Smok Code's video: Do we suffer from IMPOSTER SYNDROME as programmers

Throughout my career I’ve met hundreds of software developers, and CS students. I know many of them very well, and to be frank - one thing seems to be consistent - most of us have no idea: what level are we really on. Alright - so let’s recap: I’ve been working in teams at Amazon, Cisco and Ericsson, met multiple leaders and software developers that have years and years of successful careers, and I also interviewed people applying for software positions - their confidence levels were skewed more often; than not. I’ve found there are some commonalities, and most people fall onto the same traps and schemes. So I hope this will help you realise where you’re at and rethink your approach to things. Let’s start with a story about a developer who I was interviewing for position in neighbouring team. I was to give as an impartial opinion, as the person was previously working in this company. It was under the question if their contract should be renewed or not. Pretty tough role to be in - believe me, no matter what you say some people will hold it against you. I chose a fairly simple problem: for a long list of characters find a shortest sub-list that contains all the words in second list. This is a task that can be accomplished in less than an hour, including the code, tests and some follow up discussion if you’re at medium to senior level. The fellow is brought in to the interview, I explain the problem and wait for their questions and ideas on the solution. Instantly I could hear some tension in their voice: seems like they’re almost offended with the question, and clearly there is some arrogance and unbelievable level of confidence. They didn’t care to ask for any clarifications or anything at all - they went on straight to solving the problem. Or so it seemed. I have to say one important thing about my interviewing: I’m always more interested in the thought process rather than the solution itself - I want to know exactly how you arrived at this idea and what choices you made on your way here. Otherwise I might just think you’re lucky and heard the question before. So this candidate is clearly not going to be bothered to explain himself - and starts to produce code in shared code pad. When I prompt for some insight - I get shushed and told to wait until it’s done. It seems like I’m disturbing the great maestro in godly act of creation. Well - I have time, let’s see how this turns out. Finally it’s finished - I try to follow the code, but not much makes sense. All variable names are just letters, some of them are uninitialised, other aren’t used at all, and there is a lot of unnecessary pointer arithmetic. I don’t get it. I ask to run the code with some examples, and try to get to the bottom of the idea, but the program fails and the explanations are vague and dismissive. I had enough and I clearly expressed that I won’t be able to give him a good feedback unless I understand what the code aims to do. Guess what? I was accused of attacking him personally and being a bad colleague. Then the candidate started to explain the overly complex solution they came up with with graphs, nodes and search trees. What? Long story short - I had to fail them, and they didn’t stay in company. Clearly they overestimated how good they are, and somehow they managed to mislead other people into supporting them. Later it was revealed that their share of work in team was actually accomplished by … well other team members who were constantly picking up slack. I had few other similar encounters - in one interview a candidate who was interested in a senior position was great in answering theory questions, but couldn’t create few files with simplest class hierarchy describing animal kingdom. He really took “fake it till you make it” to heart. Sadly this is very often the case with people very early in their career - we often overestimate how good we really are and that leads us to misinterpreting the signs when things go wrong. This is a well known thing. Such bias was discovered and studied by Cornell psychologists mr Dunning and mr Kruger. As you may guess - it is called Dunning-Kruger effect. It describes relation between how we feel about certain skill or area of knowledge, and more objective measurement of how we actually perform. I recommend you have a read on the details if you’re interested, but for now we’ll settle for short explanation and a graph. Take a look a this curve - first you know nothing, and as soon as you’ll learn the bare minimum to accomplish anything - you feel like a master, this stage is called “ I know everything “. Here are all wannabes that aren’t ready to become proper devs just yet. Other name I’ve seen is “Mt. Stupid”. Being humble is huge part of the job. As you see there are two other major points on the graph, but we’ll get to them in a bit.