
Healthy Self-Doubt - zdw
https://nerdygirl.com/2020/07/02/healthy-self-doubt/
======
TopHand
For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly
educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the
years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge
we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the
company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning
curve I set up a wiki where group members could publish articles that they
thought may help others not to have to re-invent the wheel. What I discovered
was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their
knowledge. I often wondered if even these brilliant people suffered imposter
syndrome and that they didn't share this knowledge for fear they would be
found out.

What I did learn from the most brilliant members of the group was to never be
afraid to ask a question, even if it sounded ignorant. Never be afraid to
expose a gap in your knowledge. If you don't, your missing an opportunity to
increase your learning.

~~~
x87678r
I've seen a lot of people waste time on writing documents that just sit there
unread. No one wants to RTFM, esp one written a few years ago that is likely
not accurate.

~~~
andrekandre
documentation has to be actively maintained, but even old and innacurate
documentation can serve as a starting point (and be update to be accurate)
when something needs to be investigated/refactored etc

without any documentation, all you have is word of mouth, and when people
quit, the organizations knowledge DECREASES over time

> people waste time on writing documents that just sit there unread. No one
> wants to RTFM

documentation is hard... most documents that i have seen are mostly brain
dumps, very badly formatted, just very hard to follow...

one thing i think severely missing in school and otj training is how to write
documents people WANT to read

------
Negitivefrags
Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most
people really do suck at their jobs.

I see a similar sentiment all the time where people say things along the lines
of "Nobody really feels like an adult, we are all just muddling through" etc
etc.

Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out and are actual
adults.

~~~
martindbp
Yes, one particular pet peeve for me is the idea that the personal finance
part of "adulting" is hard. It's really not. Live (far) below your means and
invest the difference, that's it. Somehow 1.3B Chinese can maintain an average
savings rate of 30%, but people in the west cannot help but live paycheck to
payceck? Of course, few people are willing to actually go through with it, but
it's not difficult to understand. It so happens that getting this part right
is a pretty major part of adulting too.

~~~
Hackbraten
Don’t assume that what’s easy for you is easy for everyone else.

There’s more to getting out of debt than just basic math. I’ve been trying to
keep track of my expenses for more than 20 years but no success so far. I do
have online banking and a list of contracts but there’s no way for me to
figure out how much money I actually have left. Because for example, that
yearly medical copay may be around the corner. I have no idea how to account
for it, or how to spread it over the months while still keeping track of how
much disposable income I actually have at any given time. And that’s just one
example.

Please be aware that not everyone is financially literate.

~~~
martindbp
I actually don't think you need to track expenses much, at least I don't. I
did at first at 18 just to make sure I could survive on the $1000 I got in
loans and subsidies by the government at the time.

What I recommend is to focus on the big expenses, those are what gets you.
That is, housing, transportation, medical (if you live in the US, but there's
maybe not much you can do here). Don't go for the most expensive house or
apartment that you can afford. If every house is expensive in your area, then
settle for an apartment. If you're not willing to, then that's the root of the
problem. Go car free if you can. If you can't, get a cheap reliable used car
(mine was $4k, worked like a charm). Don't eat and drink out very often. Cut
expenses until you're saving 30-50% of your paycheck. If you're in tech,
that's very easy, otherwise it's difficult but still doable. Then, if you
start earning more money, you can perhaps allow yourself to spend more.

The problem is the expectations that people have of life. Your parents have a
big house so you deserve one as well. You're having a baby, so you need a 3
bedroom house and a yard, otherwise that's baby torture! All your friends are
buying new cars so naturally you need one too, right?

If you're earning below median income, I'm willing to cut you some slack, but
I think for most people on HN, that is not the case.

~~~
pnutjam
I'm on the Midwest, it's not as easy over here as you think.

The salary of your first job can hold down your income for a decade, you might
not even realize how underpaid you are.

~~~
hnarn
> The salary of your first job can hold down your income for a decade

Why is that?

~~~
pnutjam
Most employers ask you what your previous salary was, or get it from your past
employer. Salary is not protected information.
[https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/08/how-salary-history-
ba...](https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/08/how-salary-history-bans-can-
raise-wages-for-female-and-black-workers/)

~~~
packetslave
except in a little-known place called CALIFORNIA

------
wilsocr88
I wonder how much of this ends up being from gender-based socialization. Maybe
this individual got just the right balance of encouragement and luck in her
upbringing to build a healthy balance of self-confidence in her abilities and
self-doubt to encourage her to keep learning.

Meanwhile, a ton of men are insecure and scared, but they're treated as "the
default choice," so in many cases they may not receive that formative boost of
self-confidence. Thus, we get grown men convinced that they don't belong in
their own careers.

~~~
loopz
The individual may feel impostor syndrome or similar negative feelings. On one
level emotions need to be managed (observed & accepted). Associating emotion
with being "underrepresented" may just be one of many possible internal
justifications. The environment, work-environment dynamics, unreasonable
demands and lack of leadership, are probably more powerful influences than one
single individual's exhaggerated feelings of responsibility. Psychological
safe space must be consciously built and maintained, sometimes by dilligent
effort on multiple levels pushing back against existing marginalizing forces.

The modern victim narratives I don't automatically subscribe to. Though, try
to relentlessly direct attention to official and unofficial power structures:
How they shape interactions, siloing and the inevitable unhealthy power
dynamics (entropy). The dynamics is defined from top and down in typical
hierachical structures, but is not rectified until cooperation starts at the
top. Sometimes, technology and knowledge hoarding is used to same effects and
ends. With good people all this may happen unwittingly, no matter the color,
gender or "representation".

The cure to self-doubt is a healthy and supportive environment to provide
necessary feedback during the course of creative and deep knowledge work. This
happens to really be what agility is about too.

The Divide & Conquer-people would like us to fully believe in individualism,
to justify shortcomings in leadership, for own small-minded benefits or
managerial simplicity.

------
luckylion
> At some point in my software engineering/leadership career, it became
> evident that I was expected to have Impostor Syndrome. Indeed, it became
> clear that all underrepresented people in tech were expected to have
> Impostor Syndrome.

Is that so? I agree with the first part: it's somewhat expected that you deal
with impostor syndrome. But it's pretty much expected for everyone, regardless
of some group representation. I believe it's an occupational thing, not a "I'm
in the minority" thing. That may contribute, but it's not _the_ factor at all.

------
philosopherdog
Imposter syndrome is where you actually have the skills and/or knowledge but
don’t believe you do (irrationally). Most people are simply incompetent. That
is not imposter syndrome. Having a rational sense of your actual abilities is
tough because beliefs affect confidence. So most people seem to be encouraged
to over inflate their abilities. The syndrome is not imposter but over
inflation.

~~~
knightofmars
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy
officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and
hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and
lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership
duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve
necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both
stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility
because he will always only cause damage." -Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

~~~
kubanczyk
Yet the question is not "am I stupid or clever?", the question is should I
take advice from the army's central Hitler's opponent whose decisive moment of
the career is described by Wikipedia like this:

> Hammerstein repeatedly warned President Paul von Hindenburg about the
> dangers of appointing Hitler as chancellor. In response, Hindenburg assured
> Hammerstein that "he would not even consider making that Austrian corporal
> the minister of defense or the chancellor". Barely four days later, on 30
> January 1933, pursuant to a request by Hindenburg, Hitler formed a cabinet
> as the German Chancellor [...]. Hammerstein was forced to resign from his
> office on 31 January 1934.

------
wellpast
I always get excited when I see a position like this that embraces competence
and seems excited at rising to the challenges of learning.

There are so many meme-ish ideas that circulate that seem embraced precisely
because they tacitly claim to _remove_ the challenges of life and learning and
becoming competent.

Worried you're not competent enough? Oh, that's just "Imposter Syndrome",
don't worry about it, we _all_ have it, you don't need to do anything to
address it.

Of course there are feelings of insecurity that go too far and it's helpful to
have a compassion for ourselves.

But I think more important is to not couple our self-worth to our competence.
The tacit and wrong assumption behind "Imposter Syndrome" (and many aspects of
our culture) is the idea that our self-worth and competence are connected.

It's okay to be incompetent at something; life is too short to master
everything. But if you do make a conscious decision to grow your competence,
then you should respect that it is going to be effort, you should even get
excited about that effort, and yes, self-doubt, is essential in following
through on that effort.

------
blickentwapft
It’s strange.

In the tech industry, whenever you express any self doubt, people read that as
you saying you have impostor syndrome.

Why is that?

~~~
heavenlyblue
Because as opposed to what many people like to think, and even though tech is
a purely desk-kind-of-job; tech doesn’t actually require deep intellectual
thinking.

Tech is the least risky engineering discipline and in the huge majority of
jobs requires the level of a plumber work with almost none of the liabilities
of physical manufacturing.

So of course a lot of us have impostor syndrome as we’re simply not doing
anything special (but also the job doesn’t actually require anything special
either)

------
brailsafe
I think there are different varieties of this that someone can experience.
Many have piled onto the "most people suck at their jobs bit" (possibly
because they feel like they haven't been pat on the back enough).

I feel like it can be difficult to disseminate exactly what it is that you may
or may not be good at in a job, partly because the offered reasons are opaque,
and partly because being good at a job doesn't necessarily depend on having a
high level of whatever skill you were ostensibly hired for. Up until this
year, most companies have normalized a standard definition of a job that
selects for one type of person with some kind of skill that hopefully they'll
be passable at.

I personally have been terminated 5 or 6 times from various software related
roles, and have pre-emptively quit two other unrelated jobs in customer
service and moving. I have at all times, especially during the interview
gauntlet, been totally dissolutioned with either my own skills, those that
someone is looking for, or what I'm looking to do. I'm fairly sure that if you
were a bad programmer at a software developer job, you'd never know it unless
you just found yourself intellectually dumbstruck when faces with fairly
mundane problems.

At this juncture, I have no idea what I'd still feel like doing as a job, but
I can pretty reliably guess when I'll depart of my choosing or otherwise, out
of boredom, bureaucracy, or a terrible awful no-good sleep insomnia.

------
ravitation
This is a bit of a weird take, the weird part is primarily...

> My point is this: if we expect everybody who is a little bit different to
> think of themselves as an impostor, we’ve totally lost the plot on this
> whole inclusion thing.

I'm wondering why when "especially [...] younger women" refer to "[their]
Imposter Syndrome" it's assumed to be related to them being "women" and not to
them being "younger?" Many young men and women feel some level of self-doubt
early in their careers (and this is often labeled as "Imposter Syndrome"),
which is why I'd imagine it'd be expected. I certainly did - self-doubt being
simply a difference in internal vs. external "value" or "ability."

I certainly wouldn't expect a woman (or man) who has been in largely the same
software space for ~20 years to feel Imposter Syndrome.

Other than that, which is a large portion of the article, I agree with the
other general premise - that some level of humility in what you know is good
(I probably would not call it "self-doubt" though, because nothing she
described sounds like "self-doubt" healthy or otherwise).

------
kevsim
To me what the author is describing as 'healthy self-doubt' doesn't sound like
self-doubt to me at, but rather admitting one doesn't know everything, one
needs to surround oneself with competent people, etc. If you feel you're good-
to-go except there are some things you just don't know, I'd say you're not
suffering much self-doubt at all.

~~~
twic
Healthy self-skepticism might be more accurate, but it's clunky.

------
njsubedi
I constantly have self doubts, something in between Imposter Syndrome and OCD.
I need to make sure I did the right thing, and even when I'm done what I had
to, the self doubt kicks in, the OCD makes me look over just once to make
sure. I'd say, this feeling is the exact opposite of walking away from what
you've destroyed behind yourself like in the movies. In the early days of my
career I thought this was what is keeping myself from achieving goals but
later I realized that my self doubt kept me from making a lot of mistakes that
would cost a fixing. It's ok to have self doubts, it's ok to think you're not
competent enough, or fear that you'll fail in general. I believe that's what
actually makes you a good developer.

------
twic
Tangentially related, John Carmack on the value of feeling ashamed of your
work:

[https://www.wanzafran.com/posts/2020/shame-and-
code/](https://www.wanzafran.com/posts/2020/shame-and-code/)

------
drapery
Imposter syndrome is very much an internal struggle and I think for some
people who exhibit imposter syndrome wouldn't let other people let on. So, the
fact that admitting self doubt in public shows a break from it.

I had imposter syndrome while in business school and boy o boy did I try hard
to fit in. Only when I realized that there is more to life than external
achievements did I outwardly express any self doubt and only then to my close
circle of friends.

------
leafboi
People always talk about this imposter syndrome thing for themselves.

I think it's hard to look at yourself. You gotta look at other people. Do you
think this is necessarily true? Do tons and tons of stupid people think
they're smart and tons and tons of smart people think they're stupid?

In general I've seen some of the former and almost none of the latter...
mostly people know their place and how good they are relative to the entire
ecosystem.

------
mooreds
The author also did an insightful guest post for my blog:
[https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/04/27/it-never-
gets-...](https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/04/27/it-never-gets-easier-
you-just-go-faster/)

------
edu
I've seen quite a lot of people from underrepresented groups claiming they
have impostor syndrome but from the outside they seem to be closer to the
Dunnunig-Kruger effect and just claiming it because it's hype.

Of course, I'm not in their minds and I'm absolutely biased.

------
jpxw
If you feel like an impostor, chances are you are. Embrace it, relish it,
learn, and you’ll become not an impostor.

~~~
skrebbel
I feel like this comment is actively harmful.

I know some ultra competent people who still feel like an impostor. They
aren't. Suggesting that they are makes it harder to get out of it.

~~~
zaroth
Are those people you know in the majority? The point could be made more
politely while still being true.

More interestingly, steps to take in order to tell the difference?

------
brianzelip
Totally off topic, but damn if that TwentyTwenty WordPress theme doesn't have
awful heading letter-spacing!

------
ChrisMarshallNY
The more I know, the more I know I don't know.

Being wrong is the first step to being right.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
The more I know, the more there is to learn... this is what causes impostor
syndrome.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I always equate "impostor syndrome" to being insecure.

There's a ton of stuff I don't know, and that's fine. I'm not afraid to ask
"stupid" questions, and let folks know that I don't know something. Sometimes,
I have no interest in knowing it, so I don't ask questions about it, and don't
pretend that I know anything about it.

But there's also a lot of stuff I do know. At one time, I didn't know it, and
asked a question. Now I know it.

The only annoying thing about my approach, is that when I state confidence in
what I do know, it's perceived as "arrogance," and when I state what I don't
know, I'm labeled as "stupid," or "lazy" (I'm none of the above).

I've learned to ignore this type of thing, and go ahead and ask my silly
questions. Over the years, I have become better at asking questions. That's an
art, in its own right.

Sometimes, the best way to get a correct answer, is to state something wrong.
People will fall all over themselves to correct me. It can be grating, because
they are sometimes rather nasty about it, but they also tend to do their
homework, to make sure they are right, and I can rely on their response.

I've also found that the world will continue to rotate whether or not I
provide my opinion/experience/knowledge at every opportunity that pops up.

I'd like people to respect me, but I won't go off into the desert to die,
because someone on the Internet doesn't like me.

~~~
kubanczyk
Well, knowing something is not arrogance.

Stating that you know something _is_ arrogance, unless you take precautions.
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying the situation perfectly matches the
dictionary definition of the word "arrogance".

Everyone around here surely knows that it's often sufficient to prefix the
opinion with "everyone here surely knows that <X>". Because if you say raw "X"
very confidently, people immediately assume that your full implicit message is
"I cannot believe I even have to waste my precious time to explain to you
nitwits that <X>".

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I'm a fairly literal person ("on the spectrum"). If I know something, I say "I
know this." If I don't know something, I say "I don't know this." If I think I
have insight into something, I say "This looks like..."

My experience, here, and in many other places, is that people seem to have a
deep-seated need to "put down" other people. We jump on openings from others
with an almost fanatic zeal.

You won't find much (if any) of that stuff in my postings; here, or anywhere
else I participate.

It's just not important for me to be "better" than anyone else (see "on the
spectrum," above -I seem to have different motivational drivers from many
folks). It's my experience that I can learn from just about _anyone_ , and
that I can sometimes find that what I thought was right, was actually wrong.

I'm pretty much self-taught in software development. It has served me very
well. I've been _delivering_ software for decades, but it has also sometimes
handicapped me in other ways, by maybe missing something that CS majors get (I
was an EE), or by not knowing the current vocabulary for something.

I remember once, in the 1990s, asking someone "What's 'AJAX'?" They all
laughed at me, but explained it. I ate my crow, didn't react, and went home,
realizing that it was just HTTPRequest.

Within a week, I had written a very powerful AJAX driver.

Sometimes, the people that laugh at me are doing me a favor. It doesn't really
help things if I kick back. I've learned that I should keep my mouth shut, and
learn from them.

~~~
kubanczyk
> people seem to have a deep-seated need to "put down" other people

Well, of course they do. All the time. It's a fine way to improve status in a
social group and to get more meat after we kill our next mammoth.

------
yeahgoodok
small brain: Dunning-Kruger effect

normal brain: 'imposter syndrome'

galaxy brain: healthy self-doubt

