Imposter Syndrome

Some of the Juniors have started to discuss they feel like they have Imposter Syndrome. I was reading about this a few months back. Imposter Syndrome is about feeling like you don’t deserve your current position/achievements. It’s apparently more common with female Software Developers but can happen in other jobs, and affect all genders.

I did write my concerns in a previous blog on “hiring juniors” where I felt it was the wrong decision to hire these Juniors because we weren’t set-up to support them.

There’s plenty of days where things don’t go your way, and you do wonder: if you were a bit better; would you have made more progress that day?

I can only imagine what it is like being a Junior and not having the mentors to support/teach you. If you don’t feel like you are learning and making progress, then it is obvious you are going to question if you deserve your job. Well, I guess I have been in that position. A blog for another day.

The thing is, the requirements for these Juniors were pretty low. It’s not like they are supposed to be good developers. They were hired because they were supposed to have potential, and we would train them to realise this potential. Although we have hired them then basically just ignored them instead. Maybe they feel like they don’t meet our expectations despite them being low. I guess if they are sitting around and not really contributing, then it’s easy to feel like a failure.

I think I have experienced the opposite of the Imposter Syndrome with many developers. Colin and Derek seem to be affected by this. They think they deserve a better role, when I think they are severely under-performing in their role. I’ve probably written about that the most. I guess it is just delusion, but it could be the Dunning–Kruger effect. See this video with David Dunning.

This is where you need a certain level of knowledge in a subject to realise how much you do not know, and therefore give an accurate judgment of your own abilities. It seems a weird concept, but there has been studies on this, where 30-40% of people place themselves in the top 5%. People who are dumb are too dumb to realise how dumb they are, so they think they are performing way higher. Interestingly, sometimes people who are very smart can’t judge themselves well either – because they wrongly assume people know what they know. I wonder how much of it goes down to ego too – where people don’t want to admit they aren’t that great to another person.