
Ask HN: I am a huge fraud. Career and life advice - rightmerightnow
I have 19 years of experience, half of it exclusively with mobile (~2007-2017), some of the rest with backend software in Java, Node.js, PHP, and a few years as a PM&#x2F;PM Manager. Experience from startups to very large companies. Right now, I&#x27;m a Sr. Partner Engineer at a large cloud company. I mainly help partners with their implementations of my company&#x27;s platform, some solution architecture, hands-on coding, and that&#x27;s it.<p>I go tell partners what to do, the &quot;right&quot; way to implement their use cases, and yet, in a brutally honest review of my own career, I have MAYBE 5-6 years of writing production software. The rest is as evangelist and&#x2F;or PM. So, I feel like a huge fucking fraud.<p>I&#x27;m not particularly deep at anything. I&#x27;m a well-paid generalist that can maneuver around software, but I am not senior, not an expert. Sometimes I see the level of some discussions and I am ashamed of myself, for only being able to lurk and not contribute. I&#x27;m a well-paid fraud who searches for stuff on Stack Overflow all the time.<p>I told myself &quot;go get more production experience, go down a level, apply for SDE jobs and get expertise&quot;. But I&#x27;m afraid I cannot pass the interviews - I don&#x27;t have a CS degree and all I&#x27;ve learned was self-learned. When I see some of the interview questions in places like leetcode I am just stumped.<p>I am at a loss about what to do. Most of my identity is tied to my job - I was born poor in a shitty country and ended up in Silicon Valley. I can&#x27;t give up on life (though it&#x27;s very tempting) because I have a wife and a young son I love. I need to figure out what to do. Right now I have five Chrome windows, each with 10-12 tabs, covering Spring, Machine Learning, Angular, and IoT. I&#x27;m trying to keep up, to specialize, to go deep. Every night I stay up 3-4 hours after work trying to learn more. Just to see a junior SDE in a meeting just shit an ML-based system with a few lines of Python. I don&#x27;t know what to do. It&#x27;s overwhelming.<p>Advice?
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Down_n_Out
Sounds to me like "imposter syndrome"[0]. Lots of people deal or get to deal
with it during their career. The thing about generalists is that lots of
companies love to get them into their workforce. Generalists are also prime
candidates for moving into Solution Architecture later on.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

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codegeek
" I'm a well-paid generalist"

Nothing wrong with that. If you are getting shit done for the company and
adding value, why do you think of yourself as a fraud.

Of course, if deep down you want to become an expert developer, that is fine.
But you are not a fraud just because you are doing more high level stuff. The
high level role is also very important in organizations.

My suggestion: keep getting highly paid and do your current job as you are
(unless you really are miserable). On the side, start a coding project for fun
and go crazy with it.

Case in point. I run a SAAS business and I really don't have time to actually
write production code even though we are a small team as I am already
overwhelmed with "management" of the company which is very important. I do
sales, customer calls, partner collaborations, some marketing, employee
management, taking shit from customers if things escalate. Deep down, I also
love coding so I decided to do coding on the side like 2-3 hours every 2 weeks
if I can. I taught myself a bit of Golang and loving it.

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petercooper
Hmm, there are people whose entire jobs are that and they're very well paid:
systems analysts.

It sounds like you know what needs to known and you know how to find that
information. That is in itself valuable. You do not need to know everything in
your head. It's like knowing how to calculate times tables rather than
memorizing them. Who cares if the result is still good?

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PaulHoule
There are people who code like demons but run into a "glass ceiling" where
there is no way up for them. Some people would trade their problems for your
problems in a minute.

Just to take an example, see the second page of this:

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201000...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20100036670.pdf)

This shows you can have a 10x impact by being the person who makes sure that
requirements match up with reality. That trumps "BLEEP machine learning in a
few lines of Python" any day.

