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Self taught = no imposter syndrome? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am a self-taught programmer and I do not have imposter syndrome. I have a degree in electrical engineering and when I thought that was going to be my career I did have imposter syndrome, so I'm not immune. I wonder if there's a correlation. It seems that many if not most professionals suffer from imposter syndrome; I wonder if that's related to the way they learned.

When I say self-taught, I don't mean I never took a class, I mean the majority of my programming skill was learned by doing/outside of classes. I took a Java class in high school that helped me graduate from procedural languages to OOP, and I took classes in college but with few exceptions the ones that were practical (vs theoretical) covered material I already knew.

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[–] TootSweet 3 points 1 year ago

I doubt it's really about being self-taught or not.

And who knows if this will help any, but my story about imposter syndrome.

I had an internship in college. During that time, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome, but not all that much.
Then I started a startup with someone and had no imposter syndrome.
And then I started working at a big company and had imposter syndrome for a short while and then none once I was settled in.
Then I went to work for another big company and had tons of imposter syndrome for the whole multiple years I worked there.
Then I returned to the previous place I worked and have had no imposter syndrome since.

The place where I had imposter syndrome was an extremely extraverted place to work. And I am not extraverted in the least. It was chaotic! It was fun! And everybody else got their shit done and what I worked on would move from sprint to sprint unfinished. And I did not feel productive at all while mostly everybody around me by all appearances felt extremely productive.

The chaotic place was also the only place I'd ever been told I wasn't living up to expectations by my boss. The feed back I got from literally everyone else both there and other places was that I was kindof the MVP. I was made tech lead at both big companies I worked at (and when I returned to the first one, they made me tech lead again immediately.)

I suspect most people at least in our line of work have the capacity to get imposter syndrome given conducive circumstances, regardless of their background. My theory is that it's probably more about whether your current circumstance is a good fit for your temperment or not. At least that's what my experience with imposter syndrome has taught me.