The Skill Gap and Impostor Syndrome

You're not really an impostor. You're just pretending at it.

Introduction

Have you noticed that it's never the talentless people who get impostor syndrome¹?

I'm mainly basing this on my observations, but I'd be very surprised if it's untrue: The people who tend to worry the most about the quality of their work also tend to be objectively not bad. Meanwhile, the people who toot their own horn the loudest also tend to be the worst by far.

The first seeds of this idea were planted in my mind when I was philosophising about code quality in relation to developer impression. I'd formulated the following blueprint on how to translate developers' words:

• “My code is horrible, and I feel horrible for having had to write it this way” means “The code works”. It might not be readable or maintainable, but if nothing else it works.
• “It was pretty challenging, but overall I'm very satisfied with the result!” means “The code is brilliant”.
• “This code is genius, and I am a genius for having written it” means “Grab the haz-mat suit and three-metre pole”.

Over time, this opinion became much more concise, and much more generally applicable. Now-a-days, I phrase it as follows:

The phrase “my work is not up to my standards” describes the standards much more accurately than the work.

Oh hey, and speaking of standards…

The skill gap

While both the idea and the nomenclature had come to me more-or-less independently, the first time I came across the phrase “Skill gap” was the article of the same name in a game-dev blog. Therein, it was defined thusly:

The skill gap is the difference between your outlook on what is “good creative work” and the quality of your actual output.

“None of you will ever read the real story I've imagined,” continued the writer. “Just the crude translation that I was able to vomit out onto my keyboard.”

This is not the only place I've seen this said, in fact. Ira Glass said pretty much the same:

But there's a gap. For the first couple of years, what you make isn't so good. It's trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it's not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

Thinking about this a bit more, we can realise something: Evaluating work and creating work are not all that tightly inter-linked. It is entirely possible that one's ability to evaluate work (including one's own) is much, much better than one's ability to reach those criteria. Such a person would likely be his- or her-self's own worst critic.

I've seen yet more examples of this! One was a comic² called Chocolat, wherein a newly-turned patissier was bragging about how easy it was to make sweets. I cringed the first time I read this, thinking that nobody could feel this way and make edible sweets. A few pages later, my suspicions turned out to be 100% correct.

Another example –of the opposite side of the coin, but still– was in a TV series called The Good Place. One character decides to use the eternity he now has at his disposal to write his own novel. The result is a 400-page door-stopper, filled with the most horrible prose imaginable. But this is not the important part: the important part is that, not only is the writer completely unaware of his own badness, he's even immune to any attempts to provide useful feedback.

Another example still was a personal discussion in a writing-focused Discord server. Someone claimed to “write barely-readable trash” and “refuse to git gud”. After pushing back on this, however, s/he was all about how “I will always hold anything I do to impossible standards” and how “I can never see the good I do because I'm always focused on how I could be better” and how “Allegedly, people say that I'm good. But in my eyes, I will never be good enough.”.

This yields a promising lead for how to figure out what causes impostor syndrome.

The Impostor Syndrome

Having established that many talented people hold themselves to high standards, we can imagine a person:

• whose standards increase in direct proportion to his/her abilities;
• who holds him- or her-self to said ever-increasing standards;
• and who –most importantly of all– no longer remembers the journey it took to reach this level of expertise;

then it is, not just likely, but deterministically certain that this person will not consider him- or her-self to be an expert. Instead, the most likely feelings will be those of inadequacy, of being an impostor in their own field.

So, if you find yourself wondering if you're good enough for your supposed field of expertise… ask the people around you what their standards are for someone in your position. If they're much lower than yours, you're probably the person described immediately above.

This is more-or-less all I had to say on the matter! Your best Among Us memes in the comments, please.

PS: In case you're wondering about me: No, I've never had impostor syndrome in anything. I'm not remotely humble enough for that.