I ask you that because it is much simpler to answer to a binary question like, do I have imposter syndrome? Or put in other words, am I modest?

You can make the link with how people see themselves. A lot of very attractive people tell you they are not very beautiful, and spend their time trying to get validation from others. But they internally think they are the top 5%.

My opinion is a lot of those things exists because people are not honest with each other. So you can't really trust what people tell you about you. And you are always wondering how people see you.

Anyone who has survived a round of layoffs is very familiar with survivor's guilt, which manifests as an intense form of impostor syndrome. "Why was it X instead of me? How did I manage to trick my way into staying when X (and Y and Z) went?"

It doesn't have much to do with your honest self-evaluation. It's kind of unavoidable. Whether or not it's accurate doesn't really matter.

That's an interesting thought experiment. Though not as straightforward as it sounds like at first.

For example, I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I'm also pretty expensive.

But more importantly, companies don't have a good handle on people's performance. They have biased estimates, at best. See https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ for an exploration of this topic from a hiring point of view, but it also exists to a lesser extent when people are already working for you.

For example, one could be better than 90% of employees, but if they're highly specialized on a team/product that is getting phased out and they don't have transferable skills to move internally, they may get laid off even if they're not in the bottom % of whoever was getting laid off.

It definitely is an interesting thing to think about, but I agree that there are some holes to the logic.

I got a FAANG position without completing a degree. All my peers had degrees in CS. I thought I didn’t belong because I lacked formal accreditation. Having skill wasn’t as measurable as having a degree.

Thankfully, I’ve learned to see getting there while self-taught as validation since then.

The result: they are even further behind than they were with me, and occasionally people still contact me from the old company for tech advice. I guess it was imposter syndrome after all!

Never once were exit activities well-considered and useful.

sometimes I think most management failures are because they are acting like they are supposed to and not how they should

Did they say you were useless and changed the notice to 9 days, or are you inferring the former from the latter?

Hiring too. If you’re not in the magic club of universities or don’t have an in, your abilities don’t matter at all.

> but I don't consider them difficult (how could they be, if I am good at them)

I've struggled with this over the years. As a kid, once something clicked it felt like you had leveled up in some way, and now had a new skill. As an adult, I have a hard time not looking at everything I'm capable of and thinking "it's so simple, it obviously just works like this".

It's as if I have no spectrum of [I don't know this at all] and [I'm an expert at this], my self reflection that leads to impostor syndrome just sees them as [I don't know this at all] and [This is obvious].

FWIW, not FAANG, but Senior Firmware Engineer for a household name with FAANG affiliations.

The way you fix this perception is teach the skill to someone with zero foundational knowledge of the skill’s background requirements. Or write if there is no person around. There is always documentation going begging.

IMHO, one of the biggest oversights I see in the industry today is the lack of inward-facing technical writer and editor teams, sitting alongside pair programmers and/or agile stand ups. Skills transmission works through a highly opaque diffusion membrane of tribal knowledge (reaching its peak form in StackExchange), and synchronous, people-intensive discussions, where insight is rarely if ever captured and memorialized.

Powerful, effective documentation prepared by professional programmers with professional communications skills asynchronously transmits insight and not just information. We have incredible tooling now, but ironically do not staff them.

One way to calibrate your imposter syndrome is write lots of documentation. In it, make sure you call out references for further to skill stacks you consider prerequisites lest you dilute your focus and the the prose becomes too unwieldy. And call out references to what you have used to learn meta information and abstractions beyond the current documentation’s focused skill band. If that list will routinely take an average practitioner at a particular skill level more than a year to absorb, then you have a fair baseline. Now update the documentation each time someone asks for clarification on a point in it. If there are lots of readers and few questions, then you possibly have a reasonable grasp of the material.

We've also been pushing hard to get a full time technical writer, someone who specifically doesn't get screwed three months into the job with "Ok, you write docs, AND do a little coding work on the side in your down time". No, we've clearly got the workload necessary for a full time writer, let's bring someone on board and really let them become that core differentiator.

So this is the sticking point for me: is it really _impostor syndrome_ if it's not disproportionate and negatively impactful? What you're describing just seems like normal, mostly healthy, reasonable critical self reflection?

To me the syndrome part of it is the overwhelming runaway thoughts part.

I feel like it's not unhealthy - exactly as you describe. I've spoken to many peers who all feel the same at one point or another.

So is it that we don't have impostor syndrome because we've normalized it? Or is it the same feelings but we are just better at dealing with them?

I think it's the latter. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. With seniority comes the burden of that knowledge. You can easily become lost - where you can no longer measure your output by direct lines of code written, and you also get exposed to more and more top minds that make you feel small.

I think the feelings are exactly the same that a junior engineer faces at their first job where they are overwhelmed and feel like everyone else is smarter than them.

The difference is that once you've been through it enough times, you have the confidence that the emotion isn't valid, and you have competence to fall back on eventually.

If you present yourself as the BEST (in the world?) at something, then you are an imposter.

If you present yourself as a perfectly rounded engineer, then you are an imposter.

But if you present yourself as good at the billion things you are good at (even if you find them easy), then you are not an imposter.

5 year old little brother looks up to 8 year old big sister, and turns to her for guidance and protection - and it is right that he should do so.

I'm currently sitting on three job offers - I originally thought it would be easy to choose, but I find myself absolutely paralyzed right now with an inability to make a decision on any of them because I feel as though I will be expected to know more than I think I know, or to perform at a level beyond what I feel comfortable performing at. I've had a lot of great feedback from my peers and those in more junior roles, as well upper management, but still do not feel confident.

How do you if you are capable of moving from a familiar set applications and systems to one where you've never worked with any of the applications and only know the system by theory?

Some folks are pushing me to move entirely out of code and into management but my passion is writing code, working in databases, and designing systems but the opportunities I have before me now pay more for management rather than getting my hands dirty in the code.

Can't sleep or eat because of constant anxiety over "what if I can't perform to their expectations and get fired?"

- How do others deal with this?

If they sent you an offer, I'd just assume I don't have a clear enough picture on what they will expect of me and when, and just trust that they did their due diligence in my evaluation.

Of course, if it doesn't work out, you had three offers so you'll likely be able to get a new job no problem.

If the company fails their 'job', you end up with the black mark of a missing block of time on your resume, plus the major hassle of switching jobs and re-interviewing. It isn't "No problem" as you say. It's a major problem that could set you back by months.

And read this: https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-brea...

2. I think career progression and satisfaction is all about balancing and trading off playing to your strengths, then focusing on your weaknesses.

If you only play to your strengths, you won't grow in breadth enough. You can become a top subject matter expert, but your utility will be limited to that domain.

If you only focus on your weaknesses, you will become well rounded, but not good at anything, and you won't stand out from the pack in any way.

Only you know which of these two you more need today. Good luck with the decision :)

3. Someone else already mentioned - it's not your job to determine if you are qualified for a position. The company hiring you is. If the work is interesting to you, and they're making you an offer, and you didn't lie - then you are qualified. Learning and stretching yourself would be part of the job.

4. Nothing I say above will fix a foundational anxiety like "what if i'm not good enough and get fired". What helps me with this class of extreme worry is to consider the worst case scenario, visualize it, and recognize that ultimately it's not that bad.

So what if you get fired? Again, assuming you didn't misrepresent yourself, the company would be just as guilty of the mismatch in fit as you. You won't be blacklisted. They might even be willing to give you a referral. But if not, you got 3 offers once. You can get 3 offers again after you get fired. The worst case scenario isn't that awful.

I'm saving your reply into a Word doc so that I can use it going forward. What stood out specifically was your first sentence - I'm not tired of writing code and still feel more passionate about developing rather than managing. It pays less but I feel as though I will be happier in the end.

In any case, I wanted to thank you kind stranger, for your words!

There are extremely capable athletes with terrible ego problems and there are people that legitimately fall into death spirals. There are those that talk the talk but don't walk the walk, as well as those that quietly sweat away in their pursuit of mastery.

Lacking confidence in something, judging oneself, etc are just being human. Pretty much everyone goes through that. Sure, some might project confidence in the face of the unknown, but that's just one of many coping mechanisms we have. "Laughing to not cry", screaming in fear when startled by a spider, YOLO, panic lies, etc are other similar mechanisms where we do seemingly illogical things in response to the respective stimulus.

And of course, people are multidimensional and topics/disciplines are multidimensional. You can't possibly be great at everything, but most are certainly capable of getting very good at something (even if that something is being a generalist in software engineering - which is itself a form of specialization in the grand scheme of society). And you might experience impostor syndrome at work but still be one of those people that think they're above average drivers or some such. Or you might experience it and be confident about your looks. Etc.

When you consider that reality isn't a flat 2D grayscale spectrum, it seems fairly normal that one would experience discomfort with their lackings when compared against one of infinite arbitrary scales.

Just because some attribute exists in normal doses in most people, does not mean that it can exist in debilitating doses in a minority.

Of course, a big difference between imposter syndrome and the aforementioned illnesses is that imposter syndrome is not in the DSM-5. But if you look at the history of the DSM-5, you will notice that adding a new illness is a very slow and politicized process. And a large number of psychologists are treating it a bit to seriously for it to be just a "humble brag".

That doesnt mean everybody talking about their imposter syndrome would really classify as having it. Similarly people who checked webmd and now believe that they have cancer, also do not necessarily have cancer. That still doesnt mean that every cancer-sufferer is a fraud.

The variety I'm referring to is the one that comes from people like the one I originally responded to, who, by all accounts, is a successful functioning member of society. So, yeah, I think it's fair to say "claiming impostor syndrome is just describing a normal feeling" in contexts where the person is clearly not overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction.

Even if there is such a thing as actually crippling impostor syndrome, that's not what I see being brought up in these kinds of discussions.

I originally understood your comment to mean impostor syndrome is never used in a valid way. I have seen these statements being made about mental health disorders, including very serious once like depression. I think they can be really damaging, since they convince people not to seek help. This is why I disagreed.

IMHO, you could leverage that uncomfortable feeling positively (e.g. seeking the right people to help you, etc as you said), negatively (e.g. give up) or in a beside-the-point way (bragging about the cup being half-full). None of this has really anything to do with acting maliciously/destructively like the article seems to suggest, though.

Imposter syndrome would involve feeling like all your past achievements were pure luck, you have no merit, and your collegues were going to find out.

There's nuance to the definition; people use the term like they use the term OCD. Not understanding what it actually means. Vanity.

It's like the paradox of AI, which is that as soon as we've reduced something previously regarded as 'intelligent' to something that can be coded in software, it ceases to be thought of as intelligence any longer.

If you look at something like chess, which was often thought of as very difficult, the first thing we designed that was really good at the game made us realize that you needed next to no logic to win if you had a computer fast enough to try a billion moves. But we thought object recognition would be super easy, far less than AI tier, and we still can't do it reasonably well.

I'm much more convinced that humans suck at estimating the hardness of problems, and not very convinced we keep cheating the classification of AI.

for me, my imposter syndrome comes mainly when I look around and see everyone working hard and struggling to do stuff well and I feel like I'm not even in 2nd gear and doing as well.

So I think I feel like I'm only putting in less then 25% effort and getting 100% of the normal results (relative to others) - it feels wrong,

it's like finishing a test or exam too soon and looking around seeing everyone only half way through the same exam. I then start to worry what have I done wrong?

with many years of contract work, I've realised It's not me!!

I used to try and hide it since no-one likes a smart arse - especially a contractor. but now I do blow a my little trumpet now and then

I really do think I have ADHD and I do become obsessive about things,

my job is my hobby, so I probably put more time in to things than what i realise,

but I still do feel like an imposter occasionally (less so with getting older)

Seeking better opportunities I migrated to web development, and boy, it's hard to be a novice again. Everyone I worked with was better than me at everything. It's hard to feel like the impostor when you know you're the less skilled one.

Now web development doesn't pay that well, so the natural path was cybersecurity. Still learning, and I feel like this will be my last career change because it takes years to stop feeling dumb and start feeling like an impostor again.

Does cybersecurity pay better, at least in certain markets/contexts I was under the impression that doing web dev would land you several thousands more salary wise, though I'd certainly settle to work on the parts of security I'm not smart enough to lmao.

To be honest, I feel the change came before I felt proficient at web development, but I'm happy because I was always complaining about unsafe practices, and now I get to write the policies.

I do work with a lot of cybersec people and boy are they under a lot of pressure with badly designed applications - saying that it's amazing how many of the sec people do not even bother with learning the very basics eg like how TLS really works

I started my career in software 20 years ago with a good attitude and an “HTML for Dummies” book. It made me very cognizant that I was outgunned by a lot of my peers so it made me ask a lot of questions - half of them I’d figure out just figuring out how to pose a question while walking over to someone else’s cube.

I’ve gotten “better” as an engineer and there’s less I “don’t know” but I’m still always wondering, even on “simple” stuff if there’s not a “simpler” way to do it.

Edit: phone auto correct

You have fooled them, but you discount the fact that they have fooled you too.

I don’t think this is why you feel like an imposter, rather this is a rationalisation for why you feel like an imposter.

It’s possibly to do 1 and 2 and not feel like an imposter, so this can’t be the whole reason. It might be necessary for some people some of the time, but it’s not a sufficient explanation.

You even called yourself out on it later in your comment where you say it’s a fallacy.

I’d hazard a guess the real issue is some kind of underlying generalised anxiety.

To survive I took brainless jobs and I find myself in a different form of pain, being eroded by uneducated, learning-resistant cogs.

Right now reading you say "measuring my self against people ahead of me" feels tempting, even after all the problems I got. It's a bit like exercise .. my brain needs it or it shrivels.

ps: I didn't know generalists could fare well

pps: have all your workplaces well accepting of your working style ?

re: PS. I should clarify. I was a damn good programmer who could pump out clean, readable, maintainable code, faster than most. But only once I found myself in a job I loved surrounded by people who encouraged learning, were curious, and loved to teach me. You gotta find your tribe. Don't let your brain rot.

I have a corollary: badly managed companies make good people go bad.

Even worse is the delusion where you believe awareness of bad influences protects you from the consequences...some things can not be mitigated. For example “the culture of mediocrity” :<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257623179_The_Cultu...>.

This for sure. I find too often that I’ve been at this stuff longer than actual teenagers that blow me away nowadays.

Since when one's employer becomes a secret?! And in fact, a principal engineer title in these corps mean vastly different skill and prestiges.

For example, a principal engineer in Google is usually treated as equivalent to a Google director. While a principal in Amazon is just a more senior engineer than a Senior engineer. Because there is no staff level at Amazon, while Google has staff and senior staff...

In msft, a principal probably means just a senior engineer in other places.

The terrible part is mostly because I got too many roles and zero help to grow (I'm often the icebreaker of a tech or role), which lead me to myself doing the actual criticism to ensure I'm doing my best.

On the other hand this kind of continuous self-doubt is stressing, so reading a comment like yours is a relief :)

Thanks for writing it :)

I think I sail the same kind of ship as you, at work I'm like a jack of all trades and pretty isolated. Took me long to realize it wasn't my fault if management put too much on my shoulder and I have no peer to share with. It's a management issue if our bus factor is 1 on many project.

While I often get praise from my CEO the impostor syndrome is part of my daily routine.

Out of work, I'm currently in the process of finally releasing to GitHub a half-baked side-project I invested 100+ hours of personal time but was really too ashamed of to publish. It's not perfect, it'll never be and it's ok. Maybe it will even help me migrate to a better workplace.

Lot's of comment int his thread ring a bell for me!

Thank you all!

I see you've rediscovered Rothbard's law: "People tend to specialise in what they're worst at." (Because anything too easy seems like it's not worth doing)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/27/change-...

I just do my best and hope that's enough. If not, they can always fire me. Why worry about it?

But more and more I get that I m put in places where nobody cares what I ll code but that instead I ll enthusiastically push everyone around, make them try new fun ideas, and have a general blindness to boredom - I guess being an idiot means everything sounds fascinating and I unblocked more than a few dead end just trying or proposing stupid ideas.

I keep writing shit code - i am just lucky it doesn‘t look or run like shit, so nobody realizes. And i charge way too much for things that make my clients rich and work pretty good but are actually not good enough. And these idiots are falling for it happily and come back. I always thought of myself as an honest guy, though it seems that I am not. But then: who is.

Honestly: I just hope some day this feeling parts.

This reminds me on a cartoon in which a rocket scientists plays down his work "it's not brain surgery, after all", while in the next picture the neurosurgeon says "it's just brain surgery, not rocket science".

> I'm a Principal Engineer at a FAAMNG company.

Does anyone other than a MS employee put an M in FAANG?

Depending on what you're discussing when you're listing those companies, it may make sense to include them.

FAANG is about the pay, not the prestige of the company. They pay so far above the rest of the market that they are really only competing for talent with themselves. Average total comp at Netflix is well north of $500k for an individual contributor.

- MS: $185k

- Amazon: $230k

- Google: $267k

I work for a large media company as at Sr director level equivalent engineer. The pay is certainly not north of 500k

In the U.S., financial services shops that figured out tech is money. Or, rather, that time is money and tech shrinks time. Think banks’ trading groups, hedge funds, etc.

Along with those, a larger sector of FS bitten with the transformation bug. Even in the non trading related financial services, if a company’s emphasis is on figuring out how to tech before getting eaten by challengers or juggernauts, the pay may indicate how existential the need.

On the other hand, many in the financial industrial complex haven’t realized this yet, and are still trying to “take costs out”, doing reductions in force of knowledgable workers, offshoring any roles not understood by the executives, etc., or paying bottom dollar domestically for coders and IT support, rather than well enough for software or systems engineers.

Large companies are likely to have a mix of these models all at the same time, so understand what type of group you’re looking at.

Also note that financial titles are often inverse ranks of engineering titles, with SVPs below directors and VPs as the junior-most roles.

Note(1): Pro-employee compensation disclosure laws are starting to get passed where (a) you don’t have to say what you used to earn, and (b) a company may have to disclose the comp for your role and similar roles the moment you ask, not after you make it to offer. Check the laws governing both your zip code and the company’s and know your rights to help even out information asymmetry.

Note(2): Performance multipliers are worth paying for. Automation is worth paying for. Anything thought through and written once to do work, that then does that work many times in less time, or for many people in less time, or both, is worth paying for. FANG code runs at staggering scale. FS code makes staggering money in milliseconds. Look for places where each line of code is multiplying output — how many fold drives how much that code, and its engineers, should be worth.

You'll actually notice that none of the FAANG are on the top 10 of that list. FAANGs definitely pay well, but these days "FAANG" is outdated, IMO. I've seen it "FAANGMULA" sometimes (FAANG + Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb) but even that still leaves out other high payers like Stripe, Box, Bytedance, etc.

But yeah, that's all FAANG is and I'm amazed anyone thinks it's anything more standardized or meaningful or precisely defined. It's shorthand for the biggest and most influential companies in the tech industry at the moment, at least from the perspective of people on the outside looking in. If someone wants to the throw an M into FAANG I totally get it.

According to Wikipedia at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech

Edit: Not popular maybe, but appropriate still.

Not meant as a snide/flippant remark; this shit is what keeps me up at night.

Or the Bezos quote about “imagining myself 80 on a rocking chair – will I regret not doing this?”

As a young adult mostly lacking in wisdom of my own, I’ve found myself coming back to these quotes time and time again. Their philosophy is sound.

If you don’t want balance, then you should go all in. In general, people should take more risk. This is especially true in tech where the downside is often vastly overstated – even if you fail completely, you can get a new job in two days.

My advice to anyone at FAANG feeling unfulfilled is to quit and take a risk to do something awesome. Even if you fail you’ll still grow more than you would working for a megacorp with a recruiting funnel that intrinsically selects for conformists and rule followers.

That being said, it's hard to compare directly. I know many M folks, and some F, G, A and A folks. The M folks probably work at most 75% of the hours of the others. I for one would much rather work a standard 9-5 and make a lot than work 996 (not that extreme, but kinda) and make downright absurd amounts...

They were an OS only, non-internet company, compared to the rest. When the acronym was created, it was still that way.

Even now, they make most of their butter from OS installs, although yes, they have branched out a lot.

Originally: Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell

Then (in 2007): Apple, Research in Motion (Blackberry), Google, Amazon

Others were major market movers and shakers.

There’s never been any good reason not to include Microsoft except that for a long time it was considered old and stodgy.

Netflix doesn’t make sense in terms of market cap, and it also doesn’t make sense in 2021 when it’s more a media company than a technology company. Don’t get me wrong, they totally nailed it on a ton of tech fronts, and deserve their technical accolades…it just looks strange next to the others.

Oh, thinking about Netflix, I just figured it out. It’s about SWE salaries, and not really related to much else.

…although if that’s it, then Amazon doesn’t really deserve it’s spot any more than Microsoft.

Which isn't bad -- I assume Disney also has a number of highly-paid SWEs -- but for me the difference between FAAMG and Netflix is that (as far as I can tell) Netflix doesn't employee a giant pile of SWEs doing blue sky research / doomed projects only tangentially related to the core business.

because I wouldn't put video streaming service among tech behemoths that create operating systems, compilers, programming languages, databases, put shitton into ML research and many, many other

I'm not saying that video streaming is easy, but I believe any of those could do it easily from technical standpoint.

Google, Facebook and Amazon already do, idk about Apple and MS.

Never heard of FAAMNG though.

FAGMA or FAAM have been suggested as updated terms in light of the metrics / characteristics that initially led to the term FA(A)NG being coined.

These terms were certainly not originally intended to describe high salaries for engineers ;)

FAANGMULA

and

TARANTULAS

fun meme

There are also a handful of sub $100bn marketcap publicly traded tech companies that pay on par of FAANGs and may have more enticing vesting schedules too. Greater upside as well.

Also, did you get a lot of those participation trophies when you were a kid? I read a take on those recently, along the lines of, "if the adults always praise everyone, then their praise is meaningless and can't be trusted". Ie, a recipe for impostor syndrome in later life. I certainly experience that. Anytime I participate in an activity that I'm naturally talented at, I figure it's just not that difficult and I've done nothing special.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+...

Not to pick nits or anything!

I never considered it before, but the image of a man with fangs that slowly sucks the life out of you also might fit, depending on your PoV.