17 ms·

Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

349 points by leeny 8y ago

cyberpunk0 8y ago
Why drag gender into everything?
microcolonel 8y ago
> the key differentiator was experience Also, incidentally, a great predictor of compensation. This is a major part of why people are often disappointed with the outcome of dumb, univariate analyses.
rhombocombus 8y ago
I frequently wonder if my impostor syndrome was acquired in graduate school, or if it's an artifact of working at a job that is primarily intellectually driven. I didn't experience it until grad school, but I certainly still get it, not just in tech interviews, but in my regular programmer/tech lead job as well (making proposals, submitting high level features, etc.). I manage it fairly effectively at this point because I know what it is and how it feels, but it hasn't gone away and I doubt it ever will.
- lsalvatore 8y ago
  For me, moving out of the corporate world and into startup territory has removed most of the anxiety of feeling like an imposter. When you can build and push major features of the product with little to no friction or stressful performance reviews, you can truly hone software as a craft. 95% of it is usually hammer and a nail, and the remaining 5% is a bottomless pit of version upgrades, new conventions, external libraries, changing requirements, performance bottlenecks, browser incompatibility, etc. No one should or can be an expert of these specific nuances, but you can learn to wrangle them all effectively at once.
thomasedwards 8y ago
“More experienced engineers are more accurate about their interview performance...” Dunning–Kruger effect returns again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- thwy12321 8y ago
  Dunning-Kruger shows up in some front page discussion almost once a day. What does that say about the "effect"?
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    Its a HN cliche. Like "strawman"
    - jesseb 8y ago
      It's not unique to HN, Reddit has been rampant with both (and more) for as along as I can remember.
  - dabockster 8y ago
    It's group think. Don't read into it too much.
- taeric 8y ago
  I'm curious, with much of the interview process focused in the "soft skills", how many experienced engineers are actually wrong on their actual performance? That is, they may be more accurate in how they did on the tasks, but do they understand how they impressed on the interviewers? Of course, some of this is a bit of a curve ball. Many people would love to think that the soft skills are not important. My personal take is it is much more nuanced. Easy to focus on the obvious outliers that are terrible at the social, but amazing at the technical. Think Feynman. Most of us are not in that ballpark, though.
  - sambroner 8y ago
akshayB 8y ago
One of the biggest factors I think affects the outcome of an interview are implicit bias in first few minutes. It can be related to gender, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality. This can heavily influence the interview process.
- rjplatte 8y ago
  I think first impressions are key, no matter what.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  well, this is well known to be true. and irrelevant to the topic at hand.
twoquestions 8y ago
It doesn't help that job ads are wanting "Top 3% only!" or "Only top 1% Ninja Rockstars need apply!". Kind of reminds me of the market for singers or concert pianists, you absolutely need to be the best, even imperceptibly worse makes you unemployable. Should those of us who aren't top 5%/didn't go to a top school just find another industry, one where sub-perfect work doesn't actively make other people's jobs harder?
- thwy12321 8y ago
  The trick is these companies arent hiring top 1% talent, they're hiring top 1% interviewing talent.
  - wil421 8y ago
    Do the 1% apply to jobs with such descriptions? I’m not in the 1% in my domain and I wouldn’t touch a job with those words or phrases in the description.
    - pmiller2 8y ago
      I would imagine the real top 1% (if there were a good way to quantify that) never “apply” anywhere.
      - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        Yeah, I can't image someone like John Carmack having to apply anywhere.
  - EddieRingle 8y ago
    The appropriate response is to ask for a top-1% salary, of course.
    - cynicalkane 8y ago
      Nowdays a senior role at FAANG will often pay a top 1% salary, and salary growth at these companies shows no signs of stopping.
taeric 8y ago
The practice interview point strikes me as odd. In large, because I have never done one. Do folks really typically do that many practice interviews? I don't even know how to study. I sometimes consider it, but have never spent more than an hour prepping for an interview. :( It worries me, because I know that interviewing is a skill. But are we not setting folks up to over index on that skill such that they have difficulty with actual job performance? If anyone knows any literature into that general topic, I'd be very interested in perusing it.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  Ideally, no professional should have to practice a skill that has such a low correlation with one's actual job duties as a software engineering interview. It's mostly cargo culting, IMO.
  - taeric 8y ago
    I fully agree with this. As an interviewer, though, I have no doubt that someone that has practiced interviews would do a better job with me than someone that hasn't. So, as is normal in life, I expect it is complicated.
- bytematic 8y ago
  Instead of literature go read some of the top posts at /r/cscareerquestions . Students are expected to put in tons of hours "grinding" study sessions for interviews. Recently there was a post about a new grad who felt he wasn't doing very well at his job because he spent to much time practicing for interviews
  - taeric 8y ago
    I was hoping for something a little rigorous on the data provenance. :(
  - driverdan 8y ago
    > Students are expected to put in tons of hours "grinding" study sessions for interviews. You should never study for interviews. If the company isn't asking questions relevant to the work or you can't answer those types of questions then it's best to not work there. General interview skills are different than studying CS problems.
esotericn 8y ago
Isn't this really just a fancy way of stating that (some) people tend to become anxious when put into a high pressure environment? The whole concept of 'impostor syndrome' seems to rely on unexplored assumptions, like the idea that it even matters whether you should be working at Google or not. I think that's the key to solving it. Realising that actually, most of us are just rolling through life trying to get by and be useful. The rest is fluff. If you're playing in a professional football team, you're a professional footballer.
bespoken 8y ago
> Impostor syndrome Does this refer to the company pretending they deserve better than you? I've seen enough incompetent people at companies declining good candidates because they are simply unable to recognise it. I've seen so many shitty companies pretending they are top tier, it's just the arrogance of power. Only once you're in you can see the flaws and mess it often actually is.
tombert 8y ago
As someone with no credentials or official training, and someone who also works at a big megacorporation as an engineer, imposter syndrome hits me fairly hard, especially during interviews. It's really hard to compete with the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing, and I'm usually interviewing for a job that has a strict requirement of a "bachelors in CS, Math or Physics, Masters preferred". I've managed to pull it off somehow, but I rarely go a day where I don't wonder if I really should have as good of a job as I do.
- jknz 8y ago
  Employers look for these degrees because in their experience this is a somewhat meaningful signal that let them filter applicants. But having someone at work for real for a few weeks give employers a way meaningful signal than any degrees on a resume. If your employer maintains their relationship with you, you are likely worth more than the degrees you mentioned--dont overthink it!
  - tombert 8y ago
    At some level I logically know this, and obviously if the employer didn't feel I was worth it they wouldn't hire me. Still, after dropping out, it was hard to avoid constant feelings of inferiority. Even though people obviously didn't mean it this way, I was interpreting every statement as having an implicit suffix of "and you're stupid because you dropped out". It took me years to realize that people really aren't that much of jerks, and a surprising few actually give a crap about you dropping out. I do think that, for engineering, a year of experience is worth just as much as a year in school if you are willing to spend evenings self-teaching. My interests tend to be a bit more academic (which don't appear to be willing to overlook a lack of a bachelors), and since there's not a single Math professor in the NYC area that will take me on as a PhD student without a degree (I think I might have emailed literally all of them), I've actually started back in school, so hopefully that'll kill the complex.
    - jknz 8y ago
      What kind of mathematics are you interested in? I do math in academia in the NYC area, feel free to email (profile).
kowdermeister 8y ago
I've gone through interviewing recently and it was a rather frustrating experience. I thought that the most challenging thing will be some tricky algo questions I don't use in real life or never heard of it. It turned out that the problem was to get to the tech interview at all by convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim. Didn't always work. It was mostly because they didn't care to assess my skills because I think my resume sucks: I couldn't provide any big or even local big names thus they probably went with someone who could actually namedrop. This was in Eastern Europe, to add some context. I finally got two offers, dropped the ongoing processes and accepted one, but before I had some dark days thanks to these negative experiences. My takeaway from this is that interviewing sucks, but one company will realize what you can do and happily accept you as-is. I was lucky that I was not forced to take a sub-par offer by giving it enough time.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim Yeah, I read about "impostor syndrome" on here, and maybe the people in question really are suffering from that, but I've never felt like an impostor: I know I'm good at this; I've been doing it successfully for three quarters of my life. Statistically speaking, I'm probably not the best that there ever was, but I do know that I'm at _least_ good enough to do a phenomenal job at whatever programming position I'm interviewing for. I personally suffer more from "I feel like you're just sitting up there on your high horse looking for any reason to reject me" syndrome.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  If you're in an EU country and can move, I strongly recommend Ireland. They're starved for people, I've never had an experience like that at any of my interviews.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jarjoura 8y ago
Of course it does, it's not a gender problem, who said it was? How many of you have heard your friends and colleagues tell you, "wow I'm so lucky I got through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again today." You shouldn't walk away from a good interview feeling like you nailed it. An interviewer should push you to your limits and the more you know, the more they should push. It doesn't mean you failed, it means you reached the limits they could push you in the time you had. If you're rejected from the role, most likely you didn't reach the bar they needed you to be at, or you failed at the behavioral parts. Or, the interviewers you had weren't properly calibrated, which isn't to say anything about you other than bad luck.
- wuunderbar 8y ago
  > "wow I'm so lucky I got through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again today." That's because most people wouldn't pass their interviews if you gave it to them again. Unfortunately a lot of interviews these days are passed by grinding on LeetCode (that's not to say your experience doesn't get displayed in other forms) and then forgetting about these patterns & problems after.
  - askar_yu 8y ago
    What makes you imply that those who grind on Leetcode then forget?
    - gaius 8y ago
      Because these skills are use-it-or-lose-it. They will be LRU'd out by the skills you will actually use every day. I guarantee at your next job you will not have to roll your own red-black tree from scratch...
    - ilikehurdles 8y ago
      I can confidently say that none of my technical interview practice has ever transferred to a useful skill in the job role, but I can confidently say it has helped me land jobs. Not using it definitely makes me forget it.
mo1ok 8y ago
Dang, I am so tired of hearing about imposter syndrome. I get it. It exists. Maybe I'm more comfortable knowing that there are lots of things I don't know, even as an experienced engineer? It seems like such endless studies and banter about a relatively minor thing that is (in my opinion) easily gotten over.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  You shouldn't assume something is no big deal just because it doesn't affect you personally.
  - mmirate 8y ago
    It is presumably a big deal to those whom it affects. But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? (And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)
    - jiveturkey 8y ago
      > But why is it a big deal to anyone else it’s not. what’s your point?
      - mmirate 8y ago
        I agree it isn't. The person I was replying to, implied it inherently is.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      > But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? It's not. Of course, neither is cancer. Impostor syndrome affects a lot of techies. That alone makes it plenty relevant to Hacker News. You are not the only reader of HN, and complaining about topical, relevant news because it doesn't interest you personally is in poor taste.
- 8y ago
user68858788 8y ago
When I was younger I was able to go into interviews with the mindset of, "it's their decision and it's okay if they don't think I'm a good fit." It made interviewing easy, and in a lot of cases even enjoyable. Unfortunately for reasons still unknown to me, I'm not able to get into that mindset anymore. Interviews are extremely stressful now. No amount of rationalizing will help.
- crispyporkbites 8y ago
  probably because you have bills, expectations, and reality hits hard when it wants to take a punch at you
  - user68858788 8y ago
    That's probably true. Another factor is that I have support roles on my resume, and now it's really hard to be given a chance at anything other than support. I had an easier time getting programmer interviews when I had no experience, but that's another topic.
Bucephalus355 8y ago
Worth noting that Scott Kaufman, psychologist at Columbia, has correlated narcissism with Impostor Syndrome for quite some time. Here is a pretty easy to read overview from last month’s Scientific American: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-narcissists-more-likely-to-experience-impostor-syndrome/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-nar...
akulbe 8y ago
I genuinely don't understand why there's any surprise here. Lack of confidence / fear / worry... it's a HUMAN trait. Not a gender-specific one. Of course, this would strike men just as hard as women. Why would there be any difference at all? On a related note... one of the best articles I've ever read on the subject... it's a Seth Godin blog post. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome/ https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome/
daenz 8y ago
It makes me thrilled to see that we're finally talking about data around gender issues, regardless of what that data actually says. It seems like we're finally getting over the taboo and we're mature enough to look at facts.
- leeny 8y ago
  If you liked this post, you might also like this one: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... TL;DR We made women sound like men and men sound like women in technical interviews and found that it didn't move the needle.
  - anon84598 8y ago
    This is interesting, but I feel like it isn't as thorough as I would like. Men and women speak differently in ways that can't be masked by voice modulation and I suspect that phrasing, choice of vocabulary, intonation etc. also play a role in how people are perceived. My hypothesis would be that men are more familiar with how men speak, so if a woman also spoke like that, they would see an improvement. I'm not saying my prediction would definitely be correct, but I think it is an obvious one to consider and this post didn't attempt to address it.
    - wetpaws 8y ago
      Did you just assume the way people speak is influenced by their gender?
      - wcarron 8y ago
        Is your comment satire?
        AckSyn 8y ago
        I'm going out on a limb here but I think they were serious in a way that's bad.
jshowa3 8y ago
I didn't see a link to the actual data. Be nice to see the sample size for women.
yarrel 8y ago
Can anecdotally confirm.
black-tea 8y ago
If everyone has impostor syndrome, does anyone have impostor syndrome?
ourcat 8y ago
Who on earth said it didn't?
jondubois 8y ago
If someone thinks that they may be an impostor, then they probably are. Firstly, it means that they think that our society is a meritocracy (or close to it); this shows that they lack life experience/wisdom. Once you realize how far society is from being a meritocracy, it's literally impossible to feel like an impostor. There are so many successful people who are idiots that even if you were an idiot yourself, you would still be within the norm; I.e. not an impostor. Another thing about people who have impostor syndrome is that it shows that they feel insecure about their intelligence and/or abilities. Insecurities are typically rooted in past experiences or traumas. Smart people often get positive reinforcement about their intelligence; they don't have traumas or insecurities when it comes to their intelligence.
- myxozoa 8y ago
  This almost reads as satire. There are so many assumptions here that are completely off base.... I would be described as an intelligent person by most anyone I know and yet I have very low self esteem, in fact many of the intelligent people I know are the same way. These kinds of issues can't be distilled that simply.
  - jondubois 8y ago
    Self esteem is not related to confidence. If you had very low self esteem and someone asked you what the result of 1 + 1 was, you would probably still be 100% confident that the answer is 2. If your emotions or self esteem gets in the way of your logical reasoning, then your reasoning skills were probably not that great to begin with.
g105b 8y ago
Anyone would think that men... are equal to... ... nah, doesn't seem to add up.
throw2016 8y ago
This just seems so much myth making and gratuitous glorification so people can feel special just getting a job. The famed difficulty of getting hired creates a sense of elitism and exclusiveness and perpetuates a culture of insecurity. This is very cult like, If people are indoctrinated to think that they are part of an elite group they will be devoted and would look at leaving as a step down. Cults are a great business model as the followers are very devoted. It suits the agenda of employers to construct this and target individuals who derive all sense of identity and self worth from their jobs and when employed will work their asses off in a constant reaffirmation of 'specialness' just to retain their sense of self worth. Very cult like.
dahart 8y ago
“women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men do, after a bad interview.” To me that means that imposter syndrome is striking women much harder than men, but that’s not what the headline was talking about. They’re defining imposter syndrome as whether someone is mis-estimating their own performance. Unfortunately, a lack of accuracy doesn’t necessarily demonstrate imposter syndrome, in fact imposter syndrome is defined as self-doubt in the face of evidence of competence. So, imposter syndrome wasn’t measured here at all. The data shows women estimate their competence as well as men, and perform as well as men, and then when there are any signs of trouble they bail seven times faster than men. To me that could very well be much greater levels of impostor syndrome, or it could be much lower confidence, but to actually measure it you’d have to actually ask questions about how people rate themselves against others, not measure how accurate their responses are.

349 points by leeny 8y ago

Why drag gender into everything?

> the key differentiator was experience Also, incidentally, a great predictor of compensation. This is a major part of why people are often disappointed with the outcome of dumb, univariate analyses.

rhombocombus 8y ago

I frequently wonder if my impostor syndrome was acquired in graduate school, or if it's an artifact of working at a job that is primarily intellectually driven. I didn't experience it until grad school, but I certainly still get it, not just in tech interviews, but in my regular programmer/tech lead job as well (making proposals, submitting high level features, etc.). I manage it fairly effectively at this point because I know what it is and how it feels, but it hasn't gone away and I doubt it ever will.

lsalvatore 8y ago
For me, moving out of the corporate world and into startup territory has removed most of the anxiety of feeling like an imposter. When you can build and push major features of the product with little to no friction or stressful performance reviews, you can truly hone software as a craft. 95% of it is usually hammer and a nail, and the remaining 5% is a bottomless pit of version upgrades, new conventions, external libraries, changing requirements, performance bottlenecks, browser incompatibility, etc. No one should or can be an expert of these specific nuances, but you can learn to wrangle them all effectively at once.

thomasedwards 8y ago

“More experienced engineers are more accurate about their interview performance...” Dunning–Kruger effect returns again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

thwy12321 8y ago
Dunning-Kruger shows up in some front page discussion almost once a day. What does that say about the "effect"?
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Its a HN cliche. Like "strawman"
  - jesseb 8y ago
    It's not unique to HN, Reddit has been rampant with both (and more) for as along as I can remember.
- dabockster 8y ago
  It's group think. Don't read into it too much.
taeric 8y ago
I'm curious, with much of the interview process focused in the "soft skills", how many experienced engineers are actually wrong on their actual performance? That is, they may be more accurate in how they did on the tasks, but do they understand how they impressed on the interviewers? Of course, some of this is a bit of a curve ball. Many people would love to think that the soft skills are not important. My personal take is it is much more nuanced. Easy to focus on the obvious outliers that are terrible at the social, but amazing at the technical. Think Feynman. Most of us are not in that ballpark, though.
- sambroner 8y ago

akshayB 8y ago

One of the biggest factors I think affects the outcome of an interview are implicit bias in first few minutes. It can be related to gender, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality. This can heavily influence the interview process.

rjplatte 8y ago
I think first impressions are key, no matter what.
jiveturkey 8y ago
well, this is well known to be true. and irrelevant to the topic at hand.

twoquestions 8y ago

It doesn't help that job ads are wanting "Top 3% only!" or "Only top 1% Ninja Rockstars need apply!". Kind of reminds me of the market for singers or concert pianists, you absolutely need to be the best, even imperceptibly worse makes you unemployable. Should those of us who aren't top 5%/didn't go to a top school just find another industry, one where sub-perfect work doesn't actively make other people's jobs harder?

thwy12321 8y ago
The trick is these companies arent hiring top 1% talent, they're hiring top 1% interviewing talent.
- wil421 8y ago
  Do the 1% apply to jobs with such descriptions? I’m not in the 1% in my domain and I wouldn’t touch a job with those words or phrases in the description.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    I would imagine the real top 1% (if there were a good way to quantify that) never “apply” anywhere.
    - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      Yeah, I can't image someone like John Carmack having to apply anywhere.
- EddieRingle 8y ago
  The appropriate response is to ask for a top-1% salary, of course.
  - cynicalkane 8y ago
    Nowdays a senior role at FAANG will often pay a top 1% salary, and salary growth at these companies shows no signs of stopping.

taeric 8y ago

The practice interview point strikes me as odd. In large, because I have never done one. Do folks really typically do that many practice interviews? I don't even know how to study. I sometimes consider it, but have never spent more than an hour prepping for an interview. :( It worries me, because I know that interviewing is a skill. But are we not setting folks up to over index on that skill such that they have difficulty with actual job performance? If anyone knows any literature into that general topic, I'd be very interested in perusing it.

pmiller2 8y ago
Ideally, no professional should have to practice a skill that has such a low correlation with one's actual job duties as a software engineering interview. It's mostly cargo culting, IMO.
- taeric 8y ago
  I fully agree with this. As an interviewer, though, I have no doubt that someone that has practiced interviews would do a better job with me than someone that hasn't. So, as is normal in life, I expect it is complicated.
bytematic 8y ago
Instead of literature go read some of the top posts at /r/cscareerquestions . Students are expected to put in tons of hours "grinding" study sessions for interviews. Recently there was a post about a new grad who felt he wasn't doing very well at his job because he spent to much time practicing for interviews
- taeric 8y ago
  I was hoping for something a little rigorous on the data provenance. :(
- driverdan 8y ago
  > Students are expected to put in tons of hours "grinding" study sessions for interviews. You should never study for interviews. If the company isn't asking questions relevant to the work or you can't answer those types of questions then it's best to not work there. General interview skills are different than studying CS problems.

esotericn 8y ago

Isn't this really just a fancy way of stating that (some) people tend to become anxious when put into a high pressure environment? The whole concept of 'impostor syndrome' seems to rely on unexplored assumptions, like the idea that it even matters whether you should be working at Google or not. I think that's the key to solving it. Realising that actually, most of us are just rolling through life trying to get by and be useful. The rest is fluff. If you're playing in a professional football team, you're a professional footballer.

bespoken 8y ago

> Impostor syndrome Does this refer to the company pretending they deserve better than you? I've seen enough incompetent people at companies declining good candidates because they are simply unable to recognise it. I've seen so many shitty companies pretending they are top tier, it's just the arrogance of power. Only once you're in you can see the flaws and mess it often actually is.

tombert 8y ago

As someone with no credentials or official training, and someone who also works at a big megacorporation as an engineer, imposter syndrome hits me fairly hard, especially during interviews. It's really hard to compete with the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing, and I'm usually interviewing for a job that has a strict requirement of a "bachelors in CS, Math or Physics, Masters preferred". I've managed to pull it off somehow, but I rarely go a day where I don't wonder if I really should have as good of a job as I do.

jknz 8y ago
Employers look for these degrees because in their experience this is a somewhat meaningful signal that let them filter applicants. But having someone at work for real for a few weeks give employers a way meaningful signal than any degrees on a resume. If your employer maintains their relationship with you, you are likely worth more than the degrees you mentioned--dont overthink it!
- tombert 8y ago
  At some level I logically know this, and obviously if the employer didn't feel I was worth it they wouldn't hire me. Still, after dropping out, it was hard to avoid constant feelings of inferiority. Even though people obviously didn't mean it this way, I was interpreting every statement as having an implicit suffix of "and you're stupid because you dropped out". It took me years to realize that people really aren't that much of jerks, and a surprising few actually give a crap about you dropping out. I do think that, for engineering, a year of experience is worth just as much as a year in school if you are willing to spend evenings self-teaching. My interests tend to be a bit more academic (which don't appear to be willing to overlook a lack of a bachelors), and since there's not a single Math professor in the NYC area that will take me on as a PhD student without a degree (I think I might have emailed literally all of them), I've actually started back in school, so hopefully that'll kill the complex.
  - jknz 8y ago
    What kind of mathematics are you interested in? I do math in academia in the NYC area, feel free to email (profile).

kowdermeister 8y ago

I've gone through interviewing recently and it was a rather frustrating experience. I thought that the most challenging thing will be some tricky algo questions I don't use in real life or never heard of it. It turned out that the problem was to get to the tech interview at all by convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim. Didn't always work. It was mostly because they didn't care to assess my skills because I think my resume sucks: I couldn't provide any big or even local big names thus they probably went with someone who could actually namedrop. This was in Eastern Europe, to add some context. I finally got two offers, dropped the ongoing processes and accepted one, but before I had some dark days thanks to these negative experiences. My takeaway from this is that interviewing sucks, but one company will realize what you can do and happily accept you as-is. I was lucky that I was not forced to take a sub-par offer by giving it enough time.

commandlinefan 8y ago
> convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim Yeah, I read about "impostor syndrome" on here, and maybe the people in question really are suffering from that, but I've never felt like an impostor: I know I'm good at this; I've been doing it successfully for three quarters of my life. Statistically speaking, I'm probably not the best that there ever was, but I do know that I'm at _least_ good enough to do a phenomenal job at whatever programming position I'm interviewing for. I personally suffer more from "I feel like you're just sitting up there on your high horse looking for any reason to reject me" syndrome.
mdpopescu 8y ago
If you're in an EU country and can move, I strongly recommend Ireland. They're starved for people, I've never had an experience like that at any of my interviews.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jarjoura 8y ago

Of course it does, it's not a gender problem, who said it was? How many of you have heard your friends and colleagues tell you, "wow I'm so lucky I got through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again today." You shouldn't walk away from a good interview feeling like you nailed it. An interviewer should push you to your limits and the more you know, the more they should push. It doesn't mean you failed, it means you reached the limits they could push you in the time you had. If you're rejected from the role, most likely you didn't reach the bar they needed you to be at, or you failed at the behavioral parts. Or, the interviewers you had weren't properly calibrated, which isn't to say anything about you other than bad luck.

wuunderbar 8y ago
> "wow I'm so lucky I got through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again today." That's because most people wouldn't pass their interviews if you gave it to them again. Unfortunately a lot of interviews these days are passed by grinding on LeetCode (that's not to say your experience doesn't get displayed in other forms) and then forgetting about these patterns & problems after.
- askar_yu 8y ago
  What makes you imply that those who grind on Leetcode then forget?
  - gaius 8y ago
    Because these skills are use-it-or-lose-it. They will be LRU'd out by the skills you will actually use every day. I guarantee at your next job you will not have to roll your own red-black tree from scratch...
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    I can confidently say that none of my technical interview practice has ever transferred to a useful skill in the job role, but I can confidently say it has helped me land jobs. Not using it definitely makes me forget it.

mo1ok 8y ago

Dang, I am so tired of hearing about imposter syndrome. I get it. It exists. Maybe I'm more comfortable knowing that there are lots of things I don't know, even as an experienced engineer? It seems like such endless studies and banter about a relatively minor thing that is (in my opinion) easily gotten over.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
You shouldn't assume something is no big deal just because it doesn't affect you personally.
- mmirate 8y ago
  It is presumably a big deal to those whom it affects. But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? (And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    > But why is it a big deal to anyone else it’s not. what’s your point?
    - mmirate 8y ago
      I agree it isn't. The person I was replying to, implied it inherently is.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? It's not. Of course, neither is cancer. Impostor syndrome affects a lot of techies. That alone makes it plenty relevant to Hacker News. You are not the only reader of HN, and complaining about topical, relevant news because it doesn't interest you personally is in poor taste.
8y ago

user68858788 8y ago

When I was younger I was able to go into interviews with the mindset of, "it's their decision and it's okay if they don't think I'm a good fit." It made interviewing easy, and in a lot of cases even enjoyable. Unfortunately for reasons still unknown to me, I'm not able to get into that mindset anymore. Interviews are extremely stressful now. No amount of rationalizing will help.

crispyporkbites 8y ago
probably because you have bills, expectations, and reality hits hard when it wants to take a punch at you
- user68858788 8y ago
  That's probably true. Another factor is that I have support roles on my resume, and now it's really hard to be given a chance at anything other than support. I had an easier time getting programmer interviews when I had no experience, but that's another topic.

Bucephalus355 8y ago

Worth noting that Scott Kaufman, psychologist at Columbia, has correlated narcissism with Impostor Syndrome for quite some time. Here is a pretty easy to read overview from last month’s Scientific American: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-narcissists-more-likely-to-experience-impostor-syndrome/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-nar...

akulbe 8y ago

I genuinely don't understand why there's any surprise here. Lack of confidence / fear / worry... it's a HUMAN trait. Not a gender-specific one. Of course, this would strike men just as hard as women. Why would there be any difference at all? On a related note... one of the best articles I've ever read on the subject... it's a Seth Godin blog post. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome/ https://seths.blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome/

daenz 8y ago

It makes me thrilled to see that we're finally talking about data around gender issues, regardless of what that data actually says. It seems like we're finally getting over the taboo and we're mature enough to look at facts.

leeny 8y ago
If you liked this post, you might also like this one: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... TL;DR We made women sound like men and men sound like women in technical interviews and found that it didn't move the needle.
- anon84598 8y ago
  This is interesting, but I feel like it isn't as thorough as I would like. Men and women speak differently in ways that can't be masked by voice modulation and I suspect that phrasing, choice of vocabulary, intonation etc. also play a role in how people are perceived. My hypothesis would be that men are more familiar with how men speak, so if a woman also spoke like that, they would see an improvement. I'm not saying my prediction would definitely be correct, but I think it is an obvious one to consider and this post didn't attempt to address it.
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    Did you just assume the way people speak is influenced by their gender?
    - wcarron 8y ago
      Is your comment satire?
      - AckSyn 8y ago
        I'm going out on a limb here but I think they were serious in a way that's bad.

jshowa3 8y ago

I didn't see a link to the actual data. Be nice to see the sample size for women.

yarrel 8y ago

Can anecdotally confirm.

black-tea 8y ago

If everyone has impostor syndrome, does anyone have impostor syndrome?

ourcat 8y ago

Who on earth said it didn't?

jondubois 8y ago

If someone thinks that they may be an impostor, then they probably are. Firstly, it means that they think that our society is a meritocracy (or close to it); this shows that they lack life experience/wisdom. Once you realize how far society is from being a meritocracy, it's literally impossible to feel like an impostor. There are so many successful people who are idiots that even if you were an idiot yourself, you would still be within the norm; I.e. not an impostor. Another thing about people who have impostor syndrome is that it shows that they feel insecure about their intelligence and/or abilities. Insecurities are typically rooted in past experiences or traumas. Smart people often get positive reinforcement about their intelligence; they don't have traumas or insecurities when it comes to their intelligence.

myxozoa 8y ago
This almost reads as satire. There are so many assumptions here that are completely off base.... I would be described as an intelligent person by most anyone I know and yet I have very low self esteem, in fact many of the intelligent people I know are the same way. These kinds of issues can't be distilled that simply.
- jondubois 8y ago
  Self esteem is not related to confidence. If you had very low self esteem and someone asked you what the result of 1 + 1 was, you would probably still be 100% confident that the answer is 2. If your emotions or self esteem gets in the way of your logical reasoning, then your reasoning skills were probably not that great to begin with.

g105b 8y ago

Anyone would think that men... are equal to... ... nah, doesn't seem to add up.

throw2016 8y ago

This just seems so much myth making and gratuitous glorification so people can feel special just getting a job. The famed difficulty of getting hired creates a sense of elitism and exclusiveness and perpetuates a culture of insecurity. This is very cult like, If people are indoctrinated to think that they are part of an elite group they will be devoted and would look at leaving as a step down. Cults are a great business model as the followers are very devoted. It suits the agenda of employers to construct this and target individuals who derive all sense of identity and self worth from their jobs and when employed will work their asses off in a constant reaffirmation of 'specialness' just to retain their sense of self worth. Very cult like.

dahart 8y ago

“women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men do, after a bad interview.” To me that means that imposter syndrome is striking women much harder than men, but that’s not what the headline was talking about. They’re defining imposter syndrome as whether someone is mis-estimating their own performance. Unfortunately, a lack of accuracy doesn’t necessarily demonstrate imposter syndrome, in fact imposter syndrome is defined as self-doubt in the face of evidence of competence. So, imposter syndrome wasn’t measured here at all. The data shows women estimate their competence as well as men, and perform as well as men, and then when there are any signs of trouble they bail seven times faster than men. To me that could very well be much greater levels of impostor syndrome, or it could be much lower confidence, but to actually measure it you’d have to actually ask questions about how people rate themselves against others, not measure how accurate their responses are.