http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
They provide a citation for this, but here it is again (definitely worth going straight to the source rather than taking the one-line summary):
http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/-Langford.pdf
"Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Lang- ford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differ- ences in impostor feelings, suggesting that males in these populations are just as likely as females to have low expectations of success and to make attributions to non-ability related factors."
I would be inclined to think this syndrome is higher among programmers, because we don't have as clearly defined an education system as something like medicine. But thing is, I've known (yes, male) physicians who never felt confident, felt like they were faking it, even though they had gone to top medical schools and residencies in their specialty. So maybe it's best not to assume our own experience are unique and don't happen to other people.
Towards the end of the paper, it says that men with IS are much more likely to take risks, so either women with IS are more affected by it or that view society has on their capabilities - that is mentioned at the beginning of the paper - actually does come into play here.
"When Beard (1990) compared the PRF traits associated with impostor feelings in men and women, he found differing patterns which suggest that, though both male and female impostors are high in defendence and untrusting of others, they may respond differently to this perception of threat from others in achievement situations. For females, impostor, feelings had low correlations with impulsivity and need for change, consistent with the usual description of impostors as cautious and unlikely to engage in risk-taking. For males, on the other hand, impostor feelings were associated with high impulsivity and a strong need for change, as well as a low need for order. Beard (1990) speculated that, instead of dealing with their sense of inadequacy in the withdrawing style typical of females impostors, male impostors may tend to compensate by pushing themselves in a frenetic manner in order to prove their competency."
Everybody can feel like an impostor when objectively competent; it could have been your parents or your older brother who primed you to think that any success you have comes from faking it, but that's not the same as saying that sex or race has "absolutely nothing" to do with it.
Of course, various "positive discrimination" programs won't help this too, since once one belongs to a group which such a program targets, one has yet another - in this case, externally validated - cause to doubt if one's achievements are of one's own merit or were just bestowed by somebody else due to the fact of belonging to the targeted identity group. In this case, if the identity group is gender- or race-specific, of course this component is very prominent.
Note that there are plenty of things one can do to fight structural sexism besides positive discrimination, so picking that out of the blue to discuss is a bit of red herring.
From what I read, I might go as far as saying we have some reason to think that impostor syndrome might be equally prevalent in men and women in tech. On the other hand, if research found the opposite, I could come up with a half-dozen reasons why that wouldn't be surprising.
And I didn't see anything related to impact. It could well be that in tech men and women experience it with the same frequency, but it has more impact for women (or other people easily perceived as outsiders).
Certainly, the author addresses "girls learning how to code" specifically because her intended audience, on a website named "Lady Coders" is women who are interested in coding.
http://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/-Langford.pdf
"Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Lang- ford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differ- ences in impostor feelings, suggesting that males in these populations are just as likely as females to have low expectations of success and to make attributions to non-ability related factors."
Furthermore:
"in male-dominated fields men receive praise and validation much more easily than women do"
Do you have anything to back this up?
Finally, anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal.
> "women in tech are not taken seriously until after they have become successful"
I see men dealing with the same thing. They aren't taken seriously until they accomplish something (success being defined as accomplishing something).
I'm not saying you are wrong, mind you. You just haven't shown that you are right.
Neither are men, so I don't really see what you are getting at.
I was getting lunch with a female coworker/friend last week and we ended up talking about this very topic. We work for a software company and she's in sales. She recounted that back when she first started, other salespeople treated her like crap and blamed her for things that weren't her fault. Even when she exceeded her daily or weekly goals, she didn't receive any praise. Whereas the male salespeople who started around the same time as her were getting rewarded for performing half as well. It was only after she dominated the quarterly metrics over and over that people started to pay her any attention. Nowadays she's very highly regarded, but had to work extra hard to get that.
More importantly, though I agree that women have to fight harder for recognition in many fields, there is no evidence that this means they are more subject to impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is an internal thing, not something somebody else tells you to have.
That doesn't sound right. Given that pretty much everybody in certain fields are men, that would imply anybody there is taken seriously. But it seems to be obviously wrong - no one would just accept just any guy coming from the street as a master in any domain just because he's male. If somebody pretends to be a serious practitioner of the field, he would never be accepted as such without demonstrating some proof. I can come in and say, e.g., "I am a seasoned game developer", but people would immediately as "nice, which games did you develop?", not say "are you male? oh, then we believe you".
>>>> how their male counterparts are always praised by their peers and superiors for minor accomplishments
Being praised for minor accomplishments does not actually mean one is taken seriously - children are often praised for the smallest of accomplishments, but treating one like a child is exactly the opposite of taking seriously.
Based on everything I have ever seen in my life, you are either completely off-base or overstating your case so wildly it's almost unrecognizable. If this were true, I could walk into any company around here that is hiring, tell them I'd like the job and instantly land it without so much as an interview because I'm white and male and thus "assumed to be competent." That is very much not the case. I have to prove competence first.
It sounds as though you suggesting that these claims are factual, is that the case? I can find no evidence to support them, and evidence that indicates you are incorrect (men are equally likely to have imposter syndrome, if they got over it faster you wouldn't see equal numbers).
Looks like you still seem to be suffering from said syndrome :)
I'm not sure I agree with the OP on this: > So to all the girls learning how to code, and not sure where you stand: screw it, and just call yourself a developer already.
Replace "girls" with "people" for now (again, I'm not saying gender is irrelevant, I'm just focusing on a tangent for now)...I know there is virtually no concept of "licensing" for the fields of "developer" or "hacker" in the way lawyers and doctors have it (i.e. you can't call yourself a lawyer just because you're reading case law for fun)...and that's a good thing. But there's something in me that wants to say, "Well, you have to have built something, and watched it either succeed or fail". It doesn't have to be something big. It just has to be something you invested your time in and that you put out there because you thought the world might be interested...at that point, even with a small project, you know what it's like to "ship" and be invested.
To me, that's the difference between learning to code and calling yourself a developer.
If I were to try learning guitar, does that make me a musician? If I read the works of George Carlin and think of one-liners of my own during the day, does that make me a comedian? I would argue 'no'. But once you practice and refined yourself to the point that you book a gig, or even do an open mic, then the labels of "musician" and "comedian" seem more applicable.
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OK, now for me to be really catty: Why does any modern blog (this is not the OP's fault, obviously), in this day and age, think it acceptable to use 13px as the body font for articles? Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
As for the developer argument, the problem is that there is no hard line. How big of a project must one complete before they're a developer? You said even a small one, but Hello World is a small "project" and certainly isn't enough.
I completely agree that there is a difference between learning to code and calling yourself a developer. One problem here is that the industry uses developer, coder, and programmer interchangeably, although programmer seems to be currently falling out of favor. (I was once at a party where someone thought that I meant I was a "party programmer" or something.) Obviously they don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of like arguing over the difference between a geek and a nerd at this point.
An experience like that really affects one's coding habits and makes them structure things in a more future-proof way: things like having loggable errors, even basic usability sense cannot realistically come from anywhere but hearing real user reports, going through the most basic deployment process, finding an issue on a live system.
In addition, certain naive over-engineering impulses get tempered by real shipping experience - because YAGNI is honed as well.
It's been described that anyone creative/constructive plays both a "writer/implementer" role and an "editor" role (using a book analogy here). Writing code is what we learn in school - but editing and directing and culling that output is something that takes real exposure to user problems to get better at.
One other metric is letters per line...guidelines recommend roughly 70 to 80 characters, because as lines get wider, it's harder to track which line you were on when your eyes go from the end to the beginning of the next line. It looks like your site is at around 100 characters despite it not having an extremely wide article body size.
Anyway, just my rant...this post on typography I've found to be useful: http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/typographic-choices/
As for what kind of project makes a developer, well, that's definitely open for discussion. I have no idea, but was just looking for a litmus test beyond just learning or being interested in code.
Very rarely will you hear an attorney/lawyer so tongue and cheek refer to themselves as a such, more generally they will reference "I practice law". I know the term is used for Doctors as well, "practicing medicine". The idea is the medical and legal professions and their standards are constantly changing, but the professionals are constantly continuing their education of the profession as well as incorporating the latest advances/techniques. If a CS student described what they do as the "practice of coding" instead of describing themselves as a coder/hacker/developer I think it would be a clear and professional description.
However, I see your point unlike a "practicing" doctor or lawyer, whom you know is licensed from the very term, "there is virtually no concept of "licensing" for the fields of "developer" or "hacker" in the way lawyers and doctors have it". I do not know how practical this is, but perhaps there should be licensing for various programming languages like MS has certificates for MSCE, after all lawyers did not always have to go to law school to become members of state bars and in fact some of the best US Supreme Court Justices, and most well written, never went to law school - nevertheless bar requirements evolved to raise the standards of the profession.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_profession...
Edit: My point is I can see that being a source of self doubt which men might experience less of in a male dominant environment. So I can see this being tough to overcome for a woman surrounded by men.
(Not that I view myself as a woman in tech. I run a few websites. I do some freelance writing. I know a smidgeon of html and css. I have a certificate in GIS. But I am a former homemaker who paid insurance claims for about five years. My self image is not "woman in tech." I really do not know what professional label would currently fit me. It is quite irksome at times, though I suppose there is no need to drone on further about that detail.)
There are times when I am new to a group, that I will be constantly told how very valuable to the group I am, how awesome I am, how happy they are to have me, etc; often before I've been in the office for an hour or written a line of code.
After this sort of thing, I tend to be suspicious of praise from that group of people. Do they actually mean it? Did they even look at my code?
As a man, it's hard to deliver praise to women who totally deserve it because of the worry that "she might just think I'm hitting on her" or "she might think I'm saying it out of pity".
Do you have suggestions for how I might give genuine praise that doesn't get misinterpreted as either of those?
What I have appreciated is when men in positions of power have taken action to genuinely back my work. When I worked at a big company, I managed to impress one of the top three people in the department. I had an entry level job. We barely interacted, but his interaction with me spoke volumes and had I stayed at the company I strongly suspect that would have eventually led to something professionally.
I won a departmental award for improving a reference source that was widely used. It was announced at a big meeting that my version of the reference material would be made available via intranet. Months went by and nothing happened. I began asking around and hitting one dead end after another. After much frustration and run around, I ran into this departmental head in the hallway. I looked his way and he realized I wanted to talk to him. He stopped and came to me and graciously gave me a moment of his time. It was clear to me it was a mark of personal respect. Then he told me to email him the question.
I was only hoping he would give me an idea of who else to ask. Instead, he pushed it through personally and it finally went up on the intranet a few days later. I realized after the fact that I made a lot of ignorant, unthinking social gaffs in the process, which he covered over smoothly. I made sure he got a thank you note from both me and a supervisor who ended up being involved (turns out she wrote the reference and unofficially updated it and was finally getting recognition because of my award). I made sure it came from the two of us so there would be zero suggestion that this was "personal." I did not want there to be any raised eyebrows over the incident because it was clear to me I had basically gotten a personal favor from on high. I did not want anyone to take any notice of that fact.
I knew other men at the company in positions of power. One, in another department, asked me on a date. Another, again in another department, behaved in a way which I interpretted as a mild form of sexual harrassment -- he was attracted but I think married. He looked for excuses to be "collegially affectionate" that struck me as motivated by attraction and carefully covered as "not sexual, honest!" No other man did anything of professional value for me. I valued that small act of respect and of lending me his professional backing far more than any praise he could have given me. I find that being taken seriously by a man and engaged like that in a meaningful way is much harder to come by than sweet words, which are often essentially empty.
So on the one hand, male engineers are creating a hostile environment by not recognizing the achievements of female colleagues (the 'she just got hired because they wanted a woman' phenomenon) but now male engineers are creating a hostile environment by recognizing the achievements of female engineers because of the inherit biases of the engineer receiving the praise.
I think that sort of feeling is helped along when you are recognized by your peers. If you feel like you are "Just a person learning to code" but you think your friend is an awesome programmer, and one day you're working on a project together, and you realize that actually, you write better code faster than he does, or he compliments you, or you solve a problem he has been stuck on; eventually you start to realize the people you thought were pros are really not any different than you.
But if you never get that feedback, or if when you do get that feedback you feel like you are an exception to the group, it's harder to shed that yoke. If you go to girl friends, who have no experience with CS and they tell you "wow, you're really smart, I could never program." that's pretty meaningless. If you're in a club where you're the only girl in a group of guys, and a guy says "You did a really great job" you mentally affix "... for a girl" to the end, or you wonder about his sincerity.
As more women take CS, and as more communities like the blog above develop, I think there will be more opportunities for women to find that confidence.
More importantly, in male-dominated fields men receive praise and validation much more easily than women do, which makes it easier for them to get over their impostor syndrome. For women the situation is quite different. I work for a private software company and our owner and CEO is female. She once explained it like this: women in tech are not taken seriously until after they have become successful.
In my experience, lots of girls in CS feel this way. I convinced my ex girlfriend to major in computer science. She didn't think she could do it because she had never programmed or anything before college. I told her that it didn't matter, and that she had in fact programmed before. She used to love making myspace layouts.
As she neared graduation, she was constantly telling me how she felt like she couldn't do it. That she was faking her way through all of her classes and that if anyone actually hired her she would be a miserable failure. Honestly, a lot of that feeling was probably my fault. I was a few years older and already out of college. The amount of help I gave her on assignments would probably be considered cheating at most universities. I always tried to make sure she understood what was happening though. So she really felt like a fraud.
She had an internship writing code though, and even got a few raises while she was working there. I knew her coworkers and they never even hinted that she didn't know what she was doing. I just tried to keep encouraging her and telling her she knew what she was doing (even though I had doubts)
So what happened? She's a developer at Amazon now. As far as I know, she's doing quite well.
I'm a girl doing a CS degree and also often think that the amount of help I get from my boyfriend (who has graduated by now) borders on cheating which really makes me feel miserable from time to time, and constantly having someone next to you who you know can complete any task you have with so much less effort doesn't help a lot either.
Other times, however, I acknowledge that as long as he isn't plainly handing the solutions over to me (which he never does) but just kind of acts as my rubber duck, all that can really be said is that it's just a fortunate situation where you constantly have someone to bounce ideas off of. It's also a question of not becoming dependent of that person -- at first I felt that he literally always knew the answer to whatever I was struggling with, but by now I've realised that it's simply about the ability to think out loud and make conclusions as you go along, and I know that I have all the potential to do that on my own as well.
I guess it's kind of what the article is saying as well -- if you're used to someone being better than you and kind of like a mentor, it's difficult to adjust to a situation where you might just have caught up with them in terms of skill and expertise.
It takes time to become aware of what you know, and to know what you don't know. That's why true craftsmen take thousands of hours to master their craft. It's also why we build procedures and process -- it allows people with limited mastery to keep things going.
My first day as a professional full time IT person was a DBA role about 3 days after my college graduation. The guy who hired me had left for another job, one person was on vacation, and the other was out sick due to a car accident. I got my HR paperwork done, found my cube, and someone dropped by to say "Oh, you're the new DBA, good. The system is down."
Did I know what I was doing? Hell no. But we got an SA from another office on the phone and some helpdesk techs together, stepped through it, got things working and got things resolved in a few hours. The next time it happened, we restored service in about 15 minutes and found the root cause.
The point is, you eventually know what you are doing. But you have to do stuff first.
The chicken-and-egg situation with job experience and employability makes it inevitable that you will be in positions where you 'don't know what you're doing'. But if you have the determination to seek out answers and fill the gaps in your knowledge, you'll become that expert you think you aren't.
1. Look back rather than forward. Consider where you were even just 2-3 years ago. How much more you know now about X,Y,Z. The next goal will always stretch out in front of you. When looking forward so you'll never measure up to 'future you'. 'Past you' is a much easier comparison.
2. Look down rather than up. Consider how much you know about your domain. A Stanford CS student is probably in the top 0.0001% of people with CS knowledge. Don't compare yourself to the small number of people ahead of you, think of all the people who are behind.
3. Examine your track record. Remind yourself of all the challenges you've overcome, the hard problems you've solved. Think of how rarely (if ever) you've failed when the chips were down. Even if you can't solve [current problem X] right now, be confident that you will solve it.
tl;dr Even if you're the slowest runner in the marathon, you can still run a marathon.
'Imposter Syndrome' is my life right now, but I kinda love it.
It takes reading other peoples code to realize plenty of poor code has shipped and generated revenue. Yours may not be so bad.
Now, you can't force people to ask you questions (although you can avoid discouraging it), but you can ask more questions. Even if you're stubbornly certain you can find the answer to your question if you only dig into the poorly documented codebase for another 45 minutes, occasionally giving up and asking one of your coworkers can (a) save you time, (b) maybe make them feel less like an impostor, and (c) make you more approachable so they'll come to you for help.
I don't think I ever experienced outright sexism, but the group dynamic of all males often had to try adapt to be less abrupt/rude/direct, which was difficult for me to manage. And if you're going to post that I should have been the one adapting (and I was, in every way) - you don't get this post. It frustrates me to see many males posting here that this "doesn't exist". It's something you can't see or experience until you've been through it.
That's the best advice to anyone: never stop learning. Working hard isn't always fun, but it's - in my opinion - the best way to succeed.
The only place where I see this is an issue is if one decides that himself or herself is worse than other people and loses self-confidence. However, for people with real success and accomplishments I just really don't see this happening. They may deem their success to be lucky, but if they are aware that it was still a success, they will continue to try harder to make it 'not luck' the next time. Dismissing at the same time the false notion that he or she did not achieve.
I would even go as far to call out that Imposter Syndrome exists mostly among perfectionists. They'll get this sort of feeling whenever they sense that someone else is better than them at one particular thing. Internally they try to achieve in all aspects of life. This might not necessarily be a good mental state since it diverges one's attention depending on the current social context one is in. However with a correct mindset then one should be able to utilize this trait to his or her advantage. The idea is to know there are things to learn, but not that I am worse than others.
Therefore I know I have the 'Imposter Syndrome'. However I don't fight it, I use it.
What does the HN community think about that? Would you respond to career questions by answering, "I practice computer coding"? As a non-tech it sounds professional and badass.
Most of it is not directly related (still worth watching!), but at about 15:42 in she gives her personal anecdote of impostor syndrome and "faking it til you make it". Which, incidentally, I think applies well to entrepreneurs.
I think one important factor to feeling like you're an impostor who doesn't belong is being among others who are smarter and more experienced than you.
