Undefining Genius: How To Beat Impostor Syndrome
From 2015 to 2017, I worked for one of the world’s largest software companies. Like many corporate employees, my first day at work was dominated by an orientation session, filled with vague platitudes masquerading as advice and thinly veiled self-aggrandizement from HR, interspersed with useful information about benefits, company processes, and financial concerns. The company I was joining is notorious for its difficult hiring practices, and many of the hundreds of us in the room during orientation were still starstruck.
Our orientation leader, in a segment about stress management, asked us a question: “How many of you have experienced impostor syndrome before?” Of 250 or so individuals in the room, about 100 hands cautiously rose.
“Well,” she said, “you’ll all feel it at some point in your time here.”
Impostor syndrome is a feeling of otherness, that you are an outsider who has fooled a group into allowing you in, and it’s only a matter of time before they discover the deception. In the context of the corporate environment, it’s often phrased as “everyone here is a genius except for me.”
For many people this can be a cause of significant background stress. Thrust into a new environment, with external pressure bearing down, many people see themselves as an other. Otherness naturally makes people uncomfortable; without a feeling of familiarity and belonging, many people become easily stressed.
Throughout both my time at that company and my whole career I’ve known many people who have felt impostor syndrome at one time or another. In software, and especially at high-prestige employers, most people are refreshingly open about this experience. Many people say that they overcame impostor syndrome by realizing everyone else was “not as smart as [they] thought.” This is a reasonable encapsulation of how to foster a feeling of belonging in yourself, but it can be distilled even further: undefine genius.
The usage of the word undefine is very deliberate. In the tech world, it is weirdly commonplace to hear people referred to as “geniuses.” Articles cite the genius engineers behind the latest iOS update, or the geniuses devising Facebook’s recommendation systems. It’s a term thrown around awfully casually for one meant to distinguish “extraordinary mental superiority.” The term and all its analogues have lost appropriate context, and as such have lost much of their meaning.
It takes more than saying that “everyone is a genius except me” is a meaningless phrase when the feeling you’re still below others persists. Here is where both the term and concept need to be discarded. Analyzing and ranking people by perceived intelligence, especially in a corporate environment where everyone has undergone significant specialized education throughout their lives, is an exercise in mistake comparisons. A fellow software engineer may be able to debug an Angular error in 5 minutes when it would have taken you hours, but before assuming that it’s because they’re “smarter,” consider context. They may have solved the exact problem before. They might recognize the stack trace or have recently dealt with a similar issue. They might even just have spent a lot more time with Angular than you. None of these things have to do with innate ability, nor are they a remotely reasonable measure of job performance, career advancement potential, or personal worth.
Otherness has many facets beyond intellectual comparisons and impostor syndrome, but few in the corporate environment cause as strong a feeling of stress and alienation. Constant firehoses of vaguely directed accolades reinforce these feelings (“I don’t work on the iOS update, so I must not be a genius”), as does our nature to compare and envy, but I’ve found abandoning “intelligence” as a metric on which people are measured has eased a degree of background stress.
