a regular job with a regular schedule, but I still
have a hard time believing where I'm at.

------
wccrawford
I've definitely been paid more for jobs than I felt they were worth. I had to
take a look around at cost vs benefit, what others are willing to work for,
etc etc... In the end, I didn't have a problem with it.

------
spking
As they say here in Hollywood, "Fake it till you make it."

------
Tyrannosaurs
Does the root of this stem not from a belief that what we do is in some way
bad, but a feeling that we're capable of so much more if only we could better
channel our abilities?

We all have moments where we think "right now I'm doing amazing work" which
make us look at all the other moments - our normal working level - as in some
way insufficient.

In reality it's probably not realistic to work at that level continually, but
that doesn't mean that we don't aspire to it so instead of thinking "I work at
a decent level normally with moments of greatness", instead we think "I'm
great but spend a lot of time being mediocre".

And maybe more than that it's very possible the moments when we think we're
doing amazing work might not actually be our finest moments, just the
"neatest" ones. There are days when I burn through things on my to do list but
I suspect some of the days that really move things forward are far bittier and
less immediately satisfying. I can spend a day being pulled from pillar to
post by clients and think I got nothing done but the reality is that on those
days I might have made a couple of clients happy and unblocked a couple of
things that were delaying projects.

The TL;DR version: I suspect we're bad at judging what our real standard is,
both in terms of when we're actually doing great work and how often it's
possible to do it.

------
6ren
I felt this a couple of days ago when I couldn't intuitively _see_ something
that I thought I should. Luckily, after a while, I tried reducing my vague
confusion into specific questions, and answering each, one by one... which
revealed more to the thing than I thought there was. No wonder I couldn't see
it - that concept didn't exist.

I also simplified the problem, discarding issues of implementation efficiency
and convenience/ease of use of the user model, and any tricky wrinkles that
complicated it, to reduce it to something I _could_ see. Being able to see
that has given me a base to understand the other issues. I've noticed that
some specifications use this approach: they have a very detailed underlying
conceptual model, then add a convenience model on top. e.g. XPath
specification (crazy ancestor, descendant, sibling etc axis -> defaults to
descendant so you can just use unix-like paths).

I used to be much better at seeing things... but thinking back, my key
characteristic at that time was to embrace not knowing things, embrace
mistakes and learn. I was also working on areas that were built directly on
top of existing models and approaches... whereas now, I'm developing the
theoretical foundation as well. There's a kind of exponential explosion, with
so many different and interacting choices at every turn. In some ways, an
intuitive/insight approach is necessary, as exhaustively trying each
alternative is not feasible.

 _tangent_ : In _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ (the movie, not the story), there's
some discussion over whether Audrey Hepburn's character is a "phony", but I
never understood what they meant in that context. She's beautiful - how can
that be phony? Or maybe that she's pretending to be urbane when she's rural?

------
randomdata
The work I do day to day sometimes seems so easy and obvious, for lack of a
better description, that it feels like anyone could do it. It wasn't always
that way; far from it. I worked hard to reach the level of skill I am at, but
hard work is easily forgotten.

As such, it is easy to minimize ones achievements. There are people off
developing autonomous vehicles and doing crazy things with artificial
intelligence, and I'm here developing lowly web/desktop/mobile apps. I guess
phony is one way to describe it: If I were a "real" programmer, I would be
working on "real" problems [1].

[1] i.e. problems in which I do not yet have experience solving. I imagine
once I gain that experience and become confident in my work in those areas,
they too will no longer feel like real programming jobs and I will set my
sights on something else that is, in my mind, a "real" programmer's job.

------
yason
There's this curious inversion that is often involved, too.

When you think you haven't got anything done and you've just considered
yourself the second worst, if not worst, programmer in the world, everybody
else seems to praise you and be eternally grateful for your great work. But
when you've been in the flow, hacked magnificent solutions, and feel you're on
the top of the world, the best you can get is that everybody else doesn't even
notice. The worst might be complaints or even direct criticism that you feel
is totally unattributed to you.

Yeah, I suck most of the time. It keeps me learning, though, and I do know my
value when I need it. I also try not to be surrounded by idiots: better be a
small fish in the big pond than a big fish in a small one.

------
mnemonicsloth
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been refuted by further research:

 _[D-K] describes everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that
they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots..._

 _However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning’s main data is
better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our
ability and of task difficulty. For example..._

 _So why does Google blog search finds zero mentions of this refutation? My
guess: because under [the new] theory you should listen to those you disagree
with instead of writing them off as idiots._

citations here: <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html>

------
brianl
no. yes. sometimes.

if you're having a crisis, i suggest you really try something else. you will
either:

(1) love the new thing

(2) realize how much the new thing sucks compared to the old thing and
rekindle the love with the old

(3) realize how much both suck and try something else.

one of my old mentors told me that the job i was loving as a fresh out will
suck at some point, but to suck it up and do it because you get paid to have
fun outside of work. i haven't regretted cutting any of these safety lines to
do new things that make work (majority of how you spend your waking time)
enjoyable ...

------
simplezeal
[https://plus.google.com/u/1/113698589973698283456/posts/ShxT...](https://plus.google.com/u/1/113698589973698283456/posts/ShxT4F2Y2mm)

------
chubs
I feel this way every time i finish and 'ship' a project, especially when
submitting an app to the app store. I'm like 'this'll never get approved, its
rubbish, who'd want to buy it, stick to your day job...'

But, i submit anyway, and people end up buying the apps, and i never get an
email asking for a refund, so i guess its just all in my head!

I guess the lesson is to ignore the cynics, even when the cynic is yourself.

------
Okvivi
My favorite paper about the Impostor Syndrome is this one

The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic
Intervention
[http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women...](http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women.pdf)

I found it to have the best explanation about where originates. Of course it
has to do with your childhood. :-)

------
latch
I've worked (very recently) with some really horrible programmers..real
phonies. It isn't ok, they deserve to get fired (quicker than they did), they
are easy to spot, it's a major flaw that they got hired in the first place,
and a bigger one that they stick around for months.

It drags everyone down..it can kill a team and certainly a project. It's a
major reason I quit.

~~~
geboyr
It sounds like a different degree of phony. Phonies are all over the place and
show up in many social situations. Many times it arises due to wanting to fit
in.

In my weekly RPG, we had a new person join who claimed some experience with
the gaming system, but didn't oversell herself and was eager and knew her
competencies well enough to pick it up fairly quickly. That's pretty much the
trick. Too bad the phonies you encountered (it sounds like) oversold
themselves too much and couldn't keep it up.

------
analyst74
The biggest problem, as I see it, is the difficulty to judge yourself.

When you feel confident, how do you know if you are truly excellent, or
suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect? Same when you are feeling incompetent,
are you really lacking competence or suffering from Imposter syndrome? How do
you know??

------
tudorizer
This post and discussion thread hits a sensitive topic for me. Here I was,
recently thinking that I might be the only one having this feeling. I guess
it's part of evolving and part of life and I try to convince myself with
"Heads up! Keep on fighting the good fight."

------
etherael
If always be closing is the cardinal rule of sales, always be learning is the
cardinal rule of knowledge work. Never stop caring and never think you know
everything.

If you adhere to those rules the worst that can possibly happen is that you
get better.

------
maayank
I'm still amazed no one mentioned an amazing post about the same subject by
Jason Cohen from Smart Bear:

"Why I feel like a fraud"

<http://blog.asmartbear.com/self-doubt-fraud.html>

------
hugh3
I never suffer from impostor syndrome. I'm not sure what this indicates.

------
thibaut_barrere
I don't know a single good programmer who isn't subject to the impostor
syndrome, actually.

I've been wondering if the daily work is shaping us in this specific way.

------
Willwhatley
I'm nobody! Who are you?/ Are you nobody, too?/ Then there's a pair of us--
don't tell!/ They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!/ How public, like a frog/ To tell your name the
livelong day/ To an admiring bog!

~~~
Jun8
Good old Larkin! This reminds me of _Toads_ , which, of course is well-known.
However, he also has a poem called _Toads Revisited_ , which, depending on
your reading, may be heartbreaking in its conformism.

~~~
qohen
> Good old Larkin! Mmm...no.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Nobody!_Who_are_you%3F>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson>

~~~
Jun8
Thanks for pointing that out :-) The reference and the post _reminded_ me of
Larkin's two poems, but maybe I didn't phrase the mental hyperlink clearly.

But more importantly, thanks for at least checking the reference out in the
parent rather than giving it a downvote, as some here are apt to do.

I guess some think that any poetry relevance would be irrelevant in HN. To
those I would reply:

    
    
      It is difficult
    
      to get the news from poems
    
    		yet men die miserably every day
    
    				for lack
    
      of what is found there.
    

(from _Asphodel_ , <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15541>).

------
georgieporgie
When I was in high school, just before the Internet became widely available, I
was the greatest programmer in the world.

These days, with the Internet and constant promotion of projects, I see that
I'm just a talentless nobody.

We're now regularly exposed to the work of the tiny group of truly excellent
programmers, and only the very best output of the masses of regular
programmers. How can anyone who stays even slightly up to date (i.e.
programming blogs and social bookmarking sites) feel good about what he/she
does when bombarded by success stories of amazing sites/applications/services?

~~~
iqster
1) It is actually worse than having to compete with the best programmers in
the world. Rapid development tools and high level abstractions have created
the same sort of "level playing field" as the handgun did (i.e. a small weak
guy with a gun can take on Hercules).

2) As you get older, some people realize that you don't have to compete. You
don't have to be the smartest person in the room. Your life experiences make
you unique. It might so happen your unique perspective is what is needed to
make some breakthrough happen. You come to realize how much being in the right
place at the right time matters more than anything else.

Intellectually, I know #2 to hold true. But that doesn't stop me from feeling
that I'm not reaching my full potential :(

~~~
eric-hu
1) It is actually _better_ having to compete with better programmers.

At the end of the day, you're challenged more and sure, you may be further
from the top than you would be if you were born 30 years ago. At the same
time, you can accomplish more today than you could if you were born 30 years
ago. It's all because of those better tools and better programmers out there.

------
mhewett
This should be a poll...

