[perlgeek]

You have to make false claims to be a fraud.

It doesn't really matter if the OP (or anybody else really) is a super genius or not. People from outside the field can't tell, and so they approach those with a high media profile, and who match some of the preconceived ideas, like the buzzword bingo mentioned in the blog post.

The same is true even inside our field. When I'm interested in some architectural design pattern, I often read an article by Martin Fowler. Why? Because what he writes sounds plausible, and because I've heard his name a hundred times before. I've never seen production code he wrote, or been on a project he worked on. Maybe he feels like an impostor too, sometimes?

I'm not calling Fowler an impostor; I just want to draw the parallels how second-hand knowledge influences our perception of expertise.