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.
Inposter syndrome is probably a slight subconscious acknowledgement that they earn stupid money for copying off stack overflow and googling the answer to most problems while nurses, teachers and generally more useful people in society get paid shit all. But not actually being able to complete the analysis. Also the work a lot of programmers do and the products they make are totally fucking worthless or just a detriment to society.
I for one have not had imposter syndrome working in tech since I started to understand leftist theory. I now see myself as someone just grifting a big corporate business into paying me stupid money for stretching 1 hours worth of work over 2 weeks and spending those 2 weeks playing games and doing gardening and trying to radicalise my co-workers lol
I pretty much wanted to make this exact comment, bravo.
I actually felt really guilty for a while for doing this but now I'm kinda proud of it tbh.
I'd rather work an actually useful job though but like you said most pay fuck all and I feel like I'm gonna need all the money I can get in the next few years.
Yup this is exactly it. Have the same analysis in the same kind of gig. "Software engineering" is the ultimate bullshit job, the existence of <startups> is a net negative for society, and the amount of intellectual effort that goes into gluing disparate APIs together to do meaningless things is criminal, but I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.
If you work a job where the primary reason you interact with your coworkers is because they're the expert on something you don't know, it's pretty easy to start thinking you're not cut out for it.
Maybe this is part of why it’s so common in academia
There's a lot of hero worship in Academia, but then you read someone's field notes from 1876 and realize that the great and respected father of the field had undiagnosed ADHD, raging alcoholism, and racism that was notable even in his era. And after that you just don't worry about things as much.
a lot of hero worship in Academia
Wait, are y’all getting imposter syndrome because of the “heroes” who came before you? I 100% get my imposter syndrome from my peers, I feel like all the other grad students are smarter and more talented than I am. I don’t give a fuck about what famous professors do
I mean what's the difference between imposter syndrome and just being inexperienced? Because I've experienced this before though I just attributed it to being lazy rather than not being good enough. It seems like IS requires one to be qualified but doubt their skills
there's a bit of overlap, once people also start coming to you for the answers to questions they don't know it goes away a bit. In tech anyway, it's a lot more common for women and for people of color to experience impostor syndrome because they're so underrepresented (and frequently treated like tokens) — in my entire 10+ year career I think I've only spent 15 months on a team with at least one other woman, and ive worked in whole departments that were all men aside from me. No matter what you end up getting treated kinda weirdly in circumstances like that.
"imposter" = capitalism
it's just the disbelief at making $120k for simply writing functions into a thing (or in many cases even easier stuff than programming) which even in the case of programming, pretty much anyone could learn how to do, except you had the right college name and aced all the unnecessary exams that nobody will ever use and had the right connections and etc et al which don't actually make you any inherently better at what you do, but they were required anyway because how else will you hierarchicize people
it's basically the starting steps to being commie
It's all bullshit 100% of the time, all the time. Most people don't do shit and honestly don't need to. Most work is unnecessary except in the lower/less than sectors because that work is necessary for society to actually function. Anyone working a desk job is just fucking around and everyone knows it. For example, at a cookout I literally said out loud "I don't do shit at work" and nearly everyone around me reluctantly agreed they didn't do shit at work either.
It's all a scam.
Microsoft has like single-handedly caused all the malware in the world due to how insecure and over complex and crappy their operating system is. Literally all they have to do is introduce some kind of sandboxing for Windows apps and they just don't do it.
I don't think it's strictly Microsoft's fault here.
Windows was the first really widespread OS and so it's only logical it'd bear the brunt of malware attacks.
I think software engineering as a discipline was really immature at the time when the Internet first exploded in popularity, I think the same security faults would have happened with any OS that would be really popular at the time.
It's not like desktop Linux is particularly malware proof, Xorg in particular had some really really nasty security flaws.
I think the weak computer security of the late 90s and early 00s was just the growing pains of the entire industry, I don't think any organization would handle things drastically better than Microsoft did.
Yeah good point. It's just disappointing how far behind desktop computers are compared to phones. Android and iOS both have actual application sandboxing. Microsoft sort of tried it with the UWP but they didn't make it very easy to develop for or something like that so there was no adoption.
I don't think I've ever seen a UI change of any software and website that was good enough to justify relearning where everything is. It really does seem like a bunch of UI/UX designers constantly change shit around to justify their existence and employment throwing out nonsense buzz words like "intuitive design" as a reason why the old serviceable design somehow sucks compared with the newer equally serviceable design.
Vista and Windows 7 being skeuomorphic in contrast with Windows 8 and 10 being flat has nothing to do with the perceived benefits of skeuomorphism or flat design, but was mostly done for branding purposes. The difference in design is emphasized so when your work PC is running on Windows 10, which has a flat aesthetic, the first thing you'll think when you boot up Windows 7 is go, "Wow, this looks dated. I need to blow my money on the latest shit."
There's the reverse where the inhouse software still has their UI from the 2nd millennia because the lead developer doesn't want to update their user guide they made in 2012. It turns out intuitive design gets trumped by manuals tailored towards the endusers and personnel tasked with basic FAQs in case the tailored manuals are not adequate.
did we really need IT support?
Yes? Idk how it works in your organisation, but where I work IT support is responsible for responding to tickets caused by user error, known issues and they try to provide workarounds for simple issues. Any tickets which require code changes are handled by the software engineer who is oncall. Would be wasteful if I also had to respond to tickets which do not require in-depth knowledge of the codebase.
I've personally encountered more issues with Ubuntu than with Windows, so I don't see what this has to do with Microsoft tbh. Mac is great but they have control over the hardware and don't offer backwards compatibility like Windows does. :shrug-outta-hecks:
Sure today we need an IT Support department but that was because lack of training users combined with buggy software (Windows, MS Office) created a need.
This will always be the case. Software engineering is still very much a young discipline. Thinks are going to brake, things are going to be badly designed, users will always fail to take the time to learn stuff, at least for the foreseable future. That also means that tech support is going to have to exist.
I've been using windows and linux both very regularly the last 10 years and overall, for the average user, Windows does provide a more polished, less error prone experience than linux.
It's really just a matter of how much time you allocate into a certain piece of software, if in the 00s everybody decided to use linux for whatever reason it'd be the better OS for the average user for sure because there'd be a bunch more people reporting and fixing shit.
There's nothing inherent to Microsoft or Windows that made computing shittier overall, other than the obvious shit like shoving ads down people's throat, but that's just capitalism fucking things up as usual.
Ok fair enough, I just don't personally see how in a socialist society you wouldn't have IT support. Sure maybe less of it overall because there'd be less bullshit jobs but there would still be a lot of non tech-savvy people doing their jobs on a computer.
Wouldn't you say having computers widely available offsets the need for menial IT support labor?
Not everybody that needs a computer can be a computer expert.
Unnecessary increasing complexity made it come into existence.
But how else would I cram a bloated, extraneous UI into an already perfectly-streamlined website to justify my existence?
I didn't say I wanted imposter syndrome, I said I wanted the opposite where I do think I'm the best programmer regardless of my actual skills
I think there's two levels to it.
- People feel guilt for not doing enough work when others get paid less and seem to do more work. They have no role in society yet are rewarded.
- People feel like they have wasted all the education they were given and aren't doing anything with their life
I should read Bullshit Jobs.
I should read Bullshit Jobs.
you really should, I forced my ADHD riddled ass to read it and it's excellent
I would certainly feel bad if I got paid more to do nothing while others slave away and get paid almost nothing. But considering how many tech jobs are pointless there isn’t much one can do anyway. I’m not even bullshitting either because almost all the successful people I’ve gone to for advice say “yeah I do like 2 hours of work then watch Netflix all day.”
The other option is that you opt out of the rat race and go in the jobs that require more skill and labor, but at that point I feel like it’s just larping and fetishizing struggle and poverty. Though I’d still like to live a meaningful life... somehow. I guess I’ll use all that stolen time at work to ponder it.
Excellent book by all means. My hero is the dude who didn't show up for work for like 6 years and became an expert on Spinoza instead (though, I think he was public sector which makes it more sketchy).
I think impostor syndrome was one of those things that was a real phenomenon with specific meaning that got instantly recuperated to mean the opposite of what it was intended because we have to keep up the illusion that rich people jobs are meaningful and not bullshit.
It comes from your work being completely meaningless, somewhat harmful, and becoming demigods of capitlaism with the skills you honed you make hentai games for yourself as a child.
I'd describe "imposter syndrome" as professional FOMO, where you're worried that all your coworkers think you're an idiot but are too polite to tell you. Sort of like worrying that all your friends think you're a drag but are too nice to tell you.
That makes more sense. Although personally, I probably wouldn't mind if my coworkers think I'm an idiot unless it's personally affecting their end of the work
everyone deserves high wages actually, tech workers aren't any more deserving of them than other laborers but they certainly deserve to not have their surplus value stolen
The only time where imposter syndrome will affect me is when they review my work and I realize it’s not up to par as my peers.
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.
Wait, have techbros appropriated impostor syndrome from women and poc? I’ve only heard it before in the context of marginalized groups feeling like they don’t belong in professional fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
