[bpchaps]

Slight rant. This is currently a major problem for me that I'm not entirely sure how to handle still.

I'm young, never went to college, and my experience is entirely through work in the financial area (with side projects). In a lot of ways, I've fallen into the "Jack of all trades, master of none" spectrum. Give me any complex problem and I can generally solve it, even if I don't have experience with it. I have a very good track record and most previous bosses regard me very highly. My skills aren't entirely traditional, but they work pretty damn well.

That changed when I followed a senior colleague into a new position as a newly minted senior linux admin. As soon as I joined, I received an asinine amount of anger of nepotism or where suggestions are generally viewed as naive, then ignored. Two of those naive things were, "why does QA have root access? Why are the root ssh keys the same as prod and QA?" and "can we fix the DNS setup so that we don't need a CAB approval to run four root-owned scripts to push /etc/hosts to 95% of prod servers?". If it weren't that most of the environment isn't documented and makes our lives hell, I wouldn't bring these things up. On top of that, we're a large web company, so it's insane that these things are trivialized.

I'd like to get out of it, but at the same time, I feel like if I can get out of if, I can get out of most things. It's a complete brainfuck and killed most of my confidence at this place.

Imposter syndrome is difficult.

[HolyChao]

In regards to the Jack of all trades quote, the full thing is: "Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than a master of one."

[saganus]

What exactly is the brainfuck for you? I don't fully understand when you say "I'd like to get out of it, but at the same time, I feel like if I can get out of if, I can get out of most things".

What I mean is, as far as I understand the impostor syndrome happens when you are at a place that you feel you don't deserve (or that you aren't really up to the task/at the limit of your abilities).

In your case it seems the other way around. Your environment doesn't seem to be up to what you can achieve (by what you describe of course).

Wouldn't that cause the opposite effect? i.e. thinking, how the hell are these people my seniors/running things like this? They should now better.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding and you feel like the syndrome was pushed unto you by means of people being arrogant towards you?

If that's the case then I recommend to just keep cultivating yourself in the different subjects that interest you, to be sure that you really are the one that's correct (you never know when you will be "sure" of something just to find out you were wrong, being humble and double checking before opening my mouth has saved me lots of embarrassments... conversely because previously I didn't shut my mouth lots of times and got burned.), try to learn as much as you can from the actual experience of bearing with people that doesn't sound very pleasant to work with, and then get out of there when you can.

It definitely doesn't sound like a healthy place to be.

[manigandham]

I dont think this is the imposter syndrome. Do you feel like you're not capable as your position and peers think you are?

Seems like you're more than capable and are pointing out flaws, only for them to go unheard. And most importantly, you recognize and know this.

I think you're just working for a big web company that isn't as good as you thought it might be.