 Good afternoon. I'm going to be talking to you today about how your brain is terrible. And everything is terrible because you're getting all of your messages from your brain. So the TLDR, in case you wanted to fall asleep at some point, is everything is absolutely horrible. But not so bad. So to give you a bit of background about myself, my name is Jessica Rose, and I generally have to apologize for being a little bit too chirpy in talks. Mostly because I'm based in the UK and everybody's out there for reasons, just now. But Ireland seems to be a little bit chirpier, so I'm going to pass right by that. I work in developer relations, and this is a job which I'm firmly convinced absolutely should not exist. I get to go out to developer communities and talk to people about what they're building and give talks and give workshops. I get to spend all of my time talking to people, generally people who are much smarter than me, about what kinds of things they want to do in the future with technology. And this would be the best job in the world, but I'm generally talking to people who are a lot smarter than me. And that can be from terrifying to intimidating. And this talk really came from a lot of emotional interactions I had with talking to people who are much, much smarter than me. And because it's a little bit personal, I'm always really interested in hearing what other people have to say about cognitive biases or what they have to say about their own experiences with intellect. So I've got a tiny Twitter handle at the bottom of my slides. If you don't want to chat to me after or you don't want to chat at the question and answer, my DMs are open, you can go ahead and say that talk was the worst thing I ever heard. It's terrible. You could tell me your own story. You can do whatever makes you happy. Before I got into technology, before I got this incredible kind of bonkers job that couldn't exist, I worked in education and I worked in language and linguistics. So I taught people linguistics and taught them about language learning. And your brain is amazing. Your brain is this weird, wet lump of meat that gives you everything you experience. And there's a concept from language learning that I think is really, really valuable for technologists. And I hadn't seen anyone else talk about it. Has anybody heard of the zone of proximal development? There's like another language nerd in the back going, yeah, yeah. Vygotsky, who is an absolute dude if you're into linguists, went ahead and said that everybody's mind has a sweet spot. Your brain wants to learn. You want to learn new things. But to do that, you need to be doing activity in a specific part of your skill set. If you're doing things that are far too easy for you, you can do the thing. I think this is familiar for everyone who's ever done any development. If somebody gives you something you've done 100 times before, you can do the thing. You're not going to have a lot of motivation. You're not thrilled. And no real learning is going to take place for folks who haven't slogged through a development process that isn't exciting and they've done it a million times before. I often talk about this in RPG terms. If you're level 50 and you're still bopping level one monsters, you're not getting anything done. But on the other hand, if you go up far too high, if you're dealing with learning tasks or development tasks, any kind of tasks that are too high above your current level, not only are you not going to be able to do them, there's no real meaningful learning that can happen at that level. And furthermore, you're going to really mess up your motivation. You can jump up there temporarily if you've got a great teacher helping you preview things. But if you're consistently levels and levels above where you need to be, you're just going to make yourself miserable. Your brain desperately wants you to get in this sweet spot, which Vygotsky labeled sort of the level you're at plus one. And this would be great. We now know that there's a space in your brain where you're getting learning done. There's a space in your skill set that your brain wants to be at. Your happy brain is happiest right there in the zone of proximal development. And this would be fantastic. This would be absolutely perfect, but your brain is absolutely garbage at self assessment. You have no idea how good you are. And you have no idea how good you are relative to your own peers. And a lot of that comes down to cognitive biases. As a former teacher, I'll confess that teachers are just as lazy as students. So of course, I just copy and pasted the Wikipedia for cognitive bias. It's a pattern of DV. I don't care about any of that. My husband gave me a much better definition that I like a lot more. A cognitive bias is when your brain uses bad data to make terrible conclusions, which you then fall in love with. This is something your brain made for you and you are never going to let this go. Cognitive biases are great, well and terrible. In many of the same ways, our brains are great and terrible. But I'm going to start out talking about imposter syndrome as the first one. Does anybody know what imposter syndrome is? Amazing. For those of you who don't, I like to describe imposter syndrome as this cold, sick, wet, sad feeling that you have no idea what you're doing, but everybody else around you, they seem fine. You're freaking out, they're not freaking out. Oh God, people are going to realize I'm a fraud, I'm going to get fired, I'm going to lose my flat, I'll have to live outside, and it will rain constantly because I live in England. I think the dictionary term is the feeling that you're an imposter and you don't deserve to be where you are. But that definition is super fluffy. Oh, it's all feelings. And I want to talk about stuff that's a little bit harder. We're a technical audience, we deal with technological processes. What does imposter syndrome actually do? And luckily, folks love to research this. So I'm in Clance first piloted the study on imposter syndrome in the 70s. And they said that imposter syndrome had these effects that they found. I'm in Clance studied high achieving women who reported feeling imposter syndrome. They said, you know what, the folks in our study, they say that they report feelings of inadequacy. Which is great, it's nice to have that data point. But I feel like that's kind of covered in the definition. Hey, imposter syndrome, you feel inadequate. Yeah. They also reported that people who felt that they had imposter syndrome avoided displays of target skills. So if you thought that you weren't a great PHP developer, you're probably going to make sure that you're not writing PHP code in front of your peers. Found that people just like language learning and just like linguists, if you don't know a word or if you don't have a task, you'll find really clever ways to get around it. They found that respondents in their study used soft skills. They used charm and social mitigation. And this was really interesting. These women who were high achieving, who didn't feel like they knew what they were doing, were nicer. I'm mostly okay with that. And the thing that I thought was really interesting is they found that their respondents who reported feeling imposter syndrome reported doing more work. They spent more time on these core skills. And they spent more energy trying to upskill to get around their feelings. I like this one. Who is impacted by imposter syndrome? So I'm in Clance, did a study of high achieving women. I'm going to do a very scientific, get your hands up. You can put them up only a little, but who's ever felt like you don't know what you're doing and everybody else absolutely does. Very sneaky like look around to see who does not have their hands up. This will be great in about 20 minutes. I love how everybody's like, yeah, okay. So I'm in Clance. I said, you know what? We think that high achieving women most often suffer from imposter syndrome. And I think I'm, that's great. Clance, that's great. Thank you for that. But y'all kind of set out to study high achieving women. Let's go to the next study. And Verifasquez and Corona, they came back around in the early 2000s and they said, you know what? We've gone back. We've done a little bit more math. We think high achieving women of color are more likely to be impacted. And then I didn't want to have like 40 slides up here. So I'll just Google it yourselves, but I promise you, most of the research says that high achieving visible minorities who are underrepresented in their areas most likely report feeling that they have imposter syndrome, which would be great. But we did a quick and dirty sampling and we found that like one to everybody, pretty much everybody was like, yeah, I felt like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm faking it. So what's with that mismatch? What's with people statistically reporting that underrepresented folks feel this more often and are very scientific hands up sampling finding a really wide range of folks? I think that one of the issues is the reporting involves saying, I feel. And for folks that don't often use emotative language, I think that guys are often discouraged from saying, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing because starting with I feel anything seems to be really scary and kind of dangerous as a guy. It seems exhausting and I have no advice for y'all other than make everyone else stop doing that. That seems terrible. I think in an environment where you need to say, I feel like I'm not supported and I feel like I don't know what I'm doing to get better support, that failing to recognize that men feel the same way is really, really not serving them well. I think another big reason you see more underrepresented folks talking about imposter syndrome and reporting it has to do with representation and reflections of success. If I am a yellow, kind of gross, yellow smiley face and I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, things are not great right now, but I look around and I look at my professional contexts, I look at my peers and they sound like me and they look like me, and none of them are freaking out. So even if I'm not feeling especially well, it's probably fine, like Bill, Bill's just like me and he's cool. It's fine. But if I'm not well represented in my environment, if I'm a little cat-head emoji and I look around and say, do you know what, I have no idea what I'm doing. What's going on? What are my peer groups like? What's my office like? I look around and I say, I have no idea what I'm doing. Everyone else seems fine. And everyone else does seem fine. But I can't really see myself in their success. Bill's great. Bill's such a good dude to work with. But he doesn't sound like me and he doesn't look like me and we didn't go to the same schools. Having somebody around you and having environment that reflects success that looks like you is a really great sort of external sign that everything might be okay. I think on some level, recognizing that internalizing discriminatory messages are really common. And not necessarily just in technology, but folks who are high achieving and underrepresented get a lot of messages that this is not for them. This is not their space. They don't belong here. And at some point, taking those messages on board and really internalizing them is something almost everyone's going to do. I think that technology, very clearly, I think this is not a spoiler, but I think that technology is amazing. I think that technology is doing really interesting things to imposter syndrome that's not especially always great. Social media gives us an incredible opportunity to see and curated real-world experience through someone else's perspective. And it's really tempting to look at our peers and look at our heroes and look at our professional equals and compare ourselves to that. Before social media, if you wanted to look at somebody's dinner or if you wanted to look at what people are doing this week, you had to look at maybe politicians, lifestyle of the rich and famous. You only got mass media looks. Now, I could probably find out what y'all have been doing this week for every single person here. And it's so... Oh, you're a much better off than I am. And the difficulty there is this invites you to compare the whole of your lived experience to a very carefully curated stream. If this talk goes really well, I'm going to brag about it on every single one of these. If this goes terribly and I leave this room in tears, no one is ever going to hear about that across social... Maybe Tumblr. But looking at other people's experiences is a great way to see what they're doing and a really, really terrible way to see how you rank against them. But I made a bunch of silly promises in the abstract. In the abstract, I promised that I would tell you about ways to cope with imposter syndrome, which seems like a pretty big ask. I'm going to tell you ways to debug your brain being trash. Sort of. But you all are very nice people, right? It was amazing because this side of the room, people were like, yeah, yeah, that side of the room. Somebody in the back was like, no. You're all very nice people, right? So of course, the first thing you care about is how to make other people feel better when they might have these problems, right? Increasingly sarcastic, like, no, I don't know. Fix it for me. The first thing I would lead with is a warning. When somebody comes to you with a problem, don't tell them it's imposter syndrome for them. I do a lot of work with university student hackathons and the older I get, the more adorable they get. I swear they're like five now. They're just like happy puppies. I was working on something at a hackathon that I don't like doing and it's not at my skill set. So like a well-adjusted person, I was berating myself quietly. This is terrible. You're terrible. All of this is wrong. When the world's youngest 18-year-old boy, just like an absolute cherub, walked up and said, yes, yes, it's okay. You're not bad at that. You have imposter syndrome. And he's alive because he was the world's cutest child. Like I didn't want to... But when people are coming to you, take them at face value. If someone's coming to you as a direct report and they're telling you, I don't feel supported in the workplace. Don't tell them that they have imposter syndrome. If somebody's telling you, I'm not really fitting in with my company or somebody's telling you, I don't know what I'm doing professionally. People can be telling you that they're in a place with a poor culture fit. They can be telling you that they're not being supported. They can be telling you that they need to work on specific parts of their skillset. If you go ahead and say, no, that's just imposter syndrome. That's a really jerky way to erase everything they've just told you. Say, hey, I'm bringing you a very special concern. No, no, you're not. This is actually something that's broken with you and you need to go fix it. Unless you are the world's cutest 18-year-old, this is a terrible way to go about the world. I think he's probably unlikely to do it again. But one thing that you can do to lay the groundwork for people overall feeling less miserable is give very concrete, actionable feedback all over the place. Who has complained about something? Who's complained about an open-source project when it hasn't worked? Who's complained on social media? I love how a lot of people are lying. They're like, no, not one time, but come on. Who here has taken the time to give positive feedback to somebody who fixed something or built a feature when stuff went, oh, Drupal. For folks watching the slide video later, Drupal folks are apparently the loveliest people in the world and about 90% of them raised their hand and went, yay. Going ahead and reaching out and doing this whenever it's appropriate is an incredible way to make sure that people are getting positive feedback to combat their brains giving them terrible messaging. And this one's not risk-free. If you're in a place where you feel comfortable, go ahead and model a bit of vulnerability. Say, hey, sometimes I have no idea what I'm doing. And the great thing about this is if you do this in an even voice and you sound confident, people are never gonna believe you. I often give this talk and folks come up afterwards to say, hey, you've really got things together, which is not true. I think at some point during this talk I confess to crying in the bath. Like, that is super not true. But if you're willing to say, hey, sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about, folks are very rarely gonna be terrible about that. Fixing it for other people, great. Don't be a jerk. Give them positive reinforcement. Don't tell people that they have imposter syndrome unless you really, really want to die. But fixing it for yourself is a little bit more challenging. What can you do to combat your brain giving you bad messaging? Independent assessments, an incredible way to do this. Has anybody taken very, very useful industry certifications? Has anybody taken less useful? Yeah. If you do find an incredibly useful industry certification, taking one of these is a great way to get actual hard numbers to say, hey, I'm 87% competent. Maybe I should take a nap. But in the absence of meaningful assessment on things like this, doing things like mentorship, doing things like teaching are an incredible way to get feedback from someone else that you know what you're doing and you're passing that information on meaningfully. The difficult thing is you can give your brain better data, but your brain's still gonna go ahead and make garbage conclusions with that data. It's just what brains do. One thing that can be really helpful is to recognize the patterns. When you get to the point you say, oh, I have no idea what I'm doing. Everyone else seems fine. I'm gonna get caught. I'm going to be humiliated. Then I'm going to be fired. Then I'm going to lose my flat. Then I'm going to have to live outside, and then I will reign on me all the time. That progressive gah is one of the things that can be really easy to sort of sidestep. So when you do see yourself, like check in with yourself occasionally, say when you do find yourself saying, I have no idea what I'm doing. Everything's terrible. That's a really good time to get off the panic express. And the difficult thing is oftentimes you need to walk away from what you're doing. You need to take a break from the thing that's making things really difficult and do anything else for just a minute. My slides are gorgeous because I have designers who are much, much better at this than me. And I actually confess to my designers jokingly what I do when things get really terrible. Where's that? If anybody else eats in the bath when you get really, really unhappy, could you please come see me after this so I can text my husband and tell him I'm not gross? I don't necessarily recommend eating cake in the bath, but you do need to find something that works really well for you. If you find that taking a break and doing some tabletop gaming is what gets you back off of that panic ledge, absolutely do that. 20 minutes, do that. I see again and again people claiming that they exercise when they're stressed. And I don't know any of those people. I'm fairly sure they're lying. But if you are actually one of those people, go take a short run. Like it's all about taking a break from those messages that your brain is giving you that you are never going to be able to do the thing. And one thing I'd add on top of this is I found that video games tend to not help at all. I have no idea what the deal is, but any time I say, oh, I'm going to go ahead and take a five minute break and I'm just going to play a couple rounds of Civ 5 and I'll go right back to doing my work. I've never had that work. And chatting to other folks, I find that video games are often not the way forward. If you can absolutely be trusted to put video games down after 20 minutes, great break. Also come and tell me how you do it. I've been talking a lot about imposter syndrome is just your brain being terrible and it's always going to be terrible. And even if you get better dated on top of it, it's going to be terrible. And even if you take breaks from that messaging, it's still going to be terrible. So everything's kind of terrible. But I want to take a little bit of a step back and recontextualize. I want to look at another cognitive bias and see if maybe imposter syndrome's not terrible, terrible. Maybe it's just terrible. Eims and Clance, when they're talking about imposter syndrome, they talked about these feelings of inadequacy and that sucks. Avoiding displays of target skills, not showing off the things that you need to do more, that's not great. But I love this. The idea that if you have imposter syndrome, you're being less of a jerk to get by. Yeah, if everybody wants to make up for feeling insecure by being lovely, I am super okay with that. And this, increased diligence, doing more work to get around the thing you don't like or the thing you don't feel good enough at. I love this a lot. I want to talk about another cognitive bias really quickly. Has anybody ever used lemon juice as invisible ink? For those of you who don't, great. Take some lemon juice, write on a paper, find a non-LED light, and then it'll show up when you expose it to the heat. Way back in the dim days of the 90s, a gentleman decided to cover his face in lemon juice and then robbed some banks in the afternoon. And when he was caught, he expressed a great deal of surprise that he was able to be identified. Because the video you see, he would be invisible. And when I first read this, I'm going to cover my face in lemon juice, I'm going to go in there, I'm going to rob the banks, they're never catching me, it's a perfect crime. I was like, oh honey. But to Stanford researchers, Dunning and Krueger, they saw the same thing, and they were aware that grant money is real. Whereas, I would have just made a quiet, strangled sound, Dunning and Krueger said, hey, hey, hey, look at this. I like to imagine them over breakfast, maybe on a veranda, great fruit spoons and all that. looking at the newspaper, which is like, hey, Dunning, yes, yes, Kruger, do you think stupid people know they're stupid? Let's get a bunch of grant money and let's check. And it's marvelous, because if you look up the abstract, it includes the text, too stupid to know they're stupid. So I think we all know how this is gonna go. They got about 2,500 undergraduate students and members of the general public to take a very, very general aptitude test. If any of you are Americans and you've applied for a really crappy job, you've probably taken one of these. And they went ahead, had people take the test, and then took the paper away and gave them another piece of paper. Said, do you know what? We're not gonna give you your test results quite yet, but you've just finished the test. Show me on this graph how you think you performed relative to your peers. And I love this, because quartile is massively of underused word. They found that the actual test scores were very, very predictable. This is a predictable curve for a test. But when you ask people, hey, how did you do? And Dunning and Kruger were sweethearts. They didn't say stupid as often as I will. They said the unskilled. And they found that the most terminally unskilled rated themselves artificially high. And that the more talented you became, the more likely you were to underrate your own skill set. I love this, and I hate this, because it is actually saying that people who are unskilled do not know it. They have zero visibility around it. The first time somebody told me about this, I made a quiet, strangled scream, because I used to work with that guy, and it was fine. They went ahead and said, do you know what, here are conclusions. We think that the unskilled are holy and completely unable to recognize their own lack of skill. They do not know, but to make it better. And for those of you, I won't ask you to raise your hands, but you can go ahead and make a panicked face. If any of you have ever worked with someone like this, you also know that the unskilled are absolutely unable to see genuine skill in other people, lacking the skill and lacking it to such great extent that comprehension of different skill levels is completely alien to these folks. And again, that's fine, but it is actually fine because there's hope. The unskilled can move past their own lack of skill. The unskilled, once they recognize their own lack of skill, which they are never gonna do because we come back to point one, but if they ever did it, if folks ever had a come to Jesus talk with themselves about their own lack of skill, they could move past that and work to develop their skills. And this is great, this is super great. I think this is marvelous. So for me and for other folks out there who are constantly worried that they're not good enough, that they have no idea what they're doing, that everything's terrible, that we're frauds and we're gonna be found out, we're alone because people who are genuinely unskilled, they go to sleep at night and sleep the dreams of the just. But I think maybe that's okay. I've been telling you again and again about how imposter syndrome is your brain giving you garbage information. I think that's still true. But I think imposter syndrome, I think this feeling that you don't know what you're doing and that everything's terrible, I don't think it's garbage information. I think this is a garbage error message. When you get the, oh God, I have no idea what I'm doing, that's your brain passing you a really poorly written error message that you're not incompetent. Every time you get this, this is too much, this is too far, this is a great sign that you're edging closer and closer to your mind being into the zone of proximal development. You're getting closer and closer to meaningful learning with every they're going to catch me that you feel deep in your soul. And I've given this talk a couple times and it's been really interesting. I'm so interested in people's responses and almost always I get people coming up afterwards and say, hey, so thanks for the talk which is you have to say that it's polite. I say, well, I've actually heard of imposter syndrome before, but that's not my problem. You see, I know that other people have imposter syndrome but I'm actually rubbish. And that's difficult because when you first hear about imposter syndrome, you've got a great, oh, that's what that is. I'm gonna ignore it the next couple of times. But feelings aren't as easy to ignore as error messages. Those feelings as they continue to come back feel more and more real. I don't know what I'm doing. Everything's terrible. I don't know what I'm doing. Everything's terrible. Ignoring that kind of alarm is really difficult. Checking in with yourself regularly and letting yourself know that you're not that special. There's no kind of magical meta imposter syndrome. It's your brain giving you the same terrible messages. And don't worry, you're no more rubbish than the next person. If you were actually that terrible, you would have no idea. So the next time that you feel like you're a fake and you're a fraud and you're absolutely gonna get caught out, I'd love if you could recontextualize that. If you could think of yourself not so much as a fraud, as a con artist, you know you're terrible, but everybody else is terrible. And you're one of the few people who's actually parsing this error message into something really valuable. When your brain says, oh, no, it's terrible. You're aware on some level, hopefully lots of levels, that this is your brain saying, hey, we're learning things. Everything's mostly okay, but I'm gonna keep doing this just to mess with you. Thank you so much. I almost always get a question about how do I deal with somebody with Dunning Kruger in a professional environment? And either you just interact with them less or quit your job. Those are literally the only things you could do. You can't leave them like hints. You just, thank you all so much.