I've never had impostor syndrome, but I imagine it comes from not realizing that everyone is finite and has a finite amount of time to experience the universe. But the universe is infinite, so you can never know everything there is to know. Even if you limit it to a narrow field like programming, the infinitude is still there. The universe is literally infinite in every respect; you cannot escape it. No matter how small you limit your focus, there is an infinite amount of information to learn in that thing. I think studying fractals gave me this insight, but it's not hard to realize that the universe itself has the same property that no matter how carefully you examine some aspect of it, the complexity is never eliminated. In fact it only increases.
I've never had imposter syndrome either. I don't really relate to your fractal example. My experience was when I was 13, my older cousin was bragging that he'd used up all the memory on his trs-80 making an adventure game (BASIC). I was very impressed until I saw his program. It was all if/else statements, he hadn't used any subroutines. I was astounded. That was an early lesson to me, no one knows all this stuff. That and the realization that these damn machines make fools of us all at one time or another :)
Everyone is just at different stages of learning. When you've been doing this long enough, you've forgotten a lot you knew before. At some level, 'refreshing your memory' about what your forgot is not much different than learning it the first time.
Yeah, agreed. I guess the real point I want to make is that you need to forgive yourself for not knowing everything, and don't delude yourself into thinking your value as a human being is based on how much you know about computer stuff. It's a fine thing to learn, and we have a professional responsibility to learn on a constant basis, but if your whole identity is defined by your work, then you're building your house on sand.
