Disclaimer: This is an article a little close to home, and it is written with the hopes that at least one person who reads this relates to what I have to say.
Disclaimer 2: This article might get long, and will go on more than one tangent, but I hope to connect all of it at the end.
In Pittsburgh, 1995; a man walked into two banks and robbed them at gunpoint in broad daylight. He wasn’t wearing a mask or any other disguise. He smiled at the surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, the police arrested a very puzzled McArthur Wheeler. When he was shown the surveillance tapes, he was very surprised, and said: “But I wore the juice!”
This man was under the impression that rubbing your face with lemon juice would render it invisible to video cameras. He argued that lemon juice was used as invisible ink, so as long as he stayed away from any heat source, he’d be safe!
The above-mentioned snippet isn’t fiction, but is, infact, a real case which is the biggest inspiration of what we call today as the “Dunning-Kruger effect”.
When this story reached the eyes of David Dunning, a professor of Psychology at Cornell, he couldn’t conclude whether the robber was just incompetent, or dumb enough that he couldn’t tell how incompetent he was. Dunning was joined by a graduate student Justin Kruger to further study his behaviour.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
“The problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are… You’ll have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are.” - John Cleese
It is the relationship between how good you think you are versus how good you are.
If you observe the graph, you see that everyone who starts at something (in my case, the world of software development), stays under the assumption that they’re comfortable with most of what exists in that domain; the newbies don’t know what they don’t know.
As time progresses, and as you continue learning about something, you start to realize all the deficits in your knowledge and begin to fill them one at a time.
Impostor Syndrome
For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it is a phenomenon in which one doubts their successes/accomplishments. Instead of hard work and skill, their success comes from people’s inability to see that they are a fraud and have been unknowingly deceiving everyone. (more).
For anyone who has known me personally, will testify to the fact that I am shy of stepping up to the mantle to claim any spotlight which often gets attributed to the idea that Yash might be underconfident, which isn’t the case (most of the times).
I believe that work that is celebrated/recognized needs to be of a certain quality and scale, and most of the times, what I’ve come up with is just a lot of copy-paste, smart googling and जुगाड़. Not something I want to be highlighted, because anyone would’ve been able to do it, I just happened to get lucky.
The first time I felt Impostor Syndrome was when I was in my sophomore year and we were assigned to do a mini project for our Algorithms Course. I’d initially chosen to do a visual representation and simulation of sorting algorithms.
However, due to a few issues with my laptop then, I was unable to get GTK+ up and running. I had to switch to a backup (read: easy) project a mere 3 weeks away from my deadline.
How can installing a library be this difficult? You probably should’ve chosen an easy topic from the beginning!
In the weeks to follow, I’d clock in close to 6 hours a day on average trying to cover up all the time that I’d lost. By the deadline, I had a makeshift project ready that could be submitted. I didn’t have enough time to document or test all the corner cases of my application. I was in the worst possible place, knowing my code breaks, but not knowing how or when it would.
To my surprise, my project was graded to be the highest amongst those of the same kind, and it was honestly surreal to me. That I came up with something this quickly and it would work; I’d really gotten lucky with this one (Ring any bells?).
In my humble defence, this is something that is very very popular in the field of Computer Engineering and Software Development.
Everyone is trying to recognize and solve this weird fix they’re in, and I can see why it is so common between software developers:
- It’s a low barrier open-to-all field
- Kick starting your journey into software development or data science is simpler than ever. All you need is access to a stable internet connection and a computer. There is a universe of free tutorials and resources available on the internet.
- This implies that there is now a global
competitioncommunity of people that isn’t necessarily restricted by age, geography (or language).
- Your skill is (very) quantifiable
- Unlike a few other domains, you can very easily compare yourself to any other developer out there.
- Is my code more scalable? Does it handle more corner cases? Does mine run faster?
- There is just too much going on
- Due to proliferation of the size of the tech community, there is something new coming out every other day.
- This is bound to make anyone starting out a little (maybe more than a little) overwhelmed.
To wrap it up:
Conclusion
I believe that Impostor Syndrome might not be all bad, and the cloud has a silver lining.
The Impostor Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger effect might seem as very different phenomenons, but are linked by a very basic idea.
If you think you’re not good at something, and that you’re just a facade behind which there’s an incompetent monkey pulling the strings, remember that Dunning-Kruger tells us that:
- You’re not inexperienced: The fact that you know that there is a lot out there, goes to show that you’ve crossed Mount Stupid.
- You know you’re not there yet: You might have a long way to go, but you know that.
These two might not seem like the happiest things in the world, but they teach me to be humble and ever evolving.
They also teach me that I might (and probably won’t ever) know everything, but knowing what I don’t know is a good place to be in.
This is all for you, for now!