[dworin]

There's actually a lot of research about confidence (and an entire pop-psychology book on the subject).

The basic finding is similar to what the article says: too much confidence is bad because it makes you miss things, but so is too little confidence if it makes it hard for you to do anything. The trick is calibrating confidence and how you react to under/over-confidence.

In a situation of low confidence, you want to take action to grow your confidence by getting feedback, learning new skills, or collaborating to get new ideas. When you have too much confidence, you need to figure out what you're missing or get a more realistic perspective on where you are.

For better or worse, there's also social value in projecting confidence (not arrogance, but confidence) in certain situations.

[matwood]

I feel like my confidence is usually in the right balance. I have enough to feel like I can build something, but not so much that I refuse to test and check that it works. On new projects where my confidence is lower, my first few PRs can take me forever as I examine every little detail for correctness.

[Florin_Andrei]

Sounds like a lot of optimization problems when training neural networks.