Bougie_Birdie

A hammer is beginner friendly, but learning to use a hammer doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to build a house with it.

Well, I'm not a psychologist, so I suppose my interpretation might not be correct - the irony mounts.

But from the graphs you shared, it looks to me like the only people who underestimated themselves were the top performers. And from what I know firsthand with imposter syndrome, a competent person underestimates themselves.

I used hyperbole for effect, so I don't think that if you believe you have zero competence in something because you actually have zero competence means that you're secretly good at something. If you know nothing about plumbing, don't try to install a toilet.

But if you're working in the software factory then you don't actually have zero competence, you probably have formal education and some experience. Having that feeling that you might not be good enough is a sign that you're on the right track.

I felt like that early in my career. I used to think that being a rockstar developer was a good thing, and I'd be happy to describe myself as one.

The thing is, a lot of rockstars are really just churning out heaps of unmaintainable code. They think they have a high degree of proficiency, they're confident in their competence, but there's a disconnect between what they think and what they produce.

It can be a sign of personal improvement to question yourself when you think you're doing great. We owe it to ourselves to ask ourselves critically if we can be doing better. Because if we don't, and we just assume we're awesome, then we'll happily churn out sub-awesome cruft.

The insidious thing is that self-criticism leads to self-doubt, and imposter syndrome can be quite paralyzing. But if you learn to control your criticism instead of allowing your criticism to control you, you can achieve higher heights than rockstardom.

Based on what I know of Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems you're at your most competent when you feel like you're at your least.

So if you're feeling badly because you feel like you don't know enough to do your job, take some time to remind yourself that other people who appear to be confident have no idea what they're doing.

It's fake-it-till-you-make-it all the way down.

Just because a killer confesses to killing someone, doesn't necessarily mean they did the deed.

If a serial killer is into notoriety and self promotion they might be willing to confess to anything. The police might want to shut a bunch of cold cases and the killer will happily admit to them, whether or not they were involved.

This famously happened in the case of Henry Lee Lucas

I'm definitely writing useless git commit messages

For work, I at least include the Jira ticket id

For personal stuff, it's sweeping features stuffed into one commit that barely describes what was changed

Reminds me of this bit

Here's a "fun" tidbit: even as late as the 1980's it was cheaper for films to buy actual human remains than convincing fake skeletons. This happened famously in Poltergeist (1982).

This tidbit is sometimes presented like it's a pro-trans win, but the truth is far from pretty.

If you get caught as a cis-gendered gay man in Iran then you're potentially facing the death penalty. In a legal move that wouldn't exist anywhere else in the world, you can plea-bargain your ding dong into a hoo-hah.

If the state is offering you a choice between mutilation or death, is it even really a choice?

Just so you have a heads up:

If you use yt-dlp like a regular user, you shouldn't have a problem. If you use it to download like a thousand videos at once then YouTube may block you out or rate limit you or something.

If that happens, or that's your use case, then you may need to use a VPN

If you're overly critical of what clothing people wear, does that make you a fash-ist?

When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death!