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Ask HN: Impostor syndrome, or just an impostor?
62 points by cedws on Dec 19, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 40 comments
It's been a significant year for me career-wise. Through a few job switches and word of mouth, I moved up from a small software company to a massive firm you've probably heard of which has doubled my salary.

My first month has been quite a struggle and I constantly feel like I don't belong here. I'm getting paid more money than I could have imagined making but my output is a fraction of what it was at my old job. I usually make a conscious effort when I start at a new job to carve out some work that needs to be done for myself and get cracking but I'm having trouble understanding the project.

Everybody is much more experienced and older than me. I'm in my early 20s so I'm used to people seeing me as green. I had a chat with my 'boss' (not my boss per se, I don't really have one) and he seemed OK with my performance. I asked for what I could do better and he had something pretty minor for me.

I just feel like dead weight and like I should be fired.




Some people have said this already but it bears reiterating because I had to learn this the hard way: big organizations are qualitatively different from small ones, mainly because they can't play fast-and-loose with the rules as much. So big organizations have bureaucracy to make sure the rules get followed. That slows things down. You have to adjust your expectations accordingly.

Another thing to keep in mind: navigating bureaucracy in order to get things done is a skill in and of itself, and it takes time to learn and master. It's made that much more challenging by the fact that this is not widely recognized as a skill, and so there aren't any books or manuals. You have to mostly learn by doing. But three rules of thumb that I have found tremendously useful:

1. Be friendly. Keep in mind that everyone you interact with is a human being and they are all in the same soul-crushing boat as you are. A little bit of common courtesy can move mountains.

2. Read the rules. There are probably mountains of documentation somewhere about policies and procedures and who is at least ostensibly in charge of what. This documentation may or may not be complete, and it may or may not bear and resemblance to actual reality, but being familiar with it is nonetheless very useful because nothing strikes more fear into an uncooperative bureaucrat's heart than someone who has read the rules and knows what they say.

3. Rule 1 is more important than rule 2.


I'm good at #1, but I absolutely hate #2. I still can't believe anyone ever reads all that crap, and yet it exists and is apparently important. At a previous project, our team had to go through some sort of process to become agile and devops before we were allowed to deploy to the cloud. (We had no other place to deploy so we had to, and were in fact already illegally deploying to the cloud in the namespace for another application we had that moved to the cloud just before these new rules. And we were already way more agile and devops than the organisation could handle.) The process involved filling out dozens of tables on a Confluence page. We had no idea what they meant, but fortunately people were ready to guide us through the stupid process, and most of the points were completely trivial (but a few treacherous ones were definitely not) and we just slowly muddled our way through it over a period of months.


You’re young. Things will work out. Trust in time.

Also, it sounds like you’re insecure about how much money you’re making. Let me clue you in on something. You’re not making very much money at all. You will realize over time that they’re paying you the bare minimum to keep you around. That number just happens to be higher than what you’re used to. There’s so much money in the world and as a salaried employee you’re never going to get more than a paltry sliver. You should feel the opposite of how you’re currently feeling about money. You deserve more.


The conventional wisdom is that it takes most people a year to be fully productive at a new job.

If you are coding on a complex system with a lot of legacy it takes a long time to understand it, in a perfect world people could draw a line around some part of it and give you just the right guidance to get started but mostly people can’t be bothered to do that. A company able to do that would be able to use workers a lot more effectively but the difficulty of doing that is one reason why ‘big tech’ is frequently perceived as unproductive and bloated.


>The conventional wisdom is that it takes most people a year to be fully productive at a new job.

That's not not a whole lot less time than a lot of folks spend at a company.


Now if only these companies learned the value of retention.


If you haven't made five mistakes before noon, you aren't really trying (or learning). I'm 57 and you just have to do stuff, at great speed, and err too. OK, so I'm also gone through about 4 career changes... and been a big advocate for inventing.

Long story short. You won't invent anything if you are afraid of laughing and being laughed at.

Oh, and I'm a named inventor on a dozen patents and patent applications. How do you think Edison got through it, if he was worried about stuff not working?

Also, I've been fired a few times. Sometimes those were the best times. I shit you not.


> Also, I've been fired a few times. Sometimes those were the best times. I shit you not.

Would you humor us with any anecdotes on one of those firings?


Not OP, but I was fired from my first job. My boss was the son of the owner and his previous job was mailman, but he'd done some programming in his youth, so he could lead the IT division. I came in fresh from university, and I loved to automate my work. Why do it by hand if you can write a script or a program to do it for you? At some point, I worked at a project where we would get a detailed functional design from the customer, and this FD was sacred. It contained detailed rules about what should happen in which circumstances, and I wrote some Word macros to distill those rules from the document and turn them into my code. We had a super slow build system that involved a .h file that created tens of thousands of const uints that would be included in every single file. I wrote a macro that turned them all into #defines, which sped up the build by a factor 4.

But whenever the boss would look into my room, he's see me leaning back, watching all my scripts and macros run. He hated that. At some point I got sick for a month (B12 anemia), and on my first day back, he fired me.


It takes a while to find your stride when starting somewhere new. Doubly (if not more) so if it's a big organization. Bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy.

I went through the exact same thing, fortunately I had close teammates that followed me between employers. They understood my life path pretty well. They helped me navigate it.

They helped me understand that I wasn't an impostor, at least not any more than anyone else. Doing the thing makes you part of it, and you're there for a reason; someone saw something.

Now hundreds of people know me by name; with all of the help I've been able to give, I've made a really good reputation inside our org.

It just takes time to build, stay with it.

Remember that sometimes it is valuable to learn the skills to navigate the business too. Being a tech wizard only goes so far


Working at a big company is different from working at a small one, and you say yours is "massive."

Big companies have to comply with basically all the laws and regulations -- some of which were written to apply only to them -- and their "target customer" is often everyone in the world. So you can't skip many steps in the checklist. Trademark searches, i18n, l10n, a11y, privacy, data retention, UXR... they deal with all sorts of stuff that little companies defer because they haven't found their product-market fit yet or are willing to risk annihilation if they get caught skirting a regulation.

Even if this doesn't affect you directly, the process sets the company tempo. If you don't take that into account, you might feel like you've inexplicably switched to the slow side of bullet time.

Find a coworker you respect but don't report to, and ask how you're doing on the terms that you're concerned about. Either you'll find out you're just fine, or you'll get practical tips to wade faster through the quicksand of big-company process.


Don't let your fear prevent you from asking questions.

Other engineers will be very happy to spend literal hours with you, including breaking down the overall architecture and figure out ways to contribute. Anything to help you get less lost in the sauce.

Maybe carve out additional time to understand the project. The problems it solves may well be far beyond anything you've encountered. Thus the motivation for the project and the technical challenges it takes on en route to solving the overall challenge may all be opaque to you. Maybe toy projects and demos can help you build intuition for what's happening.

Pay attention to the feelings of shame. You've done nothing wrong and this is a common situation. There are pros and cons to it. If you still hate it in a year you can take your new shiny resume and go find another job.


Don't know about others but I've been verbally attacked for asking "obvious" questions.


Your boss is ok with your performance. Why overthink it?

Imposter syndrome happens to everyone. You interviewed, you got the job, you are not an imposter.

But ask for help when you need it and it can take a long time to learn about the systems. Your boss should be able to point you in the right direction. But do your homework! Is there good documentation to read to help get up to speed?

Also you might try writing down your day to day feelings in a journal etc..


> Your boss is ok with your performance. Why overthink it?

This is what I had to learn to let go of imposter syndrome. All the mental hand wringing, constant worry and fear even after they said "good job".

Instead nowadays I wait for someone else to tell me I'm not a good fit for the job, otherwise I just keep on plugging along.


I wonder if the opposite side of imposter syndrome is old experienced people seeing young talented folks come one board and thinking "how did we convince these young kids to give up startups and meaningful jobs and their youth to work here at this slower moving large company?"

Also, bigger companies realize younger (cheaper?) folks are to be trained and integrated and they will start incrementally producing more and more over decades.

As to imposter syndrome - it is a real feeling, and if you give into it correctly it will be the push you need to achieve something that the next crowd of incoming folks will look up to.


> "how did we convince these young kids to give up startups and meaningful jobs and their youth to work here at this slower moving large company?"

Money. Let's face it, these bigger companies can afford to pay higher salaries to compensate for the pain of working there. Although in my experience, if you really want to be paid your worth, freelancing for large companies is the way to go.


Welcome to a big company, enjoy your stay, and the feeling of uselessness.

To be honest, that sounds pretty normal to me.. It's an entirely different beast.. And the organization is so large and complex that you're no longer going to be "measured" on your direct output.. The org. does not care if you in particular has zero or negative output.. The org may care if the project you work on succeeds, it may not.. It may care only that the group you're in is doing okay.. Maybe it does not.. Maybe it only cares if the division your group,your project is in does well.. And it may be willing to also take a loss at that level..


Definitely Impostor Syndrome, not a real impostor.

Large companies move slower and have more money. That's simply how it is. I remember my second project at a large bank; I needed to do something, talked to a bunch of people, and finished the thing in about two weeks. That was not good. I was part of a big team that was tackling some complex stuff, and me running ahead of the pack was disruptive. Take it slow, be part of the team, etc. We then made a planning with the team, specified everything that we thought needed to be done, and did the thing exactly in the planned 14 sprints (which is still pretty fast and accurate for a bank).

Big projects at big companies have complex contexts and complex dependencies, and can serve highly specific abstract needs.

It can be frustrating when things move slower than you think they should or could. And it can be frustrating when it takes a long time to grasp a project. It's not unusual if it takes a few weeks, or even months, to get up to speed.

In between a bunch of big projects for various banks, I've also done one small project for a friend making an online game. Suddenly, I'm pushing changes to production on my very first day, when on other projects, it can take me a month to get up to speed. It's them. It's not you.


Oh yeah. My rule of thumb is that the first couple of months in a new job can feel miserable just as you describe above. Don't worry about it, you'll get through it and suddenly you'll find yourself being productive and happier.

I've been working for decades in multiple jobs, and it's always the same. Sure as you progress you know more, but you also lift your personal standards as well to compensate.

Stick to it and you'll get there!


First, don't second guess them if they are paying you more, or see more value in your work than you do yourself. Maybe they are idiots, but it is not worth spending time on things that are of concern to _them_.

Second, you must have an internal compass; you must work on deriving satisfaction by contributing something of value. I used to tell a boss of mine, "I can't let my job interfere with my work" ... he still recalls it with a laugh 30 years later.

I tell my students to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset wherever they are, even if they are part of a big company ... identify your customer (*), work on a problem that your customer cares about (the tech bits), show why your work is better than other solutions or is good for the customer (this involves networking and marketing your ideas), take it to an appropriate level that will fund the project and deploy it. You act as a startup within that ecosystem.

(*) The customer could be your company's customer, or could be someone internal (a fellow dev, an HR person, a sales guy ) whatever. Your focus should be on providing value to _someone_.


The most important question is, do you like the work? Are you passionate about it?

If Yes: then you'll get better because that's what passion does.

If No: then meh, I think if your work is good enough for your boss, it's good enough. Save the money you make there and then look for something else. If you're really making a lot, use the money wisely to do something in life that is truly self-enriching.


I went from a similar small extreme (~10 devs) to a large company (> 2000? devs, I don't even know). The feeling I got wasn't imposter syndrome but great frustration by how slow everything moved, especially myself.

The thing that I had to grasp was the tradeoff that although it might take 5 times longer to get a feature safely shipped following all the processes, once it's 'in the wild', it's used by 10,000s more customers than if I was still working at the small company. I also spend more time trying to make my work visible while in-progress so that it levels-up the team, which is another benefit of working slowly.

I've found sweet-spot cadence of switching between 2 or 3 WIP, or gardening/grooming ideas/experimental work on the side. I don't produce enough persistent documentation (e.g. in the codebase or formal docs) as opposed to Github issues/PR descriptions that tend to not get looked at after the work is done.


I "cured" my Impostor Syndrome by accepting that not only am I an impostor, but so are most/all of my colleagues. If everyone else is faking it 'til they make it, then what's stopping you or me from doing the same? Eventually you'll fill in enough gaps to stop being an impostor... at which point you're free to either settle into your expertise or graduate into an impostor in the next level up. Rinse and repeat.

Closely related to this philosophy is the Peter Principle, and the above-described philosophy basically represents embracing the idea of pushing yourself beyond your own self-assessed competence - the worst case being that you push too high on the corporate ladder, expose yourself as an impostor, and get cast back down a rung or two back to where you're no longer an impostor, and the best case being that you stabilize at a new baseline from which you can Peter Principle your way further up.

Also closely related is the Gervais Principle and its framework of Losers, Clueless, and Sociopaths. Whether you strive to be a Sociopath or not, it's worth understanding that their success and power over the Losers and Clueless does indeed derive from sociopathy, and that you and I exist in a socioeconomic system designed by Sociopaths to favor Sociopaths - and if we can't beat 'em, might as well join 'em (or, at minimum, disguise ourselves as them and learn to counter-exploit the exploiters).

Long story short: all of us are either impostors or marks. Better to be the former than the latter :)


Meh, I suspect not. I've worked places where we assumed a 12 month ramp up, and even then you'd probably only be at 80-90%. Fully embedded, could mentor new staff was more like 2-3 years.

That's an extreme example, but it's always jarring to move to the bottom of a knowledge mountain and start climbing again.

People expect it, its ok. Provided your attitude and aptitude towards picking up the necessary knowledge is good, most organisations factor in that ramp up time.

We had reason to pull out a project plan from just after I started my current role, and a burst out laughing.. every task I had was "safe make work for the new guy because we don't trust him yet"


Very normal to feel a bit lost and out of your depth in the first few months or year at a new company - especially a larger one.

Your "carve out some work that needs to be done for myself" quote made me wonder though - what is your team setup? Do you have a project manager or anyone guiding you on what you need to work on? Or team members to ask questions?

Usually it's best to focus on the tasks that they expect you to do and provide them with regular feedback to keep them in the loop of your progress. If anyone else thought you need to be fired, you would've known by now.


It's a very untraditional project. No tickets, no sprints, no milestones, no retros, no ownership. It's a greenfield project and the bosses have decided to do things an untraditional way. Maybe it works? It's made it pretty difficult for me so far though so I wondered if I'm just a bad culture fit. I knew about it going in and was willing to try it.


Is the whole org like this or just your group?

Without knowing more I would say that if you want to stay at this organization start making friends throughout the org. It’s not typically very functional to not have bosses or ownership.

The structure and lack of direction of your group makes me worry your group may not be long for this world. You may be in a weird corner of the company.


I'm gonna go against the grain and say it's a combination of both, but that it's nothing unique to you or something you should feel bad about.

Imposter syndrome is real, and it's rampant, but I believe it's because most of us are imposters. That's how the software industry has organized itself.

It's surprising to friends and family in other industries when I tell them that interviewing for a software dev role is always like starting over from scratch. Even as a senior developer with nearly 10 years of experience, every interview process is an exercise in convincing the other person that you're not a junior, and is more often a losing battle. Doesn't matter if you were recommended from within. Doesn't matter if you've got stars on your GitHub projects. Every time interview will be like Groundhog Day and you'll feel like you're interviewing for your first job. Every coding challenge will make you feel stupid, even if you complete it in time because you know you could have done better if you were given another hour and didn't have someone staring over your shoulder.

But sometimes we make it lucky and get that shiny new job. The paycheck is bigger than the last, and the benefits are better, but you quickly realize the reason your paycheck is bigger is because the work will be at least twice as difficult as what you were working on before, and probably more so. We applied for senior and even lead roles to find ourselves questioning whether those titles make any sense. How senior can we be if we still need help from others because nothing is adequately documented, or because the code is too confusing to us? For all we know, the person whose position we're replacing understood everything and was a "genius" within the company. How does one at least feel adequate when one's mental ass gets kicked at least a few times a week by astonishing problems and never having a complete enough picture of the problem domain?

We tell each other wonderful things about code quality and best practices, but the reality is that we don't work our way up from shitty problems to interesting and enjoyable ones. Far from it, I believe, most of the time. We get more monies and prestigious titles not to write better code or do the real exciting work, but to be the ones who manage to make the code do what the owners want within an expected period of time, and have a willingness to frequently be wrong and be able to fix at last as many wrongs as are created. It feels like being an imposter when a decade went by and the work difficulty seems more related to the passage of time than your ability to code. In a way, it is a form of imposterdom.

What disorients us is the sheer amount of opinion and theology in the field of software that we disguise as fact. Everyone is constantly wrong about everything. Take any given "best practice" or "way of the future", wait a few years, and those best practices will now be "considered harmful" and the way of the future will be "yesterday's software." How is anyone supposed to feel like an expert at anything when the inner reality of the software industry is frequently flipped on its head? How many of us are able to actually be experts at anything? How do we know what's right and what's wrong? If we can't answer those questions, how are we supposed to believe in ourselves and know what we're doing?

The only option left is to power through the slog, fool yourself and others into thinking that you belong, and focus on the better things in life that don't directly involve software.


> Even as a senior developer with nearly 10 years of experience, every interview process is an exercise in convincing the other person that you're not a junior, and is more often a losing battle

Developer interviews are one giant cargo cult in the industry. I usually spend about 15 minutes on coding during interview, and even that sometimes feels like too much.


I never get coding challenges anymore, and I doubt I'd be any good at them. But my CV says I'm a senior and I can talk like one for at least the duration of the interview, so it's never an issue. Then I start the job and after a few weeks I feel like a junior who knows nothing, but I keep working. And then I deliver some complex stuff and then I realise everybody else on the team is having the same struggles I have.


This is so true to my own experience that it made me tear up a little.


Your experience matches almost exactly mine. Doubled my TC, moved from startup to big company, although I was in my late twenties. My first month there the team didn't have any work for me to do and when I asked my manager if they had any work for me they told me to "just chill". I stayed for a year and a half and got generally good performance reviews, but it drove me crazy and in the end and I left for a smaller company and less money.


Hey unrelated to current thread but just wanted to reach out, I'm very excited about your slowsocial project and so are some of my friends on twitter. 29 people have friended me so far after posting about it. Hope all is going well and that the project is still under development. Would be happy to help in any way that I can.

https://twitter.com/DaltonDEmery/status/1606329084019179521?...


Richer companies pay more because they can, not because you need to work more compared to a poor company

And they pay more so they can choose who to hire

Don’t worry, you will be fine

Just keep trying to understand the workflow and their projects

If you want you can talk to your bosses about your concerns (if you feel like they are approachable, else I wouldn’t)


It's normal for bigger software companies. Getting anything "big" done, even for an experienced engineer with lots of time at the company is similarly vexing. This is exactly why some people search out startups, they're able to have a big impact very quickly.


Don't worry. It's going to feel like this every time you switch jobs. After a while you start to enjoy the feeling. In six months you'll know the place inside and out. Get to know and like the people you work with - they will help you figure everything out.


I think you will be fine OP, and in addition to other posters here - please -

DO NOT QUIT. Stick it out at least for a year, so if you flounder a bit and think about quitting, just don't do it. You're fine.


Trust your so called boss. If the old timers are as good as you say, you can assume they validated hires like you.


0. It almost entirely depends on your attitude about how you move forward. (Edit to be very clear: this is an assessment of what you’ve described, not a generic platitude. I hope the points which follow will give the impression that I do not think you’re an impostor, but that it sounds like you may have room for growth which will make you feel happier.)

1. This is an excellent opportunity. Take as much as can and want to from it. My experience felt a lot like what you describe, moving from a design shop which mostly specialized in brochureware websites a little on the advanced end, to a smallish startup which had more tech talent than it probably should have. After I got far enough into processing my impostor syndrome, I decided to swim (vs sink), and became much more comfortable admitting when I was inexperienced, or ignorant of even “basic” stuff, or just felt intimidated by my preparedness for a given challenge. This had the wonderful benefit of freeing up the “syndrome” portion and allowed me to accept the due praise I did get and see where I did actually contribute value in the ways I expected or better. Then whatever “impostor” was left… I was surrounded by talented people to learn from!

2. Most software engineers are far less productive than one might expect, particularly coming from a high output background. Again in my experience: this is probably a good thing. What’s better than moving fast (regardless of whether you break things)? Moving slow with clear intent, clear understanding of the value of your work, and the ability to sustain it. In other words, you’ll achieve more by being methodically circumspect, and you’ll be less prone to burnout by having realistic expectations.

3. While point the previous might suggest some degree of comparing yourself to others, please resist that urge or at least temper it with permission to be imperfect and frame it as a tool to determine how and what you could improve on. Otherwise you’ll always come up short, especially going in with self doubt.

4. Your self-expectations are different from your employer’s, and from those of your teammates. Seek feedback, often enough to know where you stand in their eyes. You might find that you’re already exceeding expectations! You’ve done this with your somewhat nondescript superior, but it’s good to get feedback from peers too. This is another good opportunity to assess whether (a) you’re working too hard, (b) your priorities are what you [or others] want them to be, or (c) whether you might at some point actually be outgrowing your role.

5. Take a vacation. It’s holiday season most everywhere. If you’re inclined, do a side project that focuses on whatever interests you but might feel a more slight challenge; or just chill because it sounds like you’re doing fine but stressed. Either way give yourself a win.




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