If I had a dollar for every time I wondered when I was going to get fired for incompetence, I'd be a millionaire. Most of the time I know that I know my trade -- I get a fairly regular stream of compliments from coworkers, customers, peers on random projects, etc and I generally feel I produce a lot of value. But the second something happens that points in the other direction, even something minor like a slight flaw in a report to a client, I immediately fall into the "how am I still around?" trap. I've gotten good at pushing that down and moving forward until I feel good about what I'm doing again, but it's tough.
I'm just glad I'm not the only one that feels this way; from what I can tell, this is fairly common. I wonder if this ever really goes away? It seems that for me, the more I realize I don't know (which is, of course, always increasing along with the things I do know) the more common it gets. Curse of knowledge, I guess.
I got my first paid programming job when I was 18, and I knew that I was way out of my element. So I knuckled down and worked my ass off to try to figure out what I didn't know, and how I could get better.
I'd change jobs every so often to see if I could try something bigger. Every time, I knew I was totally out of my league again... So I knuckled down and worked my ass off to figure out how to be better at that. I was certain that I was going to fail miserably once my luck ran out. Eventually I was going to do something so horrifically bad that I'd get laughed out of town and never work again.
15 years after my first programming gig, and now I'm self-employed. I have a few customers that are helping me pay my bills so that I can try something bigger. I'm still pretty sure I'm out of my league, so all I can do is hunker down and hope like hell I'm not incompetent and oblivious.
I don't have anything to suggest to you to help make the feeling go away, but I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with it for awhile :)
You've gone 15 years without ever having the misfortune of being stuck in an environment where all you could do was think about how boring what you're doing is (and, quite possibly, how incompetent those around you are). You've spent 15 years challenging yourself, doing (I presume) interesting things.
Ordinarily I'd put some pithy seven-worder here about how lucky you are and how "motivational speakers" probably shit their pants just looking at you, but I honestly can't think of one that's good enough. Sorry, man :)
I think all that means is that you're always learning. After 15 years of that, you're probably waaaay better rounded than the guys who stuck with the same job for that same period and feel comfortable that they know everything they need to.
Herein lies the importance of metacognition - "thinking about thinking". If we are aware of this bias, it lowers the blow when it seeps into our consciousness. I am becoming increasing aware of the power of mindfulness, as promoted by Merlin Mann, Buddhism and more. This is the hack that can drive happiness, health, and the interaction of the two.
Isn't amazing how many people are really bad at their jobs? I spent 3 years feeling that anytime I made a mistake I was a failure, and there should be no reason I should be there anymore. Everything is relative!
I find this happens when
1. we fruitlessly compare ourselves to others, and
2. 'worship' smartness. I'm reminded of a quote from David Foster Wallace's commencement speech:
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Thank you for posting the quote. I found the speech online (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction) and read it, it's incredible. And saddening, considering the fact that DFW probably succumbed to the negative feelings he was warning against here.
While I liked the general message, the post felt insincere to me. Like, "I've got 30 domains and I've only done something awesome with 3 of them." or "I used to speak Spanish really well and I still study Zulu with my wife but I spoke to a native Spanish speaker today and realize I'm lucky if I can order a burrito. I've all but forgotten my years of Amharic. My Arabic, Hindi and Chinese have atrophied into catch phrases at this point. What a phony."
Seriously, does he think that others know this stuff better? Being a phony isn't Ted Williams saying, "I only hit over .400 one time, I'm a phony". Feeling like a phony is when there's something you really feel like you should know, but for some reason you don't. For example, there was a time I thought I was really proficient in C, and then someone showed me some C code and there was syntax that had me baffled. It was bitfields. Up until that point I had never seen bitfields. Must've skipped that section in K&R and went years w/o ever seeing it. And this was before Google search, so I just happened to go through K&R and find it, and read up on it, before the code review session. I was five minutes from showing up to a meeting and saying, "What's that?" and having everyone turn and say, "Who hired this guy!?" -- that's feeling like a phony.
It was written completely from a sincere place. I used to study linguistics and 10 years ago was pretty darn good at languages. I see dudes like Tim Ferriss saying they can learn a new language in three months (I question this) and I speak to Europeans and Africans who have 5-7 languages. I used to take liguistics classes and could converse in a numer of languages. Being good at languages was part of my identity. However, we can't be good at everything. If you don't use a muscle it atrophies and that's happening with my language skills. That's what I was trying (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to express. I'm sad that this part of my identity isn't working like it used to and it makes me feel like an imposter.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize that aspect of your background. I'm a typical American (well, US native to be more precise) -- we're lucky if we know one language.
I think he means that he feels like any person that is "reasonably intelligent" person should be able to do it, and because he can't, he feels incompetent. He's not talking about the accomplishments in particular.
It may just be the nature of programming projects that nobody understands the full implications of what they are doing. And for the most part, what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is dumb luck.
So maybe you really ARE courting disaster every day, and there's something like a 1/8 chance every year that you'll do something so horrible that your clients or investors will hate you forever.
Look at the success rate of our industry. Let's set aside startups because that's widely acknowledged to be a field where much is unknown and unpredictable. Pity the non-technical CEO who just wants to computerize some filing system. It's common for 50% of these sort of routine corporate IT projects to fail. This is the thing we're supposedly good at. And yet they would never hire a plumber with a 50% disastrous track record. In fact, they probably would never expect somebody with a 50%-bad track record to even be able to stay solvent. But there are plenty of programmers or consulting firms out there with worse records than even that.
Well, if we are, then this certainly isn't the only industry in which everybody is a fraud. Look at the people who make movies, or generate electricity, or trade stock, or grow corn. Look at the people who run our various countries.
It's a really unnerving day when you realise that the whole thing is run by human beings.
If it's just the nature of programming projects that nobody understands what they're doing, does that imply we're frauds? Research in general is like that: you can't know whether you're about to make a great discovery until after you've made it.
If the CEO just wants to computerize some filing system, give her a copy of Filemaker Pro. Don't write something from scratch in Ruby.
This post and discussion reminds me of the David Foster Wallace quote: "[If you] worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."
[Edit: Beaten to it by goblgobl....]
My mind always dredges that quote up when I start to question my abilities. (Which I've been doing a bit of lately, coding for a nearly 15 year old Windows NT system. Relearning things I haven't seen since the '90s....)
Certainly we all have moments where we question our abilities. Small crises of faith, where our self confidence withers away. It's just part of life. Part of the checks and balances of our brain.
Also, I can imagine if someone is extremely talented/gifted in one domain, its extremely alluring to measure the world against that attribute. It can be self-affirming 95% of the time, because you're better than most people. But the other side of that coin is the 5% who are better than you, make you question your talents and create insecurity.
The whole Kenyon speech is good material. The kind of commencement speech everyone wishes they'd had. (I don't recall word one that Raymond Lane said at mine.)
The parts of it about traffic come to mind /every day/ I'm on the way home. Especially: "In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible... that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way."
I try to reason to myself that it's normal to feel this way as a programmer / techie simply because there is such a vast amount of stuff to know, that no one really knows even half of it.
What with the multitude of programming paradigms, languages frameworks, mobile dev, webdev, front-end, back-end, sql, no-sql,... I could go on.
In the past 1-2 years I've picked up Android and iPhone development, and am now doing a deep dive into ruby and rails so I definitely feel like a phony at the moment.
On the flip-side, just being able to pick up those skills and do a few successful projects with them gives at least some counterbalance to the phony feeling.
I actually feel really lucky RE: all the technology that's out there now. When I learned to program, the only option available was 'BASIC', then years later, C++. When I went to university (1997) I was surprised at how many other languages there were, but it still was relatively simple compared to today.
I remarked to my partner who's also in IT that I feel sorry for people trying to get into IT nowadays, because the number of languages, frameworks, platforms etc. is so huge. It's awesome in some ways but it must be overload for a newcomer trying to figure out where to get started.
I suppose to any newcomer my advice would be to go depth first into something like RoR or Django.
Learn the framework and learn the language really well, then once you're comfortable building things well (after a year or 2) experiment with something else on the side.
The hard part is figuring out what is worth learning, and for this a mentor can be priceless.
I feel for people getting into programming today. While GPLed software and better dev environments than I ever had are easily available, there's less of an emphasis on computers being programmable for users - less useful manuals, etc
Sure you can get Ruby if you know where/how/of it, but your computer likely doesn't even come with BASIC installed by default.
I often feel this way as well. I tell myself that I'll learn faster if I can get over this feeling, or learn an effective way to cope with it.
Looking back at difficult things I've learned helps. That is, knowing I felt this way about some other topic or domain, whether it was real analysis, fourier analysis, cooking, or more recently, RoR. Having a community to ask questions to also helps. Stackoverflow boosts my confidence a little whenever I see one of my questions or answers upvoted.
I had horrible grades in college. I retook more classes than I would have liked, some for really stupid reasons. I felt like I was a complete phony doing physics because, for some fucked up reason, it was what smart, cool people did, and that I didn't belong there at all, I was just a poseur who had some bright flukes along the way. More importantly, I almost worked entirely alone along the way.
In my last year, I was taking Analytical Mechanics, Q&M, Advanced Electrodynamics, and Nuclear and Particle physics. I had the second highest score in the class on the first test, which included 10 grad students. I still wrote it off as a fluke, and I didn't do so good on the next test. Then I did it again, the next semester, and I still couldn't believe it. Everyone had better homework scores than I did... how could I beat them on the test? Then the same thing happened in Nuclear and Particle physics with an oral examination because my grades were low. I sat through 5 other students who had much better grades and were doing the oral examination for the A instead of an A- (I was fighting for a B-) They weren't doing so well for the most part. At the end, the professor, who knew I could do it, started going above and beyond what we hard learned into Solid State physics, just to see what I knew. I screwed up a bit on the paper final, getting stuck on weird problem that involved some hand waving for some radiative losses for an electron near relativistic energies. I knew I was below the curve. I went in to say bye to the professor on the last day, and he asked what grade I thought I deserved, and I told him a B- (I was in C territory before the oral exam and final exam). He ended up giving me an B+.
The last year was weird. It was really the first time I thought I could really, truly do physics. I worked with other students, and I realized that a large portion of the students who I thought were better students were better focused and better working in groups. These same students even thought of me as really smart (and still tell me that). Overall, I don't think I'm smarter than they are, but I do think we have different strengths. To this day, I still feel like I got lucky, and that my bosses didn't bother to check my GPA because of my enthusiasm for the position (and writing skills)
I do have ADHD, and I know for a fact that's a driving force in this because I have a hard time focusing on many tasks. I've gotten much better at it, especially after having a regular job with a regular schedule, but I still have a hard time believing where I'm at.
I've definitely been paid more for jobs than I felt they were worth. I had to take a look around at cost vs benefit, what others are willing to work for, etc etc... In the end, I didn't have a problem with it.
Does the root of this stem not from a belief that what we do is in some way bad, but a feeling that we're capable of so much more if only we could better channel our abilities?
We all have moments where we think "right now I'm doing amazing work" which make us look at all the other moments - our normal working level - as in some way insufficient.
In reality it's probably not realistic to work at that level continually, but that doesn't mean that we don't aspire to it so instead of thinking "I work at a decent level normally with moments of greatness", instead we think "I'm great but spend a lot of time being mediocre".
And maybe more than that it's very possible the moments when we think we're doing amazing work might not actually be our finest moments, just the "neatest" ones. There are days when I burn through things on my to do list but I suspect some of the days that really move things forward are far bittier and less immediately satisfying. I can spend a day being pulled from pillar to post by clients and think I got nothing done but the reality is that on those days I might have made a couple of clients happy and unblocked a couple of things that were delaying projects.
The TL;DR version: I suspect we're bad at judging what our real standard is, both in terms of when we're actually doing great work and how often it's possible to do it.
I felt this a couple of days ago when I couldn't intuitively see something that I thought I should. Luckily, after a while, I tried reducing my vague confusion into specific questions, and answering each, one by one... which revealed more to the thing than I thought there was. No wonder I couldn't see it - that concept didn't exist.
I also simplified the problem, discarding issues of implementation efficiency and convenience/ease of use of the user model, and any tricky wrinkles that complicated it, to reduce it to something I could see. Being able to see that has given me a base to understand the other issues. I've noticed that some specifications use this approach: they have a very detailed underlying conceptual model, then add a convenience model on top. e.g. XPath specification (crazy ancestor, descendant, sibling etc axis -> defaults to descendant so you can just use unix-like paths).
I used to be much better at seeing things... but thinking back, my key characteristic at that time was to embrace not knowing things, embrace mistakes and learn. I was also working on areas that were built directly on top of existing models and approaches... whereas now, I'm developing the theoretical foundation as well. There's a kind of exponential explosion, with so many different and interacting choices at every turn. In some ways, an intuitive/insight approach is necessary, as exhaustively trying each alternative is not feasible.
tangent: In Breakfast at Tiffany's (the movie, not the story), there's some discussion over whether Audrey Hepburn's character is a "phony", but I never understood what they meant in that context. She's beautiful - how can that be phony? Or maybe that she's pretending to be urbane when she's rural?
The work I do day to day sometimes seems so easy and obvious, for lack of a better description, that it feels like anyone could do it. It wasn't always that way; far from it. I worked hard to reach the level of skill I am at, but hard work is easily forgotten.
As such, it is easy to minimize ones achievements. There are people off developing autonomous vehicles and doing crazy things with artificial intelligence, and I'm here developing lowly web/desktop/mobile apps. I guess phony is one way to describe it: If I were a "real" programmer, I would be working on "real" problems [1].
[1] i.e. problems in which I do not yet have experience solving. I imagine once I gain that experience and become confident in my work in those areas, they too will no longer feel like real programming jobs and I will set my sights on something else that is, in my mind, a "real" programmer's job.
There's this curious inversion that is often involved, too.
When you think you haven't got anything done and you've just considered yourself the second worst, if not worst, programmer in the world, everybody else seems to praise you and be eternally grateful for your great work. But when you've been in the flow, hacked magnificent solutions, and feel you're on the top of the world, the best you can get is that everybody else doesn't even notice. The worst might be complaints or even direct criticism that you feel is totally unattributed to you.
Yeah, I suck most of the time. It keeps me learning, though, and I do know my value when I need it. I also try not to be surrounded by idiots: better be a small fish in the big pond than a big fish in a small one.
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been refuted by further research:
[D-K] describes everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots...
However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning’s main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty. For example...
So why does Google blog search finds zero mentions of this refutation? My guess: because under [the new] theory you should listen to those you disagree with instead of writing them off as idiots.
if you're having a crisis, i suggest you really try something else. you will either:
(1) love the new thing
(2) realize how much the new thing sucks compared to the old thing and rekindle the love with the old
(3) realize how much both suck and try something else.
one of my old mentors told me that the job i was loving as a fresh out will suck at some point, but to suck it up and do it because you get paid to have fun outside of work. i haven't regretted cutting any of these safety lines to do new things that make work (majority of how you spend your waking time) enjoyable ...
I feel this way every time i finish and 'ship' a project, especially when submitting an app to the app store. I'm like 'this'll never get approved, its rubbish, who'd want to buy it, stick to your day job...'
But, i submit anyway, and people end up buying the apps, and i never get an email asking for a refund, so i guess its just all in my head!
I guess the lesson is to ignore the cynics, even when the cynic is yourself.
I've worked (very recently) with some really horrible programmers..real phonies. It isn't ok, they deserve to get fired (quicker than they did), they are easy to spot, it's a major flaw that they got hired in the first place, and a bigger one that they stick around for months.
It drags everyone down..it can kill a team and certainly a project. It's a major reason I quit.
It sounds like a different degree of phony. Phonies are all over the place and show up in many social situations. Many times it arises due to wanting to fit in.
In my weekly RPG, we had a new person join who claimed some experience with the gaming system, but didn't oversell herself and was eager and knew her competencies well enough to pick it up fairly quickly. That's pretty much the trick. Too bad the phonies you encountered (it sounds like) oversold themselves too much and couldn't keep it up.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is the difficulty to judge yourself.
When you feel confident, how do you know if you are truly excellent, or suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect? Same when you are feeling incompetent, are you really lacking competence or suffering from Imposter syndrome? How do you know??
This post and discussion thread hits a sensitive topic for me. Here I was, recently thinking that I might be the only one having this feeling. I guess it's part of evolving and part of life and I try to convince myself with "Heads up! Keep on fighting the good fight."
If always be closing is the cardinal rule of sales, always be learning is the cardinal rule of knowledge work. Never stop caring and never think you know everything.
If you adhere to those rules the worst that can possibly happen is that you get better.
Good old Larkin! This reminds me of Toads, which, of course is well-known. However, he also has a poem called Toads Revisited, which, depending on your reading, may be heartbreaking in its conformism.
When I was in high school, just before the Internet became widely available, I was the greatest programmer in the world.
These days, with the Internet and constant promotion of projects, I see that I'm just a talentless nobody.
We're now regularly exposed to the work of the tiny group of truly excellent programmers, and only the very best output of the masses of regular programmers. How can anyone who stays even slightly up to date (i.e. programming blogs and social bookmarking sites) feel good about what he/she does when bombarded by success stories of amazing sites/applications/services?
1) It is actually worse than having to compete with the best programmers in the world. Rapid development tools and high level abstractions have created the same sort of "level playing field" as the handgun did (i.e. a small weak guy with a gun can take on Hercules).
2) As you get older, some people realize that you don't have to compete. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. Your life experiences make you unique. It might so happen your unique perspective is what is needed to make some breakthrough happen. You come to realize how much being in the right place at the right time matters more than anything else.
Intellectually, I know #2 to hold true. But that doesn't stop me from feeling that I'm not reaching my full potential :(
1) It is actually better having to compete with better programmers.
At the end of the day, you're challenged more and sure, you may be further from the top than you would be if you were born 30 years ago. At the same time, you can accomplish more today than you could if you were born 30 years ago. It's all because of those better tools and better programmers out there.
Also in addition to getting older, your perspective changes, especially if you end up doing something life-changing like starting a family. Then I think you might find you care a lot less about jobskill insecurities, but that this laid back attitude may actually help you.
> You don't have to compete. [...] It might so happen your unique perspective is what is needed to make some breakthrough happen.
Precisely: stand on the shoulders of giants. It does require work to climb all the way up, but just not as much as would be needed to redo all that made them giants.
The same way talented musicians, artists, or actors do: by quietly doing good work, every day. We should count ourselves fortunate that, in our industry, even if we don't make it "big", we can still make what most people in the US would think of as a whole bunch of money.
I think your thoughts of being a talentless nobody have more to do with gaining experience than it does having access to more information and seeing more products. You have crossed the "Humility threshold" where "What you think you know" < "What you actually know".
I'm just glad I'm not the only one that feels this way; from what I can tell, this is fairly common. I wonder if this ever really goes away? It seems that for me, the more I realize I don't know (which is, of course, always increasing along with the things I do know) the more common it gets. Curse of knowledge, I guess.