I really liked this read. It's a topic my mentor/friend (I always add mentor because he means more to me than just "friend" and he teaches me stuff) have discu

I really liked this read. It's a topic my mentor/friend (I always add mentor because he means more to me than just "friend" and he teaches me stuff) have discussed before. Our work environment is lacking in a lot of feedback and review; we're often reporting to people who don't work in our company and touchy-feely stuff is indirectly seen as unnecessary in this culture. Add that to the fact that we're separated from the majority commercial IT world and there's a sense of "we're just hacks" and really don't know what we're doing, we're just her because of a lucky credential that gets us hired and riding the contracting gray train. In trying to evaluate my skills absent feedback, I look to compare myself to those around me. And there, I've noticed, is dangerous territory. I need to state that what happens here, is not good, but it should be recognized. If I'm on a team of engineers and operations staff, building a system, I look around and see what others are doing. Did the configure something wrong that resulted in a fault? Someone screw up and dump too much on that datastore? "Ha!" I guiltly laugh. Because I knew not to do that, I must be better than them. And since, given I hold a very critical view of my own skills, if I'm simply average or "getting by", then they must be really bad indeed. Of course, that's a terrible thing to think about one's colleagues. There's a danger in thinking that because one knows something, that knowledge must be common because to know something esoteric would be exceptional and therefor, better. Keeping with the narrative that we're average, and knew it anyways, then it must be exceedingly simple and the other person should have known better. That's not the case. We can know uncommon things. We can be deeper in our fields than we think. The other fallacy of course is that it's also a degree of confirmation bias. Everyone else's failing below ours is a sign of their ineptitude. It assumes that our own mistakes wouldn't have been caught in turn. All of this I'm trying to illustrate is, impostor syndrome can be harmful to more than just ourselves when we fail to believe in our own abilities and at the same time, measuring ourselves against others. I've caught myself trying to drag my colleagues down in my private assessments in this way, and that's not good.