Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage

I&#x27;ve been coding off and on professionally for over a decade and I STILL feel like an imposter.<p>I still have to look stuff up constantly.<p>I still watch how-to code videos everywhere.<p>Don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m alone or other people just can&#x27;t bring themselves to admit that.

I work with developers and I sometimes joke with them claiming that they’re not “real” developers because they don’t know every function in the standard library and constantly have to look things up. This is such a nonsensical level of expectation on a developer (that they would know all functions by heart) and is also a really dangerous way to work, because it breeds complacency and, in time, deviations from the norm (because the norm changes).<p>There are many things that perhaps legitimately should make people feel like “impostors” even when they aren’t, but the need to use reference material definitely shouldn’t be one of them.<p>Unfortunately many people in our business still equate knowledge or competence with “knowing things by heart” which is really unfortunate, because I think at best it tells you very little about the person, and in the worst case you may be hiring someone that through arrogance will make mistakes because they don’t care about double checking crucial parts of their code because they too feel that they “should” know what’s going on.

What if you are actually an impostor and write such to convince yourself you aren&#x27;t ?

I was an academic, but not a particularly successful one, and constantly felt imposter syndrome. Over time I realized a few things- most people in my cohort had a similar amount of trouble establishing their careers, and when I look upon their academic careers, and also see how much fakery is involved in modern PR-focused science, I actually think I dodged a bullet.<p>Instead I went to industry where I felt like an imposter for years, then built a system that worked really well, and got to work with some absolutely fantastic people who were far smarter than me. I still felt like an imposter, but at least I was well paid and respected.<p>Finally, now in my career I get paid huge amounts to debug complex ML systems in production when they break. Almost nobody else has the skills to do this; almost nobody has the interest in doing it; but I&#x27;ve spent 20+ years focusing on exactly this kind of problem. I don&#x27;t feel like an imposter any more.

I liked this. I also like how the moral of the story wasn&#x27;t &quot;You&#x27;re not an imposter, you had it in you the whole time and just needed confidence&quot;, but rather &quot;Yeah, you&#x27;re an imposter. But you&#x27;re always going to be an imposter and so is everybody else, so get used to it&quot;

And yet <i>I</i> might be a real imposter %)

Imposter syndrome, n. 1. To suffer from delusions of mediocrity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toot.cat&#x2F;@dredmorbius&#x2F;104429659613796075" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toot.cat&#x2F;@dredmorbius&#x2F;104429659613796075</a>

I liked this article, aside from the &quot;I&#x27;m totally getting fired&quot; it echoes how I felt in most jobs I had.<p>I like to think that it&#x27;s something anyone who isn&#x27;t absolutely full of himself will experience.

Interesting, but some of this might be someone who&#x27;s made it far enough that they can reason out of imposters syndrome, rather than it being wrong those first few years.

Great article. Resonated within me.