Three signs you may be suffering from imposter syndrome

post by lc · 2020-01-21T22:17:45.944Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

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You do not have imposter syndrome, because imposter syndrome does not exist.

In most professional domains, no one knows how competent they are, exactly. Unless you’re in a field where there is an agreed upon, systematic method of ranking success, like sports, you may only glean your competence through easy-to-wilfully-misinterpret signals. An uncomfortable amount of uncertainty on your value as an engineer or scientist is probably completely valid, especially if what you’re doing is trying to compare yourself against the entire population of professionals instead of the ones you can see. Just because you have a lot mentally riding on your keyboard incantation ability doesn’t mean you should have some definitive intuition for where it is, even after years of experience.

That said, I find it insightful that whenever someone says they have imposter syndrome (how you could know you have imposter syndrome and still have it I will put aside), it never seems to suffice to tell that person “You are an engineer, because you engineer things. You may be a bad engineer, but that’s not really for me to say.” The syndrome is about relative status, and never confusion about concrete abilities, like the question “Am I someone who architects buildings?” No one is ever confused about whether or not they can in fact maintain Apache servers; it is either a fish for compliments or an attempt at suppressing their own correct thoughts about being average. I suspect that the insecure often the actually incompetent, and the idea of Imposter Syndrome provides a mental placation for doubts about their own ability. It's too good of a perfectly general excuse. That nagging sense of inadequacy is explained away not by reality creeping up on their inflated sense of self, but by the DEMON of IMPOSTER SYNDROME running into their ego and smashing all of the nicely placed silverware.

Absent selection pressures, fifty percent of the people reading this statement will be below average at their jobs. You, the reader, in particular, are included in the broader population. It is a perfectly rational and reasonable thing to wonder if you have only deluded yourself into believing you are good at your work-not just wonder abstractly, as a remote possibility, but irritatingly, as something that may be highly probable. No pathology is required to explain this behavior in people. I and the people I work with wonder all the time about how good we are at our work, and it’s because we have a lot of our self-image riding on it, not because we suffer from a delusion. The solution in general is to accept the fact that you are average if that’s what is the case, and deal with it. Maybe it means continuing to focus on an activity because you like it even if you’re not any good. Maybe that means getting a more realistic understanding of how long “getting good” will take. Maybe it means giving up on your dreams of becoming a concert pianist. The worst thing, of course, would be to continue to center your life around some hobby only because of your own inflated self-perceptions.

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