8 ms·
Show HN: Impostor Roster – Suffering from Impostor Syndrome? You're not alone
- vcavallo 9y agoHere's a little blog post I wrote about it on the eve of deploying: http://vcavallo.github.io/blog/2017/03/01/launching-the-impostor-roster/ http://vcavallo.github.io/blog/2017/03/01/launching-the-impo... Thanks for checking it out! Please add something! Edit: If anyone is interested in keeping up with any changes and developments to this site (a redesign is coming soon) you can sign up for the newsletter at http://exnil.io http://exnil.io where I will be announcing that and other fun stuff)
- andai 9y agoThanks for making this!
- vcavallo 9y agoThanks for checking it out!!
- allhailkatt 9y agoThis site was frighteningly reassuring. Thank you. I hope this becomes the new FML/TFLN
- vcavallo 9y agoThat’s the idea! :) The argument order for ln one really made me happy today..
- hkmurakami 9y agoThis is really refreshingly candid, and frankly uplifting. Thank you for your efforts. So much better than the "failure resume" that was a thing a few years ago, which often looked like a thinly veiled brag.
- vcavallo 9y agoThanks, I’m glad you appreacite it. Warms my heart :)
- oldboyFX 9y agoI absolutely adore this. Watch out for the trolls though — they're coming.
- vcavallo 9y agoThanks! and yea, they’re already here... it’s good though, inspires me to think of a good lean way to keep abuse down without adding user accounts and stuff.
- craftyguy 9y agoLooks like the trolls have arrived: > Someone in the Presidency Of The United States Of America field for 12 months still can't tell you what the emoluments clause is . I mean, the troll is not wrong, but it definitely takes away some of the charm that this website (briefly) had.
- vcavallo 9y agoManual moderation is _fun_... I'm leaving anything but explicitly elicit stuff for now.
- nmca 9y agoThis is good work. Keep it up.
- vcavallo 9y agoThanks for the encouragement. Will do. And feel free to add comments on the github repo if you have ideas
- dejawu 9y ago"Someone in the Strawberry field for 10 months still can't forever." I love this. Thank you whoever sent that in
- craftyguy 9y agoI... don't get it. :( e: Oh, a beatles reference. Ok.
- vcavallo 9y agoI believe it's a Beatles reference. Strawberry Fields forever
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pmtarantino 9y agoA reference to The Beatles song.
- voltooid 9y agoIn the getting references business for 31 years. Still not getting references.
- kornish 9y agoAlso a great one: "Someone in the Out field for 36 months still can't catch a fly ball reliably"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amelius 9y agoPerhaps you can add a comments section below every post (?)
- drewrv 9y agoIt always reassures me that even Albert Einstein appeared to suffer from impostor syndrome. “the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” Source of the quote is here, about three quarters of the way down: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/time-bandits-2 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/28/time-bandits-2
- enraged_camel 9y agoDid he actually suffer from imposter syndrome, or was he being humorously humble?
- justboxing 9y agoYeah I think it's the latter.
- scroy 9y agoDon't be so sure. Einstein, in spite of all his achievements, was human. He made mistakes and misunderstood some things. Overall he understood physics more deeply that any of his time, but from his point of view maybe it came so naturally that he never felt he had totally "earned" his recognition. That said, he was known for humility, but that doesn't mean it was disingenuous. Isn't that the point of "impostor syndrome"? No matter where you stand, your measurement of your ability is subjective to whatever standards you personally hold, which may be different from an objective assessment? And maybe there is no true objectivity? Maybe it's all... relative?
- Siphwho 9y agoEinstein already made his most significant contributions by age 26 and spent the rest of his life arguing against quantum theory, the dominant school of the 20th century. Most modern physicists regard the latter portion of his life a waste in way of contributions.
- tw1010 9y agoHm... "Someone in the Computer Science field for 2 months still can't solve the halting problem."
- vcavallo 9y agoSome of the most ambitious among us suffer from this syndrome XD We added a twitter account now https://twitter.com/impostor_roster https://twitter.com/impostor_roster so feel free to comment on posts there!
- nol13 9y agoi still can't.. get past the google captcha to post my reply
- vcavallo 9y agoHm... is it just because their captcha is hard, or does it seem broken? if it seems broken submit a github issue or contact at the twitter link on the site
- nol13 9y agogonna guess just hard, but after the first 2 or 3 screens i just said fsck it. does it intentionally try to cut tiny bits of the edge off each 'correct' frame to get good training data? i did try the audio too though and had no idea what it was saying.
- yellowapple 9y ago"Someone in the Devops field for 60 months still can't explain what devops is." Can anyone explain what devops is? It's always struck me as being a meaningless buzzword.
- RingwormOne 9y agoIt's maintaining all the infrastructure required to manage a large dev team.
- dionian 9y agopretty much, its the new "Agile"... and people use the term often have no idea what it means. to me 'devops' a focus on automated deployment (in prod as in dev) and integrating prod. operations teams more closely with the development silo
- sitkack 9y agoPortmanteau of developer + operations, where infrastructure and application life cycle are coded using engineering best practices in a way that is repeatable and debuggable. Someone in devops will know tools such as Chef, Puppet, Virtualization, Containerization, Load Balancers, Network and Application Firewalls, IAM. Basically all the stuff that supports running an application. Application and System level cross cutting concerns. Dont pretend you couldn't give the same answer, imposter.
- jschwartzi 9y agoYou should allow hyphens and dashes in the inability field. There are words that I would like to hyphenate but which I can't.
- vcavallo 9y agoThis was a quick and dirty way to prevent abuse. will reinstate when I'm not panicking :)
- jasonmp85 9y agoI feel this warrants an entry.
- vcavallo 9y agoI'll add it http://www.impostorroster.com/post/sanitize-fields-thoughtfully-without-clobbering-all-punctuation http://www.impostorroster.com/post/sanitize-fields-thoughtfu...
- bigiain 9y agoApologies for being "that guy" in the skriptkiddie field who still can't write an xss<script>alert(1)</script>
- adamkiss 9y agoSomeone in the inability field for 20 minutes still can't hyphenate.
- vcavallo 9y agoI hope this speech pattern becomes a meme
- KerrickStaley 9y agoYou need to allow special characters in the inability field. My field was "Python" and my entry was "I still can't remember the argument order for json.dump()", but it gave the error "Inability Only letters, numbers and spaces allowed for inability field".
- vcavallo 9y agoAgreed. I did that as a simple way to prevent abuse. I'll have bring back special characters.
- js2 9y agoHere’s how I remember: dumps() takes no file-like argument, thus for dump() and dumps() to be consistent, the object to dump() must come first.
- amelius 9y agoThat argument would make as much sense if you replaced first by last.
- js2 9y agoOptional arguments are almost always trailing arguments: dumps(obj) dump(obj, fp) Might be implemented (in a Pythonic way) by the same function: fn(obj, fp=None): ... Another way to think about it is that you're dumping from obj to fp. The thing I always get backwards is C's memcpy(dst, src, len) which I've always thought has its first two arguments in the wrong order.
- zamalek 9y agoDoes the definition of imposter syndrome include the awareness that one should feel better about one's accomplishments? It seems ironic to self-diagnose imposter syndrome because that is internalizing your accomplishments - which is the precise antithesis of the Wikipedia definition: > individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments [and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud".] I've made a lot of progress since I realized that I potentially do not have imposter syndrome and instead have self-esteem problems.
- dfinninger 9y agoI don't know. I mean, rationally, I understand my accomplishments, and register when people compliment me. But I used to have a hard time internalizing that. It didn't feel like it was really me doing it on an emotional level... If that makes sense. Especially earlier in my career I'd attribute nearly everything to luck. Finishing that project on schedule, getting good marks on an annual review... It made leaving my first job hard because I thought I'd caught lightning in a bottle. But with each transition I was still getting good marks from managers and peers, finishing projects on schedule, etc. I began to accept that I wasn't a fraud who got lucky and would blow it one day. Even though all along I was able to rationally deduce it, it didn't feel intrinsic. Is that imposter's syndrome?
- trigoman 9y agoI’ve always wondered this same point. Not trying to be disrespectful to people who feel this way. But yeah idk, sometimes it feels like the term is thrown around too loosely. Anyway, irrelevant to conversation.
- mejari 9y ago>Does the definition of imposter syndrome include the awareness that one should feel better about one's accomplishments? Knowing how you should rationally feel and actually feeling that way are two completely different things.
- RandomInteger4 9y agoImpostor syndrome is mostly marked by the feeling of being a fraud which can run in parallel to feelings of "I know I'm smart, but I feel so dumb compared to everyone else." It's a constant self-doubt in spite of knowledge of what one is capable of; self doubt that one should be in a particular position, because while one knows what they're capable of, they think they should be capable of more when comparing oneself to one's peers. One doesn't need accomplishments to feel like an impostor and a lack of notable accomplishments doesn't mean that one shouldn't be in a particular position.
- ggm 9y agoWhen did we stop calling it "the peter principle" ?
- seattle_spring 9y agoWe didn't. The Peter Principle refers to a completely different phenomenon-- "Rise to the level of your own incompetence."
- ggm 9y agoWhat do people who rise above their own incompetence feel if not imposter syndrome?
- icebraining 9y agoImpostor syndrome means the person feels incompetent despite not being. If one is actually incompetent, then feeling like so is just having an accurate perception :) Plus, I'd say many don't even realize they're incompetent.
- kasey_junk 9y agoWhere is the Dunning-Kruger registry? Cause I know exactly what that should look like.
- mikekchar 9y agoJust looking at the software entries and when I see "still can't X effectively" I'm left thinking, "And neither can anyone else". One of the most interesting things I've discovered as I've gotten older is that I sometimes have a great success and then I think, "Awesome! This is the way to do it!" Then I try to duplicate that success and... it doesn't work. Now I'm left wondering whether my previous success was because of my actions or in spite of my actions (or not related at all). So frequently we read from people who are really good at promoting themselves and they say "This is the new super sauce!" They really are convinced themselves, but that's mostly overconfidence. It's worse when the thing they discover makes tons of sense, but doesn't really work the way you might imagine it would. It's an exciting time to be a programmer because there is still so much to discover. It's also a stressful time because everyone sucks badly at this stuff. Those who think they've got it figured out usually (in my experience) have either very low expectations or very poor observations skills ;-)
- bonniemuffin 9y agoWe need a Dunning-Kruger roster, but I'm not sure how people would realize they belong on it.
- mikekchar 9y agoYou've got it backwards. Try to name someone who shouldn't be on it. Being overconfident because you lack understanding/experience is just another word for "young".
- opportune 9y agoSometimes I wonder if the current state of software/programming will, in the future, be seen similarly to cuneiform or hieroglyphics, in the sense of it being an archaic, overly complicated form of expression needlessly reserved to specialists. Coding might be something everybody is required to know in the future, like reading or writing are now. What I envision happening is that whatever become the popular languages will sacrifice similarity (in the sense that even across functional/imperative/OOP/etc families, languages are in general low-level/explicit enough that coding in them is similar) in favor of a highly opinionated programming style designed to make it easier to program in. For example, imagine a language and IDE designed in tandem to compliment each other. You could incorporate all kinds of visual models into the design of the code, and actually make it easy/automatic to include things like the standard library, which you could make very large. The language could require such a high amount of structure that once you learned it to a reasonable extent, there would only rarely be a need to look up how to do something completely new. If kids learned how to use things analogous to e.g. python/matplotlib instead of excel, or jupyter notebooks for science reports / presentations, just imagine how much more productive we could be as a society. I'm happy knowing that even if we suck now, we can perhaps live to see a future where we don't suck. I just hope it's soon
- tw1010 9y agoToo bad the site just reduced to jokes and spam after it was posted on HN.
- Camillo 9y agoI suspect that "impostor syndrome" is just what many people feel when the comforting illusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect starts to fall apart.
- icebraining 9y agoActually, the tests made by Dunning and Kruger that led to the coining of that "effect" also showed that competent people tended to rank themselves below their actual level - exactly as described by the Impostor Syndrome.
- 2_listerine_pls 9y agoImpostor Impostor Syndrome: pretending to have impostor syndrome as a self-serving justification.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Gigablah 9y agoImposter Imposter Syndrome Fallacy Fallacy?
- stareatgoats 9y agoYes, the site title is misleading (imposterous one might say ...). Fun idea nonetheless.
- brailsafe 9y ago"Someone in the White Girl field for 240 months still can't even." Love it.
- smcl 9y agoThis is a serious issue and I'm really glad someone's making an attempt to make people realise it's not uncommon. I am slightly ashamed to admit however that I completely lost it at "Someone in the Roller Coaster field for 13 months still can't get off mr bones wild ride.". Context: https://imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl https://imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl
- vcavallo 9y agohaha yep, as the creator of this site I'm now trying to figure out the best way to keep the fun stuff while also keeping the site helpful. for about 20 minutes at the beginning of the HN traffic there was a beautiful moment of 100% real posts and supportive comments here. and then...
- smcl 9y agoCool, good job all the same! When I looked it was still a healthy mix of fun and serious :-)
- jmkni 9y agoI find that a lot of people who say they suffer from imposter syndrome are really just humble-bragging. They 100% know that they are good, but it's socially better to show false modesty.
- agumonkey 9y agoI only feel an imposter when people ask me how much I want to be paid.
- sitkack 9y agoI have this nagging feeling that my imposter syndrome is forced, fake, that I really am an imposter, other syndrome suffers have it, I don't.
- vcavallo 9y agoAdd it! "Someone in the Impostor field for X months still can't accept that other people feel the same way" XD
- bob_theslob646 9y agoYou should make a " you are not alone" voting button instead of comments
- vcavallo 9y agoI'm thinking of doing both. Definitely needs a voting feature.