I worked through impostor syndrome by realizing two things:

1) almost no company will just up and fire a developer without warning, even in "right to work" states. A company will always

2) have the manager or HR talk to the developer to try to resolve a performance issue. It's cheaper than firing and rehiring a new developer. It also saves time.

Now, because of these two factors, I realized that if my performance were an issue, my manager or HR would have a meeting with me to address the situation. The fact that such a meeting has never come up means the company is satisfied with my performance. So, if there's a down day at work, then I don't feel so guilty about surfing the web reading up on new languages or techniques, even if everyone else (usually in different departments) are on a tight deadline.

Another thing I've learned (not at work) are the three rules for dealing with worrisome situations. Given you are worried about some situation:

1) Can you do anything about it now? If so, do something about it and stop worrying.

2) Can you do anything about it later? If so, wait til later and stop worrying about it.

3) Can you do nothing about it? Don't worry about it because there's nothing you can do.

Plan accordingly.

> 1) almost no company will just up and fire a developer without warning, even in "right to work" states. A company will always 2) have the manager or HR talk to the developer to try to resolve a performance issue. It's cheaper than firing and rehiring a new developer. It also saves time.

Hmm, I've been fired from my last two positions without any warning or prior notice. In the first instance, I was a full-time employee and I got stuck on a piece of functionality and I was simply let go. I made co-workers aware of the fact that I needed some sort of help, but one day after a prolonged period of being denigrated, I was let go. When asking how come no prior warning was given, I was told "you could see it coming."

The most recent position was as a consultant and I was working with deadlines that had slipped for a number of reasons mostly outside of my control and I had to handle numerous support requests in addition to that -- which led to a severe case of burnout. My contract was abruptly terminated one day, without prior warning.

I took what I could from both experiences and improved my skills as much as I could, but there is always the domain-specific hurdles that arise.

My point is that there are some companies out there that are ruthless, so far in my experience it seems that this mostly applied to the smaller ones. I never oversold myself or my skills and I did ask for a second opinion when I felt things were taking too long. It could just be my luck thus far.

> I've been fired from my last two positions without any warning or prior notice

This feels more like the exception than the rule - especially if they are willing to spend a whole day denigrating you. Obviously, I don't have the same context as you on this, but I have never seen someone get let go suddenly for poor technical performance.

True, it is more of an exception based on the majority of other cases that I have heard as well. PIPs and/or warnings are usually issued first. The one commonality between the two companies is that they were very small (3-5 developers).

Have you ever been through a re-org? I've seen people get escorted at the door by security on the exact same day of the public annoucement. People who worked 15 years for the company. Also, do you know that some companies rank and keep track of their "least valuable employees"? So when the time comes there's to time to waste trying to find out about who should go and who should stay.

Technically, yes. The company that hired me was bought by another company (B), which in turn was bought by yet another company (C). There was much shuffling of upper layers of management (mostly VP and higher) but that's about it.

I've never had impostor syndrome, but I imagine it comes from not realizing that everyone is finite and has a finite amount of time to experience the universe. But the universe is infinite, so you can never know everything there is to know. Even if you limit it to a narrow field like programming, the infinitude is still there. The universe is literally infinite in every respect; you cannot escape it. No matter how small you limit your focus, there is an infinite amount of information to learn in that thing. I think studying fractals gave me this insight, but it's not hard to realize that the universe itself has the same property that no matter how carefully you examine some aspect of it, the complexity is never eliminated. In fact it only increases.

I've never had imposter syndrome either. I don't really relate to your fractal example. My experience was when I was 13, my older cousin was bragging that he'd used up all the memory on his trs-80 making an adventure game (BASIC). I was very impressed until I saw his program. It was all if/else statements, he hadn't used any subroutines. I was astounded. That was an early lesson to me, no one knows all this stuff. That and the realization that these damn machines make fools of us all at one time or another :)

Everyone is just at different stages of learning. When you've been doing this long enough, you've forgotten a lot you knew before. At some level, 'refreshing your memory' about what your forgot is not much different than learning it the first time.

Yeah, agreed. I guess the real point I want to make is that you need to forgive yourself for not knowing everything, and don't delude yourself into thinking your value as a human being is based on how much you know about computer stuff. It's a fine thing to learn, and we have a professional responsibility to learn on a constant basis, but if your whole identity is defined by your work, then you're building your house on sand.