i just made this right now, after trembling at my first professional correspondence with an old highschool friend.
We all are. Even the tech lead at the top of your program is only good at what they’re good at (bad attempt at humor removed) Nobody knows everything and most of us are just googling stackoverflow like you are.
As a female tech lead, its comforting to know I don’t exist!
Rhetoric like this discourages women from becoming engineers, saying that a female tech lead isn’t even a possibility is
prettysexist. For the record, if you had just said “he” without the sassy parenthetical I wouldn’t have batted an eye.*Now that I think about it, pretty sexist is an understatement, it’s just plain sexist. Female tech leads exist, look it up, and stop perpetuating sexist ideas in tech
I apologize. That was meant to be a humorous commiseration on the state of a profession that tends to be gender biased, but clearly I missed.
Just noticed this, fair play to you! Sorry for the misunderstanding :)
Both! You’re probably a lot better than you give yourself credit for but also haven’t made enough mistakes yet to see the error of your code
I started this way but I’ve been in my field for a few years and now I can’t tell if I’m pretty good or if everyone else is just terrible.
For me, it’s, “Is this good enough to get me a job. Some dude already got a whole ass facebook or twitter in his resume no forks.”
Eventually you’ll realize those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Realizing you may not know something isn’t a bad thing, it’s a step to understanding. The people who think they know it all regardless of the evidence presented are the problem ones.
I’ve worked with people like that. They’re the real dumbasses.
Dw you’ll get there :)
Don’t worry, it’s both
Not being sure about that is the essence of impostor syndrome.
There are five levels of competence
- Incompetent and doesn’t know it.
- Incompetent and does know it.
- Competent and doesn’t know it.
- Competent, and knows it.
- Expert, but still often feels clueless.
I have 20 years experience, just cracked a project I’ve been working on for almost three years, and I still hesitate to consider myself an expert.
Now, I’ll tell any lay person who will listen that I’m an expert, but man, some days I just feel clueless.
I find the biggest issue I run into is lack of a peer group. I work in a large IS department, but other than one guy at my last company who works with a different language, I have no one to talk shop with.
Once one gets to a high level of expertise, it seems there are fewer peers around - people who can teach something new, or give a perspective not already explored.
It all depends on where you work, and whether there are any user groups frequented by veterans.
Not to worry, this feeling never goes away
It’s both
If this feeling ever goes away, you’ve become over confident and will get back to it eventually.
Talk to colleagues about it. I didn’t and the stress ate my soul until I had to take a mental health break. Most of the time you are not more of an idiot than they are and they have things to say about you that make them feel insufficient.
Some are just idiots though, but they often feel too confident to realize.
It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect you can never escape from
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