Honest question, imagine if at your company tomorrow they decide to fire one principal engineer. Would you find it fair that the one is you? Would yo find it fair if you were among the 10% they fire? The 20%? The 30%?
I ask you that because it is much simpler to answer to a binary question like, do I have imposter syndrome? Or put in other words, am I modest?
You can make the link with how people see themselves. A lot of very attractive people tell you they are not very beautiful, and spend their time trying to get validation from others. But they internally think they are the top 5%.
My opinion is a lot of those things exists because people are not honest with each other. So you can't really trust what people tell you about you. And you are always wondering how people see you.
Anyone who has survived a round of layoffs is very familiar with survivor's guilt, which manifests as an intense form of impostor syndrome. "Why was it X instead of me? How did I manage to trick my way into staying when X (and Y and Z) went?"
It doesn't have much to do with your honest self-evaluation. It's kind of unavoidable. Whether or not it's accurate doesn't really matter.
> Honest question, imagine if at your company tomorrow they decide to fire one principal engineer. Would you find it fair that the one is you? Would yo find it fair if you were among the 10% they fire? The 20%? The 30%?
That's an interesting thought experiment. Though not as straightforward as it sounds like at first.
For example, I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I'm also pretty expensive.
But more importantly, companies don't have a good handle on people's performance. They have biased estimates, at best. See https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ for an exploration of this topic from a hiring point of view, but it also exists to a lesser extent when people are already working for you.
Furthermore, it's unlikely that a company would simply drop X% of employees based on performance.
For example, one could be better than 90% of employees, but if they're highly specialized on a team/product that is getting phased out and they don't have transferable skills to move internally, they may get laid off even if they're not in the bottom % of whoever was getting laid off.
It definitely is an interesting thing to think about, but I agree that there are some holes to the logic.
Imposter syndrome can also manifest via factual evidence even when it isn’t indicative of being an imposter.
I got a FAANG position without completing a degree. All my peers had degrees in CS. I thought I didn’t belong because I lacked formal accreditation. Having skill wasn’t as measurable as having a degree.
Thankfully, I’ve learned to see getting there while self-taught as validation since then.
I went ahead and did the experiment: I felt like I was contributing nothing of value at my last job after seven years and just slowed things down, so I ended up giving 5 weeks notice. My employer agreed I was useless and decided to turn that into 9 days notice.
The result: they are even further behind than they were with me, and occasionally people still contact me from the old company for tech advice. I guess it was imposter syndrome after all!
Accelerating notice is not always indication that your employer doesn't find you valuable, I almost always prefer to do that, especially with highly productive people: once an employee knows they are leaving and has announced it, anything they do other than tie up loose ends is more liability than benefit, and good people will do more. But their head is not 100% in it, they don't expect to have to maintain what they build, and most importantly they won't be around to ask questions of if things go wrong later, so it's almost always better to get them out the door ASAP.
The CTO shouldn’t even be involved in that conversation imo. If I was your supervisor I would told the CTO about 3 weeks into your 5 weeks and off-boarded you with other engineers if needed.
I ask you that because it is much simpler to answer to a binary question like, do I have imposter syndrome? Or put in other words, am I modest?
You can make the link with how people see themselves. A lot of very attractive people tell you they are not very beautiful, and spend their time trying to get validation from others. But they internally think they are the top 5%.
My opinion is a lot of those things exists because people are not honest with each other. So you can't really trust what people tell you about you. And you are always wondering how people see you.