
Confidence Through Feedback, or Why Imposter Syndrome Is the Wrong Metaphor - ingve
http://blog.bethcodes.com/confidence-through-feedback
======
ckozlowski
I really liked this read.

It's a topic my mentor/friend (I always add mentor because he means more to me
than just "friend" and he teaches me stuff) have discussed before. Our work
environment is lacking in a lot of feedback and review; we're often reporting
to people who don't work in our company and touchy-feely stuff is indirectly
seen as unnecessary in this culture. Add that to the fact that we're separated
from the majority commercial IT world and there's a sense of "we're just
hacks" and really don't know what we're doing, we're just her because of a
lucky credential that gets us hired and riding the contracting gray train.

In trying to evaluate my skills absent feedback, I look to compare myself to
those around me. And there, I've noticed, is dangerous territory. I need to
state that what happens here, is not good, but it should be recognized. If I'm
on a team of engineers and operations staff, building a system, I look around
and see what others are doing. Did the configure something wrong that resulted
in a fault? Someone screw up and dump too much on that datastore? "Ha!" I
guiltly laugh. Because I knew not to do that, I must be better than them. And
since, given I hold a very critical view of my own skills, if I'm simply
average or "getting by", then they must be really bad indeed.

Of course, that's a terrible thing to think about one's colleagues. There's a
danger in thinking that because one knows something, that knowledge must be
common because to know something esoteric would be exceptional and therefor,
better. Keeping with the narrative that we're average, and knew it anyways,
then it must be exceedingly simple and the other person should have known
better. That's not the case. We can know uncommon things. We can be deeper in
our fields than we think.

The other fallacy of course is that it's also a degree of confirmation bias.
Everyone else's failing below ours is a sign of their ineptitude. It assumes
that our own mistakes wouldn't have been caught in turn.

All of this I'm trying to illustrate is, impostor syndrome can be harmful to
more than just ourselves when we fail to believe in our own abilities and at
the same time, measuring ourselves against others. I've caught myself trying
to drag my colleagues down in my private assessments in this way, and that's
not good.

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jvvw
There's the fourth option of not judging yourself on whether you are a good
programmer or bad programmer but instead just trying to become better (which I
think is essentially the conclusion eventually reaches).

It's the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset a la Carole Dweck.
That is quite a tough shift to make however when you've been conditioned with
lots of feedback from school and university telling you are good and then
suddenly that feedback disappears when you start work. Indeed I imagine most
programmers aren't actually especially good when they first start - certainly
if I looked back at the code I wrote 10+ years ago, I'm sure I would cringe.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> just trying to become better, which I think is essentially the conclusion
> eventually reaches

Yes, though there's a lot more detail to it than "just trying", mostly about
good ways to get there: shortening the feedback cycle of improvement through
peer feedback, getting past the fear of failure by lowering the cost of
mistakes through blameless review. And that "being smart" is the wrong
criterion, which I think is the "growth mindset".

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ska
This is a misreading of imposter syndrome, at least how I understand it to
work and how it has been used in common parlance around me. Granted that has
included a lot of academic circles and math/physics types, not only
programmers.

Imposter syndrome refers to beliefs about your own lack of competence, skill,
experience or whatever - in contradiction to _good_ evidence to the contrary.
And the uneasy feeling that you're going to be "found out" at any moment. As
such I think it is a useful characterization, and understanding it will help
you mentor some people more effectively.

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CM30
I get the point in the article, and I do think a lack of feedback does
contribute to this in some way (especially in smaller or newer companies where
getting any sort of code 'review' is pretty much non existent), but I think
the simplest reason for imposter syndrome might just be same as the reason so
many are unhappy on social media.

You just can't see how much other developers might be struggling with issues.
You can picture your own struggles and time online looking through
Stackoverflow answers and documentation and what not, but not the nightmare
some other 'better' developer might be having with their own work.

So you think other people are simply not struggling, and hence know more than
you do, or can pick things up more quickly, or whatever else.

Maybe it's just more of a 'grass is greener' thing.

------
phkahler
This kept reminding me of "Daring Greatly"

[http://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-Vulnerable-
Tran...](http://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-Vulnerable-
Transforms/dp/1592408419)

This book addresses a lot of these issues in broader sense, so it applies to
all areas of life.

------
RyanZAG
_> Next time, I had learned the coding conventions and how scope worked in
JavaScript. The time after that I finally understood closures. _

Is this normal in some companies? This seems to imply they shipped production
javascript in which the author didn't understand scope or closures. I can't
honestly wrap my head around this one.. how could you write functioning code
without understanding scope and closure? Repeatedly moving code lines around
until it doesn't give an error or something? Putting everything in a single
function?

~~~
jrgv
"I learned how scope worked" does not imply that the author was previously
unaware of the concept or didn't understand it at all, it just means that
there was some aspect that she didn't fully understand until it was pointed
out in the code review. I don't find that hard to believe at all. How many
developers have you met that never had any questions or misunderstandings
about, for example, the scope of `this` in JavaScript?

------
frobozz
The three options without feedback are rather extreme. Why can't someone
believe themselves to be mediocre?

------
jjviana
There is a third option when confronting failure other than "blame others" or
"drop out": admit the failure, learn from it and know you will do better next
time. That's what successful people do.

~~~
sageabilly
That's what the author did. That's the entire point of the article.

