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Comment by _swfb | Hacker News Reader

As someone with no credentials or official training, and someone who also works at a big megacorporation as an engineer, imposter syndrome hits me fairly hard, especially during interviews. It's really hard to compete with the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing, and I'm usually interviewing for a job that has a strict requirement of a "bachelors in CS, Math or Physics, Masters preferred".

I've managed to pull it off somehow, but I rarely go a day where I don't wonder if I really should have as good of a job as I do.

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"It's really hard to compete with the people who actually have proof that they know what they're doing"

And yet... as an independent consultant, I'm often brought in to projects worked on by these folks who "have proof that they know what they're doing". If they knew what they were doing, almost by definition, they wouldn't be calling in an outside consultant to fix broken shit.

There are often many reasons - cutting corners due to time or budget, or inheriting something that was bad and not having support to fix it, or not knowing how to fix it. But often if I'm able to talk to these folks... they didn't know what they were doing (and often didn't know they didn't know), so the result was a mess.

The "1% dude" with his CS degree probably has never had to acknowledge to a boss that they made a mistake, or are in over their head, or... haven't had to deal with their own code 5 years later and clean up their own mistakes, let alone others'.

What I also find funny is that hardly anyone interviews or vets consultants and contractors the same way they do employees.

I've been brought in as an "expert" on all sorts of things, with hardly any interviewing. Just show up and be given the keys to the kingdom.

Granted I've almost always been able to deliver, but they mostly took my word for it up front.

I’m guessing that by the time someone needs an “expert” at something and is willing to pay consultant rates, they’re probably incapable of such vetting.

Employers look for these degrees because in their experience this is a somewhat meaningful signal that let them filter applicants.

But having someone at work for real for a few weeks give employers a way meaningful signal than any degrees on a resume. If your employer maintains their relationship with you, you are likely worth more than the degrees you mentioned--dont overthink it!

At some level I logically know this, and obviously if the employer didn't feel I was worth it they wouldn't hire me.

Still, after dropping out, it was hard to avoid constant feelings of inferiority. Even though people obviously didn't mean it this way, I was interpreting every statement as having an implicit suffix of "and you're stupid because you dropped out". It took me years to realize that people really aren't that much of jerks, and a surprising few actually give a crap about you dropping out.

I do think that, for engineering, a year of experience is worth just as much as a year in school if you are willing to spend evenings self-teaching.

My interests tend to be a bit more academic (which don't appear to be willing to overlook a lack of a bachelors), and since there's not a single Math professor in the NYC area that will take me on as a PhD student without a degree (I think I might have emailed literally all of them), I've actually started back in school, so hopefully that'll kill the complex.

What kind of mathematics are you interested in? I do math in academia in the NYC area, feel free to email (profile).

I've done 3 interviews in the last couple weeks where candidates couldn't do a simple Python dictionary lookup. These were people with a Masters in CS and have Python as their primary language.

I wouldn't worry about being an Impostor.

My favorite is when people put "concurrency" as a feature on their resumes. When I ask them their opinions on actors vs. CSP, without fail, they don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Apparently "concurrency" to a lot of trained people just means "spinning up threads and use a lock occasionally".

I have done dozens of interviews in my career and have yet to meet anyone who was this bad. What am I doing wrong?

Probably working for a company with sane resume filtering. We outsourced that.

Oh, yeah, I could see that. Most of my experience was with a company where my team and a dedicated technical recruiter did all the filtering, and where the engineers could override the recruiter decisions (in either direction).

Some of it is that, but I can say from my own experience that the company itself can draw large numbers of this kind of candidates. For various reasons ($) I’ve worked at a company that people view as a sort of safety school; you get a much higher fraction of incompetents at companies like this.

You don’t see them at startups or at companies with solid technical reputations.

Am I missing something, or do you mean they didn't know `myDict['key'] `?

Yes. One candidate remembered to do it that way after some searching, the other never did.

Both started out by looping over the items in the dict and stopping at the correct one. Asking if there was a simpler way to get values out of dict didn't help.

The third candidate really didn't get far enough to get the dict wrong so I counted them as well but they may have known how to do a dict lookup.

Here is the exercise:

Given these dicts:

{"a":[1,2],"b":[3,4],"z":[5]} {"a":[66],"b":[77]}

Write a program in language of your choice that sums the common keys.

a and b are common so result is:

{"a":1+2+66,"b":3+4+77}

so output should be:

{"a":69,"b":84}

This exercise is stupid simple. Note this is in an IDE/Editor, not a whiteboard.

I remember how I didn't believe that Fizzbuzz eliminates some crazy-high percentage of candidates until I started interviewing. I think most of the people I have interviewed are relatively smart people, but a lot of them really haven't had a lot of need to practice their algorithms, so they don't.

I've had people fail the "tell me if these two strings are anagrams" thing, with one person's response being to have 26 counters, one for each letter.

I feel your pain. I didn’t finish college and I hold a high level director position at a firm with over 200 employees and 6 offices on the east coast. I’m not an amazing interviewer, but I am extremely creative and resourceful, which has gotten me farther than I would have imagined. The imposter syndrome is strong, but slowly getting better as I see my work changing the company for the better. I’ve made a lot of believers, but more importantly I’m becoming a believer in myself.

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