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u/ChestPainGuy 4d ago
I came here to laugh, not to feel
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u/Yhamerith 4d ago
I laughed and felt at the same time... kinda confusing
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u/sandboxlollipop 4d ago
Might need to change your underwear then. Pelvic floor exercises to help prevent feelins in future
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u/Cfrolich 4d ago
I have a concept of what I’m doing
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u/TheVibrantYonder 4d ago
If you keep at it for a few more years, you might even have concepts of a plan!
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u/Own_Beginning_2558 4d ago
There's nothing wrong with incompetence, assuming you are given the resources to become competent. You can't grow if you're constantly stressed about being fired.
Junior devs are pretty incompetent, but eventually they'll get there. Assuming you are able to create a space for them to grow and not just sink or swim.
I got a new job and I was incompetent at developing with the new code base. Now, a year or so in, I'm not perfect but I'm definitely better, and getting better.
Edt: misspelled perfect.
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u/AnUncomfortableTruth 4d ago
My boss told me, just this week, that he does not believe I can live up to his expectations and that it's not my fault. He also had no suggestions for improvement except maybe starting to look for a different role.
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u/iveriad 4d ago
That's the thing.
You can think you're having an Imposter Syndrome because you have Dunning-Krueger. Or the other way around.
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u/Sheerkal 4d ago
Dunning-Keueger affects both ends of the spectrum.
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u/iveriad 4d ago
Oh right, that's true.
I truly forgot about that because the opposite of Imposter Syndrome is the one most often used as an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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u/IlllMlllI 4d ago
Which side are YOU on?
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u/guto8797 4d ago
They say in programming county
There are no neutrals there
You'll either be an assembly coder
Or a chump for python libraries
Which side are you ooooon boys?
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u/Alternative_Star7831 4d ago
If you're also doing ML, probably both
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u/al-mongus-bin-susar 4d ago
Most people in ML don't know what goes into those Python/C++ libraries past the theoretical...
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u/NuclearWarEnthusiast 4d ago
I'm over here doing lisp and bash scripts, so I really don't know shit
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u/GrimmDeLaGrimm 4d ago
They sat me in front of a UI and told me to figure it out. So, yes? Whats python?
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u/dcheesi 4d ago
Especially in the alternate interpretation of the original D-K data, in which everyone sucks at estimating their own competency, but due to the Lake Wobegon Effect, the above-average people just happen to be closer to the truth
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u/AnnyAskers 4d ago
Nuh, I KNOW I'm incompetent and people around me know so too, they just assume I'm lazy and don't care, instead of being a little sick, burnt out and slow.
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u/fixano 4d ago edited 4d ago
Source. I have managed hundreds of developers and spent 20 years as a developer myself.
If you feel this you are doing alright. I'd say I felt that way for the first 5-6 years of my career. For some reason people expect software engineers/developers to be magicians. Their lead paint addled brains believe that if they can imagine it, it must be possible for you to do.
First forgive yourself. Second , remember the best developers are not just technical wizards they are comfortable setting boundaries.
I put things in 3 buckets 1. The things I know won't work. 2. The things I can attempt but no promises. 3. The things I know I can do.
Number 2 is the obvious problem. People will always try to turn 2's into 3's. This is where you have to put on your corporate shark hat and document your level of commitment via email/slack whatever.
Most of the time when addressing a 2. I may not know if/when something can be done, but I can usually guess when I'll know. e g. ”I have concerns about this part, I can run this test tomorrow and give you a definitive answer by end of day, does that work for you?"
Mastering this technique greatly improved my life.
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u/mal4ik777 4d ago
Aren't we all a little slow until the last few days/hours before the deadline? Being lazy is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you still find your way of getting the job done ;)
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u/whosline07 4d ago
Maybe all of us on here are but I work with several people who are prolific as fuck all the time. The unicorns do exist, and if you're not one, the hard part is coming to terms with that.
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u/_Weyland_ 4d ago
I think imposter syndrome doesn't come in form of "I don't know what I'm doing", but usually in form of "I can do it now because it's simple. But what if it gets complicated? What then?"
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u/Consistently_Carpet 4d ago
It's also easier to apply to things that don't have a clear 'success' or 'fail' so you don't know where you stand. Did you lead the meeting well? Well enough? Did you waste people's time? Did you sound stupid?
Obviously if someone died during your morning stand-up that's probably a failed meeting, but there's a lot of gray area above it.
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u/botetta 4d ago
I like how you say "probably".
Is there a chance that if someone dies during a stand up it is still considered a success? :P
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u/Zwagaboy 4d ago
"Greetings, everyone. I have thoroughly investigated our process and have found a liability. Needless to say, this can not stand." loads gun
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u/drakoman 4d ago
I literally just watched that scene from robocop where they accidentally shoot one of the executives and immediately after the robot shoots the executive a million times, they green light the robocop program. So, like, the meeting was a success right? I mean the movie is named after it, so you’re not allowed to argue.
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u/AbatedDust 4d ago
I I might be able to answer this one.
My boss died, not during a meeting, but over the weekend.
That Monday, I and a few of my other colleagues that worked under him found out a few minutes before the weekly sprint planning.
This was my first big job and I had been at the company for maybe 3-4 months. The meeting rolls around and everything is getting started, I ask one of the project managers that also knows if I should say something, and I get the affirmative.
A whole lot of "Oh...", a bit of silence, and then covering the major tasks for the sprint. While a lot of people took time off, myself included, the meeting still went more or less as it usually does, which would probably be a success.
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u/ArsStarhawk 4d ago
Only if it's the person who says "I'm going to give ya back 2 minutes of your time!" because the standup ended at 09:28
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u/Fierydog 4d ago
My first project out of uni i was hired to do a machine learning project at a very large well known company.
I was the only person on the project, i had weekly talks with the head of their dev team.
But every single meeting whenever i tried to explain what i had done, where i was, how it was going etc. He would immediately stop me and respond "you're the expert, you know what you're doing".
By the end of the project i was a wreck, doubting everything i had made, doubting my skills, myself and if i was even cut out to be a software dev. Because i'm sitting there fresh out of uni doing this project at a large company and i had no one to confirm if i was on the right track or not.
For me that felt like imposter syndrome.
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u/_Weyland_ 4d ago
Damn, that sounds tough. How did it turn out though?
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u/Fierydog 4d ago
I ended up making a tool that they can use to pull all sorts of data from either one or more of their datacenters and use it to predict future data to be used in all kinds of live-updated graphs.
They could configure what model should be used, the granularity of the predicted data, how far ahead to predict and how often the model should be updated.
It would then at specific times, boot up a task on a dedicated GPU cluster, unpack the model if there is one, retrieve the data, train the model, pack it down and save it to be used for predicting data whenever needed.
All automated
So it ended up working and doing what they wanted. But in reality the machine learning part was overkill and a more simple approach with just applying some linear algebra and math would have been just as good.
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u/dyslexda 4d ago
Sounds to me like the head of their dev team was right to trust you on it. Could have given more feedback, but it worked out in the end, no?
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u/ScootyHoofdorp 4d ago
Yeah, no. It comes in the form of, "I don't think I'm as capable as I think people think I am."
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u/TheRealStandard 4d ago
"Imposter syndrome is when you doubt your own skills and successes. You feel you're not as talented or worthy as others believe, and you're scared that one day, people will realize that." - Google
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u/Kitty-XV 4d ago
It's thinking "I did it, but it was because they luckily assigned me a really easy one to do." when you were given a normal work item. Underestimating the difficulty of what you've done because you are an imposter and so it couldn't have been that difficult if you did it.
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u/panicattheformaggio 4d ago
I've felt this when not being able to perform well on the job day 1 because I can't do the things the guy I'm replacing was doing on his last day.
But, as per him and our boss, I'm better than he was on his first day, which is really what the comparison should be IMO.
Otherwise, any position would be increasingly hard to fill, always requiring someone who has at least the same experience as the person who just left.
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u/UsedSalt 4d ago edited 4d ago
Even if you’re experienced procedures are different in different places. I just got the equivalent of my old boss’ job at a new place and I know what to do but the systems to do it all different due to different senior management. When I was starting my career I had the imposter system but looking back, for a junior, I performed extremely well Ironically one of my subordinates in finding is legit incompetent but no one’s told him and he’s been there a couple years before I started as his boss. It’s awkward… and I wonder if he senses it
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u/liberty 4d ago
I'm not sure I agree. The higher you climb (in terms of skill and expertise, not necessarily management or hierarchy), the more you're tasked with unique and unprecedented problems and tasks. It feels like you're back at square one because you are back at square one. It's just that your knowledge, skills, and abilities make you the best person to advance to square two. It can often feel very much like "I don't know what I'm doing."
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u/a_useless_communist 4d ago
I think i recently had it when i joined the latest gmtk game jam, joined a team and we got an idea and its all good until i actually started programming, and for the love of god i couldn't get any of the main simple mechanics to work and started panicking and started thinking like "wait did i overestimate myself and trick those people into making me join them?", so if thats it its more like "i overestimated myself and put myself in a responsibility bigger than me"
(The rest of the jam was fine tho got everything figured out)
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u/st1r 4d ago
This is me. Same software job (my first) going on 3 years now. Still haven’t been fired. They just feel bad for me so they pay me and give me healthcare/dental/401k match as a sort of charitable donation to those less fortunate.
I know rationally that’s not true but it sure feels that way sometimes.
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u/anoldoldman 4d ago
Imposter Syndrome comes when everyone around you is telling you you're doing fine, but you "know" you're not. It's the feeling that you've got everyone fooled.
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u/JackNotOLantern 4d ago
I mean, imposter syndrom is just a feeling of being am imposter - you are in a position you should not be with your competencies, and you are just pretending that you have those competencies.
But having this syndrom doesn't say anything if you actually are or aren't competent for the position. It may as well be a very accurate feeling.
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u/AMViquel 4d ago
you are in a position you should not be with your competencies, and you are just pretending that you have those competencies
I think the wikipedia entry describes it better, "the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one's abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary"
When I was 17 years old, I was fixing computers for 10€/hr for the neighborhood. Almost always the modem/router needed restarting, sometimes "the housekeeper" vacuumed the interior and everything needed to be wiggled a little bit to fit back where it needed to. Rarely I swapped my test-components in and figured what part was failing (unusually often the CMOS battery. My own never died. Never. Yet if there was a hard problem, it was that stupid battery)
So I felt bad for charging 5€ for a simple modem restart, like that's worth nothing and why wouldn't that be the first thing anyone tried? An old immigrant nurse, not a top-earner whatsoever, still gave me 10€ for the "work" and explained that while it's a job anyone can do, not everyone wants to do it and the customer isn't paying for the 5 minutes, but for the experience that allowed me to do it in 5 minutes and I should never feel bad for this, and also raise my minimum charge to the full hour so people learn to just turn it off and on again before bothering anyone else.
I'm glad I learned this lesson early, and since raised my prices by a lot. I still get called to restart modems and printers though.
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u/mal4ik777 4d ago
the customer isn't paying for the 5 minutes, but for the experience that allowed me to do it in 5 minutes
thats exactly it though. You know a thing, someone pays you, because he doesn't know anything about the given topic, so you use your knowledge and fix a problem. Restarting something is just an example, it can be applied to almost any field of work ;)
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u/therealvanmorrison 4d ago
No, it’s not. The key is the evidence goes against your self-doubt. You have to actually believe you’re an imposter in the sense of getting things not owed to you.
That’s why when all the B students in my law school said getting Bs gave them imposter syndrome, what they really meant was that they had self-aggrandizing syndrome: they believe they deserve As and it’s the results that were wrong. They weren’t in distress because the results were too far above their self-image. They were in distress because their self-image was A student and the results weren’t good enough to support that self-image.
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u/C-SWhiskey 4d ago
The evidence can take many forms. In a lot of jobs, like tech, simply being awarded the position is evidence that you're seen to be on par with your now-coworkers. In the case of those law students, they were accepted into law school and, by their perception, are underperforming, which makes them feel like they should never have been accepted in the first place and they're just squeaking through.
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u/Recent_Chipmunk2692 4d ago
No, imposter syndrome is specifically when you feel like an imposter even though you are not. If you’re incompetent, then that’s not imposter syndrome; you are an imposter.
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u/PHD_Memer 4d ago
I think he might mean more that some people who claim to have imposter syndrome genuinely are imposters. That the feeing of being an imposter may be true in and of itself but you’re right that it wouldn’t be the syndrome in that situation, its just self awareness then.
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u/TarPitGil 4d ago
I don’t think imposter syndrome is as real as everyone makes it out to be, because in my experience most people actually are bad at their jobs. That feeling you are getting is because there is a lot you do not know that would make you better at your job, and you know it, you just don’t know what to do to advance.
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u/Olivia_VRex 4d ago
I feel like as a woman educated in STEM who now works in finance, I get this a lot. Any self-doubt is actually just imposter syndrome from a patriarchal industry! You go girl! Be the boss lady! And then we sit and listen to all these incompetent women "unpack" their imposter syndrome...
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u/Add1ctedToGames 4d ago
I think it also comes and goes when there's various issues. I struggled for an hour thinking about what could be wrong with a program and was questioning whether I was really fit to keep programming in my view as a career and then felt like the man immediately after realizing the suddenly obvious solution
Can't say I've ever just naturally felt like an impostor, or else I just wouldn't bother getting into the field in the first place
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u/Kahlil_Cabron 4d ago
Agreed, this subreddit makes it seem like everybody suffers from imposter syndrome. I always figured it must be some kind of coping mechanism.
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u/SynthRogue 4d ago
And every software developer is incompetent. Because you can’t be competent at a every single tech that exists. You see the problem? Would you consider someone who knows one programming language or tech over another to be incompetent because they don’t know the tech you know? How many does a developer need to know before he can be called competent? Where do you draw the line? Such a dumb industry full of assholes.
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u/Lladnar700 4d ago
No lie, where I work, imposter syndrome runs really deep. We are constantly given the resources to do our job accurately, and what to expect, and where to go for additional help. However when the real shit comes through, we’re all the meme of Jacky Chan scratching his head, and we’re just all like what the fuck.
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u/Rikki-Tikki-Tavi-12 4d ago
Someone from my former company got up at a company event and asked the motivational speaker how to get around impostor syndrome. I had to stop myself from getting up and telling them "Not to worry! There is nothing wrong with your self-perception.".
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u/XeoPlaysLOL 4d ago
Every time I'm praised my brain automatically switches to nah nothing to praise for.
Should I see medical professional?
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u/M0mmaSaysImSpecial 4d ago
People that think they have imposter syndrome don’t have imposter syndrome because they don’t actually see themselves as imposters
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u/Then-Adhesiveness-70 4d ago
Imposter syndrome is actually the opposite: everybody praise your work but you feel like you don't deserve it. This comic is simply wrong.
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u/Exotic-Amphibian-655 4d ago
Pretty sure that’s the joke. Incompetent employee telling themselves that their feelings of incompetence are just imposter syndrome. The fake it till you make it people.
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u/slightly_mental2 4d ago
am i the only one to get triggered by people misspelling the word "impostor" on purpose now
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u/Kahlil_Cabron 4d ago
"Imposter" is the American English spelling, "impostor" is the British English spelling. This sub is mostly Americans.
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u/ModestasR 4d ago
I doubt it's any more purposeful than people misusing apostrophes or writing "should of" instead of "should've".
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u/zebulon99 4d ago
Paradoxically if youre convinced you have impostor syndrome you probably dont, as that requires you to be confident you actually know what youre doing
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u/PublicWest 4d ago
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to hate the phrase “nobody knows what they’re doing”
I definitely know what I’m doing at my job, I think it’s just something you need to tell overwhelmed 20-year-olds so they don’t burn out.
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u/AtrioxsSon 4d ago
So if you think you are incompetent then it’s imposter but if you think you are an imposter then it’s just incompetence
Just like when someone thinks he is dumb he is actually smarter than those how think are smart ?
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u/jsanders96858 4d ago
I've never seen such a brutal yet accurate depiction of code reviews. Feels like I've been personally attacked more times than I can count!
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u/Consistent-Cow5441 4d ago
This is why I always make sure my code has no obvious flaws before anyone else looks at it. The fear of a personal attack is real!
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u/Hot_Shirt6765 4d ago
People are too nice and don't want others to feel bad, so you always see mention of imposter syndrome (especially on Reddit).
Sometimes the truth hurts and you would be better knowing the truth. If you suck at something, like programming, then it would be in your best interest to find and pursue something you can be successful at instead of constantly trying to fit a square in a round hole because Reddit doesn't want you to feel bad.
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u/ilikedmatrixiv 4d ago
I struggled with imposter syndrome the first years of my career. Especially when I was sent off as a consultant with a full 2 YoE under my belt to go work on big systems. I kept getting stellar feedback from my colleagues and managers, even though I kept feeling like I mostly just googled how to do what they asked me to do or work from existing code and adapt and it kept working.
My imposter syndrome was, I wouldn't say cured but greatly reduced when I started working at a certain project. I was brought in to refactor their existing python data pipelines to a more streamlined system with Snowflake and dbt. The design decisions I saw there are hard to bring into perspective. It was a bloated code base written by people who had no idea what they were doing but enough of an idea to get going. It was utter madness. Some examples.
One of the original coders clearly didn't understand you can join on more than column. There were hundreds of lines of code dedicated to working around this.
They wrote redundant classes and objects for things that already existed. They had a DataframeMerger class, which as you can guess, merges two data frames. It did not introduce any new functionality. In fact it added a bunch of code that did nothing and in the end just used a pandas merge.
Instead of writing actual scripts, they had a bunch of yaml files that defined which functions were run in which order (you know, like a script). That yaml file was read in by some other script that then parsed it and ran each line consecutively. You know, like a script.
At several points they did a pivot followed by an unpivot on the same columns. That is essentially a convoluted way to do a group by. They evidently knew how to do group bys, because they used them elsewhere in their 'scripts'.
When I left that project, I actually took a copy of that legacy system with me. It lives in my private github. Not because I want to steal intellectual property. If they ever sue me, I'll gladly argue in court that their code is functionally impossible to use for commercial gain. No, I kept it because if I ever end up teaching (who knows), I want to show some excerpts of that nightmare to students to show them that people with the title 'Senior Data Scientist' wrote the biggest heap of garbage I have ever laid my eyes on.
It also helps me some days when I'm struggling to just open one of those pages and look into the abyss. When it stares back at me, I know I have my faults as a developer, but it could be much worse.
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u/Uninvalidated 4d ago edited 4d ago
Whao, whao, whao. Why did you out my production manager like that?
(I'm working at a $10 billion+ budget EV battery startup and we're shutting down operations in certain parts due to financial problems and being over two years behind on producing on spec material and this have been her and a few others in management for a couple of years now)
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u/Kriztov 4d ago
I don't know. When I know what to do I do it good. I just don't know what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing
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u/lavatasche 4d ago
Yeah not like figuring out what the best way to do something is the programmers job.
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u/soupie62 4d ago
Wait a while, for the Dunning Krueger effect to kick in.
You'll have Delusions Of Adequacy.
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u/johnnyblaze1999 4d ago
As long as you keep learning, practicing, and researching, you will eventually find someone who is more incompetence than you.
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u/DaedalusHydron 4d ago
It's all fun and games until you think you have imposter syndrome and then get laid off....
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u/Freecelebritypics 4d ago
If you ever feel confident about what you're doing, you're either extremely experienced in your field or destined for leadership
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u/NewMoonlightavenger 4d ago
See, the thing is that he's coworkers could be joking, and making every effort possible to show that they are joking, and a person with imposter syndrome will think not only that they are incompetent, but that their co-workers are making fun of him.
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u/My_Work_Accoount 4d ago
I feel like anyone incompetent would never consider they may not actually know what they're doing.
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u/lightley 4d ago
You either get a party at the end or your contract is unceremoniously ended. You just have to be patient to find out which it’s going to be this time.
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u/frostbite305 4d ago
I think I'm actually decent at programming but I pretend to be stupid most of the time to avoid looking like I have a big ego and putting off my coworkers 💪
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u/Slimebot32 4d ago
“god i’m fucking incompetent i’m basically stealing money”
gets assigned someone else’s code to work on
“god i’m a fucking genius i’m too good for this company”
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u/lightwhite 4d ago
Someone that imposes an incompetent person is technically still an impostor. It’s just semantics.
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u/getmesongs 4d ago
Relate max. I literally have no idea what I'm doing. Thanks to cursor and Claude now i can fill the void of my incompetence with their code. Just bought cursor pro today
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u/BoBoBearDev 4d ago
Just remembered, as long as you know your goal, you can figured out the path one step at the time. Incompetence is either having the wrong goal or don't have a goal. A lot of failures happens because they only do the work without understanding the purpose or the goal, so, the work is wrong in the end.
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u/Fruitboots 4d ago edited 4d ago
I've been programming for over 15 years and still feel like I'm not really an "expert" in anything. Mostly because I started with an art degree and figured out how to get some dev training (which ended early) and parley that into my first job. I've had 3 jobs total since then (7 yrs, 7 yrs, 2 yrs) and each time I had to learn one or more new languages/frameworks, basically starting fresh and not having a solid understanding of how to implement things until a while later.
So nowadays I'm unemployed and looking for work, and I assume that people are going to expect me to be a senior developer, but I still don't feel like I'd be able to spearhead a project and have the knowledge to say "yes we should do XYZ" because I prefer to be able to work under someone else, get comfortable with the codebase and then gradually ramp up to having more responsibilities.
I really appreciate the opportunities I've had, and the employers who took a chance on me. I did good work for them. But these days, I worry that there aren't going to be many companies like that. Everyone has such a broad selection of devs to choose from when hiring, I assume they'll go with someone who's got more technical experience, and they'll be less likely to bring in someone like me who is good at learning. My goal now is to just work on shoring up my fundamentals and hope that it'll be enough.
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u/1up_1500 4d ago
I mean, that's how imposter syndrome works, so I genuinely don't know if I have it
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u/do_you_know_de_whey 4d ago
I can’t code for shit so I just take on BA, QA, and platform work, so far it’s worked out fine lol
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u/KamuiT 4d ago
Impostor Syndrome is doing stuff for the job, but nobody tells you if you're doing it right or wrong. So you keep going, but have no idea if what you're doing is the correct thing to do. Now you're all up in your head thinking that you're obviously doing it wrong, but too afraid to change in case you might be doing it right.
Oh Jesus. All those old feelings are coming back. MAKE IT STOP!
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u/Papellll 4d ago
I am literally an imposter. So at least I don't have to wonder if I have imposter syndrom or am just incompetent, I know it's the latter
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u/Hmasteryz 4d ago
So sure it is switching between incompetence and imposter syndrome which means still don't have a clue what i'm doing, so it is.
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u/bXkrm3wh86cj 3d ago
Honestly, this describes anyone who says that they have imposter syndrome. If they really had imposter syndrome, then they could not think that it was imposter syndrome.
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u/i_should_be_coding 4d ago
I don't think I'm good enough to develop imposter syndrome...