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.

  • elint
    30·
    1 year ago

    Naah. Impostor syndrome is a personal psychological phenomenon. I don’t think it is really connected to how you acquired your knowledge/skills or how much you know.

  • esscew
    30·
    1 year ago

    I’ve found that imposter syndrome generally comes from misinformation. Once you start talking to peers and understand that they also go through the same steps you do, you start understanding that you belong.

  • MagicShel
    10·
    1 year ago

    I’m self taught and have pretty bad imposter syndrome. Don’t think that’s the magic bullet.

    • ZikejiEnglish
      00·
      1 year ago

      Also self taught. Also imposter syndrome.

      • charolastra
        10·
        10 months ago

        Same here. I do think I’m getting over it though, and possibly quicker than the boot campers.

    • EthanOPEnglish
      00·
      1 year ago

      I assume you’re implying my confidence is due to having limited competence and thus overestimating my competence? The fact that I have imposter syndrome when I imaging trying to be a professional electrical engineer (despite having a degree) seems counter to your presumed argument.

      • lysdexicEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        I imaging trying to be a professional electrical engineer (despite having a degree)

        That’s the definition of specious reasoning, and fails to address the point I made.

        • ggwithgg
          11·
          1 year ago1 year ago

          I think your point here is relevant.

          One can never truely evaluate its own competence.

          A degree, or good reviews from collegues are good indications you are competent. But also these are not proof: it could be a result of incompetent collegues, or an education that was not that good.

          Not having a degree, but saying you know for sure to not have any Kruger raises lots of eyebrows for me: you do not know what you do not know.

          Coming back to op’s original question: the correlation comes from that education shows you what you do not know. You are getting involved with all kinds of subjects, and you get a grasp of how many there is left to learn and how smart certain things are. You might for example have never thought about the complexity of a compiler. This can make you feel dumber than if you would have never found out these fields existed.

          Imo I think kruger is much more harmful than imposter