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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 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.