It's not just imposter syndrome. Theres reasonable concern that a company doesn't want to have to deal with illness/someone that cant hack it. I personally wouldn't want to make myself an outlier with this question, so I too would answer 3.

I guess you could approach it that way. I definitely treat job interviews that way (e.g. try not to be negative about a previous employer, even if it is justified).

If I were in a situation where I felt like I needed to approach interactions with my manager this way lest they try to screw me, I don't think I'd be interested in staying in that kind of environment. I guess some folks have overriding priorities where they are willing to endure antagonism and gotchas like that, but sheesh.

I wouldn't say it's antagonism or anything like that, just as you aren't antagonistic towards the gear in your alarm clock. Nevertheless if the gear started playing up, you'd get rid of it without a 2nd thought.

Obviously this is filtered through (emotional) humans, and job roles have differing fungibility, but the corporation doesn't really care about you except perhaps where it benefits itself.

I don't grant the validity of that analogy. People aren't gears of a clock and, when you say they are to a corporation, you are giving them a pass that is built on assumptions of an agency which they lack. Maybe legally you cannot pierce the veil, but ethically and morally a corporation is just other people making decisions and doing things.

If someone is treated this way, a whole cadre of other >people< had to be the ones to enact it. My previous statement stands - maybe there are overriding reasons to do business with people like that for some, but to me that's a hard pass. If you can't trust somebody to even be a decent human being, what can you trust them with?

"What can we do to bring it down to a 2?"

The number doesn't matter as much as doing anything one can to help.

eg, imposter syndrome. It has a cure. But being okay bringing it up and asking for help is required steps. This doesn't have to be with a manager. It can be with a therapist. People care, and if they don't, is it worth working in an environment like that?

Good point.

One way I could try to pre empt this is to say: "nobody was ever fired for answering 4 or 5 to this question"

But I'm not sure how effective that would be.

That question (and all variations of it) give me stress just thinking about answering lol.

I immediately begin to micro-analyze what the likely outcome would be for each scenario. Does these get recorded, and reflected upon to judge my ability? Will it spread? What will the 1on1 manager think of me? If I answer 4-5 am I not capable? If I answer 1-2, are they going to think I'm more capable than I am, and overwork me?

etc etc. Probably not a fault of the question / approach.. just how I operate. Every move in life is a chess move.. and it's stressful.

You'd think I'd be further along in life with that attitude. Yet, it's a fairly recent (~10years) adjustment.

I Am Declaring War on STRESS! Denholm The IT Crowd | Series 1 Episode 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZTvMYQSl_w

We had someone answer 5 because they had just had a family member die... I asked him if he wanted to apply for bereavement leave.. he declined because he wanted to immerse himself in work.

I kept up with him until he felt at around a 3 and then I asked him to take bereavement then... he kept sending me pictures of his WoW Classic character doing quests during his vacation... love that guy.

I'm afraid I wouldn't believe you.

With rare exceptions, management wants to hear 'no problem' and that 'everything is fine'.

The next thing to do is a PowerPoint chart for the 2nd level managers showing names and stress levels over time with trends.

> With rare exceptions, management wants to hear 'no problem' and that 'everything is fine'.

This makes me so sad. As a manager (formerly an engineer), I want to hear about problems as soon as possible! I can help! It's my job to clear roadblocks, to help find interesting projects, to keep the team working well together for the long term.

It doesn't do me, the engineer, the project, or the team any good to hide problems. Such a bummer when managers push for short term results over the long term health of the team.

I should be more clear. When I say 'management', I'm really referring to 2nd level managers and up. From my experience, line managers are either the member of the technical staff who tells the lords and masters that everything is fine (and are mostly fighting fires or pushing a chunk of hardware through a pipeline) or they have three ring binders full of yearly company-supplied HR stuff. In neither case is there enough power to really 'run' things. Heaven help you if there's a completely separate creature known as the 'project manager'.

OTOH, directors/VPs (and other intermediate levels in larger firms) are not only the people that senior technical staff will run to for various reasons, but also are the folks who love to hear 'no problem' and that 'everything is fine'. Bringing them things to worry about is best done cautiously. In the final analysis, the worker bees are ERUs.

YMMV (very much so) of course. I can speak only for about a dozen companies. The world is a big place.

Companies loose more when people run into burnout and become sick or leave the company. If the company doesn’t care about your wellbeing, leave.

Also you should leave when there is more middle management then people who do real work.

This seems appropriate when talking about optimizing stress levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZTvMYQSl_w

Another angle is to declare from the start wanting improve the situation whatever their stress level is, and ask what your efforts should be directed at.

If they don't have much to complain about it will be low priority items, if they're in a 4-5 situation it will be a longer discussion. At least they might be more open to explain heavy stuff if they know you're there to solve them and not just analyse.

"...because they all understood intuitively that they would be fired if they ever did. Also, past performance is not indicative of future results."

So it would be zero effective. Employees cannot trust their employer to act ethically, at any level of management, ever. Full stop. Every measurement that could be used to influence management will be gamed. The employee can't know whether their manager is asking out of genuine concern, or due to a top-down directive to identify stressed workers, probably so they can be fired first.

If you want to know if the employees are stressed or unhappy, ask via an anonymizing third-party, such as their union rep.

Holy crap this is so true. Anyone who's been on the receiving end of "wow, if you are so miserable here, maybe you'd be better off somewhere else" knows what I'm talking about :P. Being quite frustrated cuz work shenanigans makes shenanigan makers quite uncomfortable.

That's why you should ask "From 1 to 5 except 3" and "from 1 to 10 except 7" because these values are "always" used as the default "I don't really care" answer.

I mean, what if I'm actually totally fine though and in a good place.