Maybe it’s because I literally do not give a shit about the company or it’s products or customers. I just want money. In fact, I want the opposite kind of imposter syndrome, where I trick the people hiring me into thinking I’m much more qualified than I actually am get paid a shit ton more money. Yes I know C++, Pascal, Assembly, COBOL. Please pay me $500k.
The culture at techbro schools that are working correctly is such that your coworkers will be constantly assessing your fitness for work during conversation and making you insecure about what you don't know.
Amber wrote some article about the PMC that pinpoints their anxiety as stemming from the precarity of reproducing themselves as a class and I think that rings true. The artificial scarcity and class barrier imposed on technical educations, and the constant pressure to succeed academically from childhood, produce a mentality where the PMC constantly need to reassure themselves that they deserve to be where they are by measuring themselves against their peers.
This was definitely me the first few years of my career.
After that I realized it's all bullshit anyway and I stopped caring.