[hpoe]

If you ever start to feel comfortable, to feel like you are a genius and you have a handle on everything that's when you need to worry. Imposter syndrome will drive you motivate you and spur you to continue to improve. However Dunning-Kruger will turn you into an intolerable a-hole that everyone wants to avoid and will ruin things.

To paraphrase Paul Graham, great hackers don't seem to wonder why they are so smart, but rather wonder why everyone else seems so incompetent.

The trick is just to not tie, your identity, who you are, your sense of self worth to how good you are as a programmer. As long as you can avoid that embrace the imposter syndrome and let it drive you to improve, for knowledge is like compound interest, a little bit more now will result in a substantial return on investment in the future.

[jondubois]

I don't agree with this view because it assumes that all developers receive more positive feedback and attention than they deserve.

If nobody is giving someone good feedback about their work, then it's impossible for them to feel like an impostor. There are many great developers out there who rarely get positive feedback about their work and they have no idea what people are talking about when they mention 'impostor syndrome'.

You'd be surprised by how many people fall through the cracks of the system; these people will never understand this idea of 'impostor syndrome'. I've been coding for over 15 years, both in my spare time and full time job. I've worked 7 days a week on open source. I've build several significant, scalable systems. In addition to my open source side projects, I've worked for at least a dozen different companies of all sizes in different industries and different countries.

The main theme of my career has been one of feeling constantly undervalued. I'm confident today precisely because I've been constantly undervalued in the past and this adverse environment has been the main driver for me to improve.

Recently, I started getting excellent feedback for my work, but it's not because I suddenly became a better developer, it's just that I changed companies too often to get noticed before and also I got very lucky that the people I work with now are smart enough to notice and have enough money in their pockets such that their opinions are taken seriously.

[karmakaze]

On first reading, this all makes sense. On rereading it and applying to myself, I don't know what to think. I do always feel comfortable even in new jobs/roles and think everything will work out, not because I think I'm so great but because historically it always has. I experienced imposter syndrome for about 1 week once, can't even recall when or where as it wasn't a significant event--it passed. Beginning to suspect that I'm a bit of a what's the correct term? narcissist, sociopath? Basically I trust my own self assessment strongly enough not to be brought down by external factors. Maybe I have my own mental "Trello board" (as mentioned in another comment) in my head of past accomplishments. I probably do have a bit of Dunning-Kruger which I think is a good thing--if you knew all the things you didn't know, you'd be paralyzed from doing. I believe my success is from finding hacky/pragmatic ways of getting things done, resourcefulness, not building the perfect thing.

Don't know if this will be of any help to anyone, but I thought I'd share a different perspective.