“It's a fluke that I got this job interview...”
“I studied for weeks, but I’m still not prepared...”
“I’m not actually good at this. They’re going to see right through me...”
If any of these thoughts resonate with you, you're not alone. They are so common they have a name: impostor syndrome.
It’s that feeling like you’re on the verge of being exposed for what you really are—an impostor. A fraud.
Impostor syndrome is like kryptonite to coding interviews. It makes you give up and go silent.
You might stop asking clarifying questions because you’re afraid they’ll sound too basic. Or you might neglect to think out loud at the whiteboard, fearing you’ll say something wrong and sound incompetent.
You know you should speak up, but the fear of looking like an impostor makes that really, really hard.
Here’s the good news: you’re not an impostor. You just feel like an impostor because of some common cognitive biases about learning and knowledge.
Once you understand these cognitive biases—where they come from and how they work—you can slowly fix them. You can quiet your worries about being an impostor and keep those negative thoughts from affecting your interviews.
Here’s how impostor syndrome works.
Software engineering is a massive field. There’s a huge universe of things you could know. Huge.
In comparison to the vast world of things you could know, the stuff you actually know is just a tiny sliver:
That’s the first problem. It feels like you don’t really know that much, because you only know a tiny sliver of all the stuff there is to know.
It gets worse: counterintuitively, as you learn more, your sliver of knowledge feels like it's shrinking.