[j_baker]

People would rate you "great" but you'll be able to say "How would you know?". At which point, the better you get, the worse you'll know you are. Anybody who rates themselves as "great" is probably on the uphill side of the learning curve.

This attitude annoys me greatly. I understand Dunning-Krueger and all, but I still don't buy the idea that skill is inversely proportional to confidence. I think it's simplistic to think that confidence directly implies lack of skill and vice-versa.

I mean clearly no one likes an ego-maniac who acts like a know it all. But at the same time, sometimes people are right when they say good things about themselves. Even if they act completely narcissistic.

In fact, I would say that maturing has done nothing but increase my confidence in my skill level. I think that I can say that I'm a good programmer and that I hope to be a great programmer some day without being cocky or egotistical. It doesn't mean that I'm always right or that I don't make mistakes. But at the end of the day, I have confidence in my abilities.

[nostrademons]

I think that "confidence" bifurcates once you gain experience. There's confidence in your ability, and there's confidence in your accomplishments. The former tends to decline, because you realize there's so much more out there that you could be doing to but just don't have the time or mental capacity for. The latter tends to increase as you rack up projects and see people use them.

I thought I was hot shit when I entered college, and I had the test scores - but no tangible accomplishments - to prove it. And then I tried to convert those test scores into tangible accomplishments, and found that maybe I wasn't as hot shit as I thought I was. I think I'm significantly dumber now than I was as a 19-year-old hotshot fresh out of high school. I can see all the alternative ways of doing things, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes I'm still making. And looking ahead of me, I see all this complexity and all these challenges for the things I want to do, and I didn't see that when I was a wide-eyed kid, and it makes me feel pretty stupid.

But looking behind me, I've done some pretty cool stuff. FictionAlley.org. Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours. Ported Arc to JavaScript. 2 products for somebody else's startup that never went anywhere, and a startup of my own that also never went anywhere. Wonder Wheel & Search Options. The websearch visual redesign of 2010. Google's Authorship program. Google's first canvas-based homepage doodle. The [let it snow] easter egg.

And I think about how I just made tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people happy last weekend, and it feels pretty good. So even though I don't know anything, I must be doing something right.

[kevinalexbrown]

I think it's one thing to be confident about being great relative to most people, and another to learn just how great the distance still is between you and "the best." I've definitely had this experience while learning things - as I move into say, the top 5-10%, I feel pretty good. And I'm confident putting myself there. But then I see just how far I have to go to get from 5% to 1%, or 1% to 0.1%, and it's the kind of thing that wouldn't have been obvious at all until I got to 5% because I'd have no idea what that difference even meant, and how hard the gap is to bridge.