[SilasX]

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