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Comment by pmb | Hacker News Reader

Overcoming impostor syndrome! Woo!

Code culture measures how much you self-perceive to know about code. It's only after a bit of getting to know a person that you can get at their actual levels of competence. If you are in a situation that claims to be a meritocracy, but all claims of merit have to be evaluated in seconds, then it's not a meritocracy, it's a self-confidence-ocracy. Unfortunately, self-confidence can be negatively correlated with talent... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect )

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Hey, fancy seeing you here :).

And good point on the "self-perceive to know", and how it's not the same as actually knowing. And, of course, ties in with gender issues itself.

FWIW I never had a whit of impostor syndrome in the context where we met. But code culture, it's weird that way.

Hey you!

Code culture IS weird. And not in a good way. I have all sorts of things I think about this, but I have trouble sorting these things out in any sort of useful way, so I really appreciate seeing others sorting their own thoughts out for me to read. Thanks for saying interesting things!

I've not encountered a "code culture" that "measures how much you self-perceive to know about code." I've encountered management cultures like that, but if you have a bunch of developers working together, people deeply know the wizards from the blowhards.

I have encountered groups of developers that have gone both ways - some actually paid attention to the people who knew things, and others paid attention to the people who claimed to know things. For example, I like to think I can tell wizards from blowhards, but I am also pretty sure I can be fooled in the short term.

If you have a bunch of developers, yes. But the entry level filter is people who aren't yet developers, and people talking about code. I've found actual developers pretty welcoming, but I also had to skip the entire beginning of the pipeline to get to them.

On the other hand, there's "coders-wasting-time" culture that's much uglier than "coders coding" culture.

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