4 ms·

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor sy

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.

SCAQTony 3y ago
"It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." — Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)
blagie 3y ago
I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. 2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge. 3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better. 4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools. 5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same. Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it. Breaking conditioning is hard.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
  - googhopeful000 3y ago
    as someone who's going through the Google hiring pipeline right now (as a candidate), I just wanted to say thanks for these nice words of encouragement / rational thinking about all of this. the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough. thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
    - blagie 3y ago
      Hiring is a die roll. Here's a good model: - You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units - A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in. - There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units - This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz. The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model: - You have 100 people in a work force. - 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years. - Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months. Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in. This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
DesiLurker 3y ago
Hmm, I can definitely say I've seen a version of that at Indian IITs. all great students but most feel like imposters there. also the subtle thing is that the risk/reward calculus gets f-ed up, meaning, for all the students who have been at the top of their games wherever they came from now the rewards for significant incremental efforts were minuscule. So I have seen many disengage & get into 'enjoy life' mode.

SCAQTony 3y ago

"It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." — Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)

blagie 3y ago

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. 2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge. 3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better. 4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools. 5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same. Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it. Breaking conditioning is hard.

sanderjd 3y ago
> 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
- googhopeful000 3y ago
  as someone who's going through the Google hiring pipeline right now (as a candidate), I just wanted to say thanks for these nice words of encouragement / rational thinking about all of this. the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough. thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
  - blagie 3y ago
    Hiring is a die roll. Here's a good model: - You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units - A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in. - There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units - This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz. The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model: - You have 100 people in a work force. - 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years. - Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months. Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in. This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.

DesiLurker 3y ago

Hmm, I can definitely say I've seen a version of that at Indian IITs. all great students but most feel like imposters there. also the subtle thing is that the risk/reward calculus gets f-ed up, meaning, for all the students who have been at the top of their games wherever they came from now the rewards for significant incremental efforts were minuscule. So I have seen many disengage & get into 'enjoy life' mode.