Being fired from my first programming job was a counterintuitive gift. Also counterintuitive: I probably would have been better off with worse interviewing skills. My interview skills outstripped my programming skill, which meant I got jobs I was underqualified for, which ultimately went badly. I would have been better off with interview skills better correlated with my actual job skills.
Interesting, the common meme about imposter syndrome is that it’s just a cognitive distortion, but it sounds like you think you were actually an imposter even in retrospect. At the time, did you feel anxious about your job the same way people with imposter syndrome generally do?
TBC I didn’t spend my whole career like this, just the last 3-4 years. And yeah, for those years I felt I was bad at my job and underqualified, and it was extremely frustrating that when I reached out for help people would say “oh you just have imposter syndrome” without checking my actual performance. And when they finally caught up to reality, there was never any acknowledgement that I’d been trying to get this addressed for months.
From that experience, what do you think of the learning value of being in a job you are not qualified for? More specifically, do you think you learned more from being in the job you weren’t qualified for than you did in in other jobs that matched your level better?
No, the gap was too large for me to overcome. Meanwhile I learned a lot in jobs I was overqualified for, because I had so much free time and room to take risks.
That is interesting. My guess would have been that you would learn fastest in jobs that are just a little above your current skill set. (Learn fastest does not equal ‘most happy’).
Although, your claim does seem to fit better with my lived experience.
Being fired from my first programming job was a counterintuitive gift. Also counterintuitive: I probably would have been better off with worse interviewing skills. My interview skills outstripped my programming skill, which meant I got jobs I was underqualified for, which ultimately went badly. I would have been better off with interview skills better correlated with my actual job skills.
Interesting, the common meme about imposter syndrome is that it’s just a cognitive distortion, but it sounds like you think you were actually an imposter even in retrospect. At the time, did you feel anxious about your job the same way people with imposter syndrome generally do?
TBC I didn’t spend my whole career like this, just the last 3-4 years. And yeah, for those years I felt I was bad at my job and underqualified, and it was extremely frustrating that when I reached out for help people would say “oh you just have imposter syndrome” without checking my actual performance. And when they finally caught up to reality, there was never any acknowledgement that I’d been trying to get this addressed for months.
From that experience, what do you think of the learning value of being in a job you are not qualified for? More specifically, do you think you learned more from being in the job you weren’t qualified for than you did in in other jobs that matched your level better?
No, the gap was too large for me to overcome. Meanwhile I learned a lot in jobs I was overqualified for, because I had so much free time and room to take risks.
That is interesting. My guess would have been that you would learn fastest in jobs that are just a little above your current skill set. (Learn fastest does not equal ‘most happy’).
Although, your claim does seem to fit better with my lived experience.