I am a self-taught programmer and I do not have imposter syndrome. I have a degree in electrical engineering and when I thought that was going to be my career I did have imposter syndrome, so I’m not immune. I wonder if there’s a correlation. It seems that many if not most professionals suffer from imposter syndrome; I wonder if that’s related to the way they learned.
When I say self-taught, I don’t mean I never took a class, I mean the majority of my programming skill was learned by doing/outside of classes. I took a Java class in high school that helped me graduate from procedural languages to OOP, and I took classes in college but with few exceptions the ones that were practical (vs theoretical) covered material I already knew.
Naah. Impostor syndrome is a personal psychological phenomenon. I don’t think it is really connected to how you acquired your knowledge/skills or how much you know.
I’ve found that imposter syndrome generally comes from misinformation. Once you start talking to peers and understand that they also go through the same steps you do, you start understanding that you belong.
I doubt it’s really about being self-taught or not.
And who knows if this will help any, but my story about imposter syndrome.
- I had an internship in college. During that time, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome, but not all that much.
- Then I started a startup with someone and had no imposter syndrome.
- And then I started working at a big company and had imposter syndrome for a short while and then none once I was settled in.
- Then I went to work for another big company and had tons of imposter syndrome for the whole multiple years I worked there.
- Then I returned to the previous place I worked and have had no imposter syndrome since.
The place where I had imposter syndrome was an extremely extraverted place to work. And I am not extraverted in the least. It was chaotic! It was fun! And everybody else got their shit done and what I worked on would move from sprint to sprint unfinished. And I did not feel productive at all while mostly everybody around me by all appearances felt extremely productive.
The chaotic place was also the only place I’d ever been told I wasn’t living up to expectations by my boss. The feed back I got from literally everyone else both there and other places was that I was kindof the MVP. I was made tech lead at both big companies I worked at (and when I returned to the first one, they made me tech lead again immediately.)
I suspect most people at least in our line of work have the capacity to get imposter syndrome given conducive circumstances, regardless of their background. My theory is that it’s probably more about whether your current circumstance is a good fit for your temperment or not. At least that’s what my experience with imposter syndrome has taught me.
I would just say you are extremely confident in your skills. Usually the imposter syndrom really sets in when encountering a seemingly unsolvable problem (for your skill set). I get it bad when I’m snagged on something.
This might be relevant to the discussion:
I assume you’re implying my confidence is due to having limited competence and thus overestimating my competence? The fact that I have imposter syndrome when I imaging trying to be a professional electrical engineer (despite having a degree) seems counter to your presumed argument.
I imaging trying to be a professional electrical engineer (despite having a degree)
That’s the definition of specious reasoning, and fails to address the point I made.
I think your point here is relevant.
One can never truely evaluate its own competence.
A degree, or good reviews from collegues are good indications you are competent. But also these are not proof: it could be a result of incompetent collegues, or an education that was not that good.
Not having a degree, but saying you know for sure to not have any Kruger raises lots of eyebrows for me: you do not know what you do not know.
Coming back to op’s original question: the correlation comes from that education shows you what you do not know. You are getting involved with all kinds of subjects, and you get a grasp of how many there is left to learn and how smart certain things are. You might for example have never thought about the complexity of a compiler. This can make you feel dumber than if you would have never found out these fields existed.
Imo I think kruger is much more harmful than imposter
I’m self taught and have pretty bad imposter syndrome. Don’t think that’s the magic bullet.
Also self taught. Also imposter syndrome.
Same here. I do think I’m getting over it though, and possibly quicker than the boot campers.
