Intro

I routinely come across Reddit posts, podcasts, conversations, and just about any other source you can think of discussing Imposter Syndrome. These posts are often filled with plenty of commiserating (“same bro”) and encouragement (“fake it ’til you make it!”). To an extent, that’s good. This field already has enough stress in it without bringing each other down. But I also think there’s a dark side to it.

Welcome, boys and girls, to my latest act of pedantry. Does this discussion of Imposter Syndrome matter? I’ll leave that to you to ultimately decide, but I think it’s worth broaching.

Setting the stage

To begin, I think the moniker of Imposter Syndrome is often misused/misdefined. The National Institute of Health defines Imposter Syndrome as:

… a behavioral health phenomenon described as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals. These individuals cannot internalize their success and subsequently experience pervasive feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and/or apprehension of being exposed as a fraud in their work, despite verifiable and objective evidence of their successfulness.

Source

I want to acknowledge that I do think there is a fair amount of Imposter Syndrome in cybersecurity and in many technical fields that have a high floor. I’d say I’ve felt it myself from time to time. But even examining my own use of the label and its application to myself, I think there are more times where it’s really something else I’m dealing with rather than Imposter Syndrome directly.

I routinely experience feelings of inadequacy around my job as a Red Teamer. The things my peers demo from their exercises in our weekly meetings often make me question how I can even call myself a Red Teamer! But as slimy as these next sentences feel to type, I do know my successes, several of which are quite substantial. I know the areas where I’m above average and I am confident in them. I know most of my weaknesses, too, but I also know that I’m a quick study, so even when I don’t know something I’m confident I can learn it.

In light of that, the feelings of inadequacy, no matter how frequent, or the weight of knowing there’s more to learn aren’t enough to meet with the definition above in my estimation (aside: there’s always more to learn, but more on that later). But what I often find online and in other discussions is that Imposter Syndrome is used exactly like that: as the catch-all term for a general feeling of inadequacy, most often of not knowing it all.

Sure, anywhere you turn you can find colloquial uses of a word that connote something more than the literal definition of it. But I think we need to be careful around abusing this term (a concern that extends to the prevalence of other therapy/psychology terms used … loosely … in society).

So let’s talk about why.

A little story

The most recent Reddit post I saw that inspired me to finally write out these thoughts came from someone who self-identified as “early 20s” just starting out on her career. The post found this poor soul crying on the floor of her office bathroom after a tough meeting with a client where she was asked a rapid-fire series of questions that she didn’t know how to answer.

Her post ended with the supposition that she’s maybe dealing with Imposter Syndrome. That she feels like she’s working hard but just can’t cut it.

Before moving on: I want to assure you that in no way am I making light of the situation. We can all point to a time where we felt the deep discomfort of being on the spot with nothing but the air around us to grasp. It sucks. Whether you cried, went home and had a scotch, or took it out at the gym, we’ve all had our version of the bathroom floor.

On this post, the vast majority of the comment section - as is typical - flocked to her corner affirming Imposter Syndrome and how we all deal with it and encouraged her to keep her chin up and … you get the point.

What’s the problem here?

She’s just starting out in her career as a junior. She quite literally does not know everything she needs to know to do her job. Of course she didn’t know how to answer all the questions. Of course she could watch her colleagues with 10 years more experience answer them. No amount of gumption or willpower or drive changes those facts.

Is that a problem? HECK NO. We were all in that same position X number of years ago. No amount of prompt-foo in ChatGPT or even raw learning ability can replace the great equalizer of time.

Was she an imposter? No, I’d say not. She wasn’t trying to deceive anyone.

Did she feel inadequate? From her post, it certainly seems that way.

Was she inadequate? Well now that depends. In a real sense - not a chance. The measuring stick she was using to compare herself was people with 4x her experience, not other juniors. But in a literal sense - yes; she couldn’t answer the questions she needed to, so she was inadequate for the task.

And it’s this dichotomy that makes me believe being too quick to throw the term Imposter Syndrome around is dangerous.

By telling this woman that it’s just Imposter Syndrome, it’s siphoning the energy and attention to a straw man. If it’s just Imposter Syndrome, that’s the end of the story. The problem isn’t you / your knowledge / your skills, it’s just a bogey man in your mind. All you need is confidence. But that’s not the case. She couldn’t answer the questions she needed to answer. There were things she needed to know or learn to do. I’ll come back to this story, but for now I’d argue someone junior in their career would be hard-pressed to be a candidate for real Imposter Syndrome.

As you get more senior, I think the prospect of real Imposter Syndrome rises. Now you have been around the block a few times, you’ve theoretically become an expert in at least some elements of your field (remember, Imposter Syndrome only applies to high performers, so chances are you’ve put in the effort). Looking around at others, it’s then easy to point out how so-and-so knows more about this niche topic than you do while neglecting to see the wealth of shared knowledge you have and the niche things you know more about than them.

But hearkening back to my introductory section, I’d argue that, even then, knowing there’s more to know or do doesn’t rise to the level of Imposter Syndrome until you really hit that threshold of not recognizing your own set of skills and talents.

That’s just the feeling of inadequacy - welcome to being human.

The problem of Imposter Syndrome imposters

My first proposition is that ascribing feelings of inadequacy to Imposter Syndrome can become a crutch. In the case of the young woman above, having more confidence in an insufficient skillset doesn’t get her to the point where she does know the answers to the questions and can do the tasks. It’s time and hard work.

For more senior folks, chasing all the niche fields you don’t know about and attributing the feeling of inadequacy to Imposter Syndrome is a good way to actually end up in Impostersville - you can only know so much.

Knowing your gaps and being realistic in your expectations around how many and what gaps you have is how you close them and keep your sanity. Everyone knows you can’t know it all or do it all, but then we turn around and think we should know it or do it and we call it Imposter Syndrome. I call it silliness.

I would argue instead of preaching how Imposter Syndrome is a horrible and unavoidable affliction on all of us poor tech workers, we should have that discussion. Help people find realistic measurements for themselves to set attainable goals. Help remind folks that the blogs and the LinkedIn posts and the conference presentations are some mix of self-serving endeavors and products of potentially hundreds of hours of work.

Would you have spent hundreds of hours on that blog topic? No? Is it because you’re lazy and you should have? No? Is it because you need to learn/know/do other things? Yes? Well, do you think knowing/learning/doing that thing is something you need for your job or personal goals? No?

Then don’t worry about knowing it or doing it.

That knowledge or skills gap that’s a perceived in adequacy is only an inadequacy if you actually need to have it. That’s the definition. If you don’t need it, then it’s just something you don’t have. Big whoop. Chances are you don’t find your (likely) inability to play the bagpipes an inadequacy, right? The same thing applies here, even to things that are within your field of work or interest.

Trying to address a gap as Imposter Syndrome doesn’t concern itself with that - it slaps a coat of paint on it and moves on. Instead, you could be free from the feeling of inadequacy by realizing it’s not an inadequacy at all. Or, if you find after introspection that it is an area you need or legitimately want, then you can come up with a plan. The point is, calling it Imposter Syndrome lets us run away from action.

And look, y’all – I’m talking to myself here, too.

I found myself at this crossroads not long ago. There was something that was bugging me, it had been bugging me for a little while, and it was stressing me out that I had this perceived deficiency. So what could I do about it? Well, I could stay on the same path of just having it bug me and stress me while futilely trying to convince myself I’m just being hard on myself. I could decide that it really is a gap I need to close and make a plan to address it. I could decide that it’s something I want in the future but I have other priorities now and set a date to reevaluate it (and stop worrying about it now). Or, I could decide it’s not something I need to fix even if it’s not perfect and… you guessed it: stop worrying about it.

My second proposition is more of a 1a than something new. I think by focusing on Imposter Syndrome we’re promoting the wrong type of confidence and directing people to look under the wrong rocks. Confidence is good, you should have it and you should build it in others. But confidence should also be grounded in reality. You shouldn’t have a blind confidence that “I’m OK because everyone feels this way, too,” you should have confidence because you’ve actually taken time to know yourself.

A focus on confidence to overcome Imposter Syndrome only asks you to account for your successes. But none of us are perfect. We have a lot of gaps and mistakes, and it’s up to us to take those and make them fertile ground for successes later (if we even need to, as discussed above). If we simply ignore them, they’ll just continue to grow and weigh us down.

So instead of simply willing ourselves into thinking we’re awesome just the way we are, we should sit in our messes and untangle the webs of our feelings (and the factual realities) of inadequacy. In the untangling, we can discover the buried successes we’ve had and use them to mark how far we’ve come. We can find all the leaves and dead bugs caught in the web that we don’t need to worry about and torch them. We can also use the past successes as anchors and the untangled webbing of our legitimate shortcomings with purpose instead of angst to reach a new set of achievements.

Well now I’m just waxing poetic and probably not in a good way.

Conclusion

As pedantic as it may be, I think we’re using Imposter Syndrome incorrectly and I think that hyper-focus is doing us more harm than good. We’ll all feel inadequate, it’s part of the human experience. That doesn’t make it Imposter Syndrome.

Instead, the feelings should be discussed as opportunities to mature and evaluate what we really should feel inadequate about, using the good things as spurs to drive us forward and dumping all the rest. We’ll never have enough time or brain cells to do it all, calling inadequacy Imposter Syndrome just makes us spend our energy on the wrong thoughts and actions.

More than that, large portions of people saying they have Imposter Syndrome at the junior level likely don’t have enough experience to actually have it. You are inadequate, and that’s OK, that’s why you’re junior. Take a more realistic view of what you should know at your level, what you need to know for the next level, and for the love of bits and bytes don’t compare yourselves to mid-level or senior folks when they can do things you can’t. Make a plan to learn how to do them on a realistic timeline (newsflash: that’s probably years not months). And when you do know how to do those things, pass it on to the next set of people who will be standing where you currently stand.

So now you can decide if this was worth the time, thanks for coming to my blog.

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