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Study Finds 58% of Tech Employees Feel Like Frauds (cnet.com)
"Feeling like a hack is more common than you might think," writes CNET:
In fact, 58 percent of people with technology-focused careers suffer from Impostor Syndrome, according to a new informal study from workplace social media site Blind... Blind's user base includes 44,000 Microsoft employees, 29,000 from Amazon, 11,000 from Google, 8,000 from Uber, 7,000 from Facebook, and 6,000 from Apple, just to name a few. From Aug. 27, 2018 through Sept. 5, 2018, Blind asked its users one question in a survey -- "Do you suffer from Impostor Syndrome?" A total of 10,402 users on Blind responded.
Blind found that 57.55 percent surveyed experienced Impostor Syndrome. Seventy-two percent of Expedia employees say they experienced Impostor Syndrome, the highest among companies with at least 100 employee responses. On the lower end of the spectrum, only 44.45 percent of Apple employees experienced impostor syndrome.
Blind found that 57.55 percent surveyed experienced Impostor Syndrome. Seventy-two percent of Expedia employees say they experienced Impostor Syndrome, the highest among companies with at least 100 employee responses. On the lower end of the spectrum, only 44.45 percent of Apple employees experienced impostor syndrome.
I clicked on the link to figure out what they were talking about, but it was such a mess that I had to close it before getting a chance to read a single sentence.
This is just the Dunning-Kruger effect. Tech employees who have moderate to high levels of experience are knowledgeable enough to "know what they don't know" about their field, and this makes them concerned that they don't know enough. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about the employees who are over-confidence in their abilities.
How many are frauds though?
There are plenty of times I've felt out of my depth, and sometimes it's because I legitimately was. I think the issue comes down to what people do about it. It's not a sin to realize you lack the required knowledge to accomplish something, but it's pretty damned foolish to remain in that state when you've become aware of it.
I also suspect that people's susceptibility to this is directly related to their belief that everyone (or maybe even anyone) else knows what the hell is going on. Once a person comes to realize that almost no one has the right answers and that most people just operate as best as they're capable of doing, it's kind of hard to feel like a fraud if you're at least trying to get better.
My personal estimation is that we have about 20% people that know what they are doing, at least in IT. (Yes, I know that impostor syndrome refers to people that have external evidence that they are actually competent. But in IT holding a specific position does realistically not provide that evidence, even if a psychologist may believe it does.)
It depends a lot on the organization, but are ~20% of people proper experts with the technology or product they're working on? Probably. That means a good chunk of the remaining 80% keep on running into the boundaries of their knowledge, thinking "hmm, I probably should know this, I bet Bob and Sally know it, it's important for me to perform this task, but it's kinda vague".
Now a lot of them are probably still providing good value, and Bob and Sally might not know after all, but that continual experience sounds like a good recipe for imposter syndrome.
The other aspect is productivity, if I were working 100% engaged for 8 hours a day my productivity would be at least doubled, but I just can't mange that. I kind of assume other people manage it, but they're probably hiding their distractions and lack of engagement the same as I am.
I stole this Sig
...you'll feel a bit overwhelmed the first year, this is completely natural.
I work for a huge corporate with IT, and in the beginning I asked myself several times "What am I doing here?", the workload and assignments are so overwhelming that I thought I couldn't even learn this the next 10 years. The truth is, the company is completely aware of this, and most likely - so are your manager.
But corporate knows, you're there because they saw the potential to shape you. Sometimes you can get a job where you have NO initial qualifications, but as long as the company do in-house training, and you're willing to learn - then you're already a valuable asset to the company, at any age!
If you have a competent manager, he/she will have seen the likes of you 10 times over and then some. They know from experience how their learning curve is, and what most of us battle with on a day to day basis. If they're worth their salt, they'll slowly but surely learn from you, observe you, and introduce you to the things you need to qualify yourself over the years, over time you become an invaluable asset to the company, and will feel somewhat more competent as you progress.
I got hired in my late 40's, I was totally clueless. But I fought hard to learn and adapt. Years later - I still feel inadequate sometimes, but I am nowhere NEAR as inadequate as I was years ago, and I now tutor many of our own new trainees - and believe it or not, I learn from them as well.
The trick is actually just to take up challenges, lead yourself. If you sit idly by, chances are that you can get by unnoticed, unremarkable in any way - still you'll have some value to the company as you're not fired yet, they would fire you on the spot if you don't bring anything to the table. Trust me - successful corporates aren't a bunch of clueless fools, they got there for a reason, they found people like you - and you might just be more valuable than you might realize.
I've talked a lot to my managers, they often speak of other values like how well you fit in with the rest of the teams, how you can "empower" others to feel better about their efforts, and how social you are. It's all about the team.
I have had numerous discussions with colleagues that feels EXACTLY like those 58% we're talking about here. I have a female colleague that has no personal interest in IT, and constantly mentions how little she knows and how hopeless it all seems, but I see it differently, she's older, but quite awesome, always nice to those she helps, and if she can't figure it out - she already have figured out those WHO CAN, and she observes when they work, and learn.
She's become quite adept at helping people with IT tasks now, but she still feels like the 58%, I prefer to call that "staying humble" rather than being safe in your position of knowledge, because in IT the knowledge change ALL the time as we get new software solutions every 6 month, and you need to stay focused on new solutions and know how to make things "fit" together, aka - the bigger picture.
If it wasn't for my colleagues constantly accepting my failures by helping me out, I'd be totally lost today, but it turns out that over some time - you become that mentor to someone new as well.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
No, I disagree.
Angsty nerds are likely to check their work, apply good methodology, document and test, because they know they can make mistakes. Those are GOOD programmers.
What you don't want are the Microsoftists who check nothing, who get fixated on this better crap and who end up endangering lives (and killing everyone on board the occasional airliner) because they absolutely have confidence and fixes will be in the next patch anyway.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The other aspect is productivity, if I were working 100% engaged for 8 hours a day my productivity would be at least doubled, but I just can't mange that. I kind of assume other people manage it, but they're probably hiding their distractions and lack of engagement the same as I am.
There are some very old systematic studies done by Ford and others as to what amount of work-hours provide maximum productivity. For manual work they found the peak at 8h/day, 5 days/week, for mental work at 6h/day, 5 days/week. For mental work, you can basically as 2h/day of stuff that needs not much focus, but that is it. If you work more, you are very likely below your maximum overall productivity, i.e. the additional hours make the overall result worse. There are a lot of idiots that do not know this though. As Ford is not in any way under suspicion to have wanted to do something nice for his workers, these numbers are pretty reliable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We all generally know who is competent, or at least more competent. There's always someone that's getting asked to put out the fires or to help fix things or to look over something to make sure that it's okay. That's the competent person, or at least the person more competent than everyone else. Management might not realize this person exists, but that's their own failing. Worse still, management probably undervalues this person because they just look at some metrics that really penalize anyone who's spending a considerable amount of their time helping other people out even though that person is adding the most value to the company.
It might take a while for people to figure out, but if you actually took a step back and monitored a company, there are going to be a few people that have everyone else beating a footpath to their door when they need help. And then there's the other side of the coin, the people that are never going to get asked to do something because everyone knows that they'll screw it up or do a shoddy job of it. It's just that capturing this as a metric so that middle management doesn't make a mess of things is hard to do.
When I took my first computer science class in high school Java had not yet been invented and IPv6 was becoming a formalized standard. Powershell didn't exist for many many years in my career and dynamically routed networks weren't really common when I got started - clusterfucks of static routing everywhere.
Was I a fraud then? Am I a fraud now? - Yes and Yes.
No one in tech knows everything - it's a dynamic field that is constantly changing. "Experts" I've found have very deep and narrow knowledge of one particular part of the field. Many are not experts, but have wide and shallow knowledge and experience.
Are we all frauds? Probably. Do we have the ability to constantly learn and apply our knowledge? - hell yes. The ones that don't wash out very quickly in this business.
I'm a fraud - you are too - and there is nothing wrong with that.
It kind of bothers me a little to see so many people talk about imposter syndrome (AKA Dunning-Kruger).
No. IS and DK are OPPOSITES.
Imposter Syndrome: You think are dumber than you really are.
Dunning-Kruger: You think you are smarter than you really are.