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Those are all good points, but when programmers talk about feeling fraudulent aren't they talking about their level of knowledge and/or competence? I'm not sayi

Those are all good points, but when programmers talk about feeling fraudulent aren't they talking about their level of knowledge and/or competence? I'm not saying that work ethic, tidiness, etc., aren't standards but I suspect that when a programmer fears that they're are a fraud they're not so much worried about the quality of their commit comments as they are, say, the breadth of their knowledge across the web stack, or their expertise in tuning databases, or their mastery of design patterns, etc. In other words, intellectual skills rather than good habits. I admire the integrity of those workers who own to feeling like a fraud, especially those who talk openly about it, and I'm not seeing that they are 'objectively' frauds, simply suggesting that something is out of synch for them to feel fraudulent in the first place. Denying feelings of self-fraudulence COULD discourage someone from taking actions to become an expert ... or it could have the opposite effect.

sdrothrock 11y ago
For me, the (self-diagnosed) root cause of that feeling is an awareness that there's so much that I don't know. When I read about insightful things or neat tricks/pitfalls is a different person from a different background, but it turns into a mess of "wow, all these people know stuff I didn't know -- and there's so much more I don't know!" So even though I do the best I can, there's still a feeling of "Oh, geez, I bet someone else could do this way better. I'm probably missing so much or doing this in a fundamentally bad way."