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by ZephyrBlu 1465 days ago
I'm pretty junior in terms of YOE, but I hate when I see people say things like "don't worry, I have no idea what I'm doing and I have x YOE. You're fine!" to people on the internet.

I have a decent understanding of what I'm doing, but I worked for it by doing exactly what you described in your last paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit process.

If you don't know what you're doing you're either bad or don't have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not good.
3 comments
SilasX 1465 days ago
Well said! I would add that, I’d you feel you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s a third possibility: you actually do know what you’re doing, in any meaningful sense, but your memory of your past work is dominated by the few cases where there wasn’t a clear right answer, and you made a call you couldn’t rigorous justify, even though you were doing most of the job very competently.

Those situations make it seem like you’re just shooting from the hip/groping in the dark all day … but that belief is wrong.

Either way, the right response to the feeling of impostor syndrome should not be to shrug and say “oh everyone’s like that” (which is how you get the Elizabeth Holmeses of the world); it should be to look for objective heuristics to identify whether you are, in the large, performing competently.

Edit: earlier comment on this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749

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bitexploder 1465 days ago
I sometimes say it for fun, but yeah, it’s weird. I worked very hard over multiple decades to acquire specific sets of skills that are hard to acquire. It’s fun to plunge into something and maybe joke about not knowing what you are doing, but the reality is if you spent as much time as I have and don’t actually know what you are doing that is very sad indeed.
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abakker 1465 days ago
Not to mention that people who say that they don't know what they're doing, but are earning 6 figure salaries are being extremely condescending to everyone else. The idea here is that you get paid for your expertise. If you don't have it, get it!
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