Impostor Syndrome leaves most tech workers feeling like a fake Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft feel like frauds. | Malaysia

When you are first starting out, you spend a huge amount of time doing battle with inexperience and learning, conquering new things. This leads us to feel that we are doing amazing things and working extremely diligently when, in truth, we are not really all that productive.

Later, when we are experienced, a larger number of the things we do are easy to us, so that feeling of victory happens less and less which can lead to a feeling that we are not really programmers any longer. That does not mean that we are not productive though.

In my case, this phenomenon is compounded by the fact that the majority of the applications that I work on were created by me ages ago when I was starting out. Over the years I have futzed with them and upgraded all the functionality to the point where the systems pretty much take care of themselves (the whole “lazy” programmer thing). This is a good thing, of course, but I often get bored for long periods of time.