Impostor Syndrome — Started from the bottom, why we here?
Hello loyal readers, if you haven’t noticed, it’s been a year since my last post. I swear this post frequency is becoming a bit of a pattern, which is definitely problematic, coz I made some pretty public promises in my last post about how I would interleave writing into regular life. Wonder what happened with all that resolve. The truth is that writing is hard, and compiling a jumble of second-rate thoughts and ideas into a coherent story requires a burst of mental effort that by nature is easy to put off to browse FB instead.
It goes to show that being cognitively convinced is only the first step in the journey towards self-improvement. The long and perilous road from idea to execution is the true test of character. I’ve realized that ideas are cheap, and now tend to admire folks that can materially deliver on something far more than some navel-gazing intellectual-type — they’re a dime a dozen. The gap between principle and practice is a deeply interesting discussion in itself, one that I now notice in every walk of life, and certainly warrants its own blog post. Hold me to it, loyal reader!
Okay before I get into our topic for today, life update!
- I graduate with my MS in a few days (^_^)
- I am moving to Ann Arbor for my first real job (^_^)
- I will keep working on drone autonomy but this time to build an actual product that customers will use! (^_^)
- I am going to sorely miss my life in Pittsburgh
- I’ve been reflecting on my migratory lifestyle and all the transience and rootlessness that comes as part of the package. Definitely need to chop through that dark tangle of emotions in a future blog post.
Aight, let us now wade into the murky backwaters of my mind to explore the topic at hand — Impostor Syndrome. Don’t @ me, I know there are tons of cliched blog posts written about this topic, but I’ve never been able to fully relate to them, nor draw many lessons. My specific life trajectory may be a lot more relatable to my readers, especially those embarking on something new, and hence is valuable to write about.
To be honest, my initial impression of all this syndrome business was not very sympathetic. There tends to be a humble-brag undertone to these discussions — Oh look at me, I’ve surrounded myself with all these brilliant people, cracked into these elite spaces, punched above my weight, even though I started from nothing. Groucho Marx famously said — I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. Well in that case, this impostor syndrome business certainly sounds like a Groucho Marxist utopia. You would think only a privileged few would find themselves in such a situation, right?
Unsurprisingly however, the human psyche is not a perfect observer of objective reality. Around 60% of software engineers self-report as suffering from impostor syndrome. If we define impostor syndrome as the feeling of being within the bottom 5 percentile of your peers in some metric, then this figure should be 5%. An alien observer would clearly notice some sort of systematic mismatch here, a bug in human nature if you will.
Doesn’t feel that way when you’re in it though. When I enrolled at Carnegie Mellon two years back it was in the engineering school — which is good but not top-ranked — unsure of what exactly to do, interested in control theory but without the experience to prove it. I did so because it was the best school I could get into, rejected from all my dream attempts (Stanford, Michigan, etc). I was going to pay tuition through my nose and take a massive risk that it would pay off.
When I arrived, it was obvious that the Robotics Institute (RI) in the CS school was the basin of attraction of all good things I could possibly want in academic life (except for a balanced sex ratio). It really was a dreamy place, there were so many talents doing cool shit with so much interesting math, and money flowing like water to fund it. It oozed a vibe of achievement and self-assuredness, as you would only see in a top-ranked space.
I did not initially have to worry about being an impostor, I wasn’t even an insider yet! However, I was soon recruited by my advisor — a young prof in RI — to join his lab. He offered to cover my (exorbitant) tuition in its entirety, and gave me a generous grad stipend to boot. Most importantly, I was given the chance to work on one of the coolest projects in RI — the DARPA SubT challenge — with ownership of a significant chunk of the drone software stack.
This was success beyond my wildest expectations, and in all honesty, I had done nothing to deserve it, I was simply at the right place at the right time. This I still believe to be a correct assessment. It is indeed true of most successfuls that a ray of good fortune shines through at the right time and affords them their big break, and it always feels unearned.
As I started working in RI, my circumstances as an outsider naturally led me to have strong impostor feelings. I didn’t think I actually deserved to be in this space, and for quite some time felt dwarfed by the domain expertise, implementation skills, and productivity per unit time of my peers. The upside of impostor syndrome is it pressurizes you to play catch-up ASAP. The ugly side is that it saps at your self-assuredness. Clearly, this does your personality no favours, but also makes you a worse contributor to your team and throttles your career trajectory. Low self-assuredness translates directly to higher levels of inhibition — excess baggage that makes you cautious and reluctant to ask questions and unearth information — which is the most important step on the journey towards becoming an effective worker. Somehow, you also tend to take for granted legacy decisions, coz you’ve convinced yourself that people more awesome than you must’ve known what they were doing. To some degree, it also shows in your body language when you suffer from these insecurities, and impacts how much responsibility your team would be willing to place in you.
This tends to happen a lot more in heavily technical fields, or at least a lot more people complain about it online. What doesn’t help is the multiple abstraction layers that insiders collectively build up over time. Having a common word-bank of abstractions deriving from domain knowledge and technical concepts is essential for efficient communication, but makes assimilation more daunting than it needs to be for a newbie.
So if you’re lucky, you snap out of it. Because statistically speaking, you are vastly overestimating the awesomeness of your colleagues. Everyone has a unique journey, with myriad variations in initial conditions, times in their life when rays of good fortune may have shone through, people and institutions investing in them, and external guiding forces that all colluded to get them to their current level of awesomeness. Often people that you idolize, think famous profs for eg, are people just like you, with the difference being that they stuck to a path and persevered for years on end.
So it is not fair, nor is it all that important, to compare yourself to your peers on an absolute scale. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those participation certificate types, far from it. But I firmly believe fundamental human qualities such as reasoning ability, creativity, and perseverance supersede the more superficial aspects of domain knowledge or knowing some frameworks here and there. Have faith in the primacy of first-principles thinking to cut through all manner of abstractions, display high-quality logical reasoning when understanding foreign concepts, and you will be valued in your organization.
My engineering education at BITS Pilani may not have taught me any robotics, and in some sense, I lagged behind my peers as a result, but it embedded in me a strong math background, and a knack for first-principles thinking to cut through pretentious abstraction BS. My time at Carnegie Mellon has been spent a lot more actively engaged in wrestling with a bunch of ambitious undertakings, which has given me a lifelong confidence that I can solve complex problems, given enough bull-headed perseverance and occasional flashes of inspiration.
I am not going to tell you to fake it until you make it, as the other blog posts do. Instead, be radically honest about what you do and don’t know in terms of technical abstractions, but have an intense faith in your cognitive capabilities and character strengths. These are the true metrics of comparison, and everything else can be learnt through time on the job, until one day you outshine your peers in terms of awesomeness. And I stress honesty here, because the fastest way to learn is being up-front about your background, and I personally highly value my peers that ask the obvious piercing questions that I’ve always taken for granted.
So if you find yourself burdened by inhibitions and insecurities — maybe you’ve suddenly upgraded your environment, or some tech-bro colleague is being a prick — keep in mind that it is the fundamental primitives of reason and character that make a gem among stones, and everything else is window dressing.
