A 2024 Korn Ferry survey of 10,000 professionals found that 71% of U.S. CEOs show symptoms of imposter syndrome. Which means the people who run the companies doing the hiring feel like frauds. That should recalibrate something.<\/p>\n
Imposter syndrome in tech isn’t a soft topic. It has measurable consequences. A 2024 study at HCII (arXiv:2404.10194) tracked final-year computer science students with eye-tracking hardware and heart rate monitors and found that students with higher impostor syndrome scores spent more time on code problems and solved fewer of them correctly. The feeling of being a fraud is not just emotionally unpleasant. It degrades performance on the exact tasks you’re being evaluated on.<\/p>\n
I don’t think we talk about that second part enough. Most imposter syndrome content stays at the level of “you’re not alone, believe in yourself.” That’s true, and mostly useless. This piece tries to be more specific about what’s actually happening and what tends to help, based on what I’ve seen in engineering hiring and what candidates tell us through LastRoundAI.<\/p>\n
The classic description of imposter syndrome is the gap between external performance and internal experience. You’re getting good reviews; you feel like a fraud. You ship features; you assume anyone could have done that. Got promoted? They must have lower standards than you assumed.<\/p>\n
That’s real, and plenty of engineers recognize it. What gets discussed less is the behavioral output of that state. When you feel like a fraud, you stay quiet in meetings to avoid exposing yourself. You preface every idea with “this is probably wrong, but.” You over-engineer solutions to compensate for feeling underqualified. You avoid applying to roles or speaking at conferences because you’re convinced you don’t meet some bar you can’t quite define.<\/p>\n
None of those behaviors read well externally. The silence looks like disengagement. The hedging reads as low confidence. The perfectionism causes delays. The career avoidance keeps you in roles you’ve outgrown.<\/p>\n
In interviews specifically, the effect is stark. It’s hard to answer “tell me about a time you led a technically difficult project” when your brain is simultaneously tagging every accomplishment with an asterisk. (I don’t have hard data on how this specifically affects PM or design candidates versus engineers. My observations are engineering-skewed.)<\/p>\n
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described the impostor phenomenon in 1978 in their paper on high-achieving women. The original framing was about high achievers who dismissed their own success as luck or deception. It’s since been documented across demographics, though it’s more pronounced in contexts where you’re in an underrepresented group or where the learning curve is steep and public.<\/p>\n
Tech hits multiple triggers simultaneously. The field changes fast enough that senior engineers are constantly working with tools they learned last year. You’re always next to people who seem more fluent in whatever is currently important. And technical interviews are one of the rare professional formats where you’re asked to perform under observation. That combination is genuinely hard.<\/p>\n
There’s also a structural dynamic that I think gets underweighted. If you’re underrepresented in your team or company, the Korn Ferry research suggests confidence decreases with seniority rather than increasing. Senior leaders in their sample reported lower self-assurance than junior staff, despite higher competence ratings. That’s a counterintuitive finding and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it at least suggests that more years in the industry doesn’t automatically resolve this.<\/p>\n
Engineers who work through imposter syndrome rarely point to a single insight. More often it’s accumulated evidence that contradicts the internal narrative. A few things come up repeatedly.<\/p>\n
Seeing that respected peers also don’t know things. The first time a staff engineer you admire says “I have no idea, let me look it up” in a meeting, something shifts. The image of expertise as complete knowledge starts to crack. What you start to see instead is that experience mostly means being comfortable in the space of not knowing.<\/p>\n
Getting external evidence and actually allowing it to count. This sounds simple and isn’t. A common pattern is discounting positive feedback systematically (“they’re just being nice”) while accepting negative signals at face value. Deliberately keeping a record of positive evidence and revisiting it doesn’t fix imposter syndrome, but it does give you something to argue against the internal voice with.<\/p>\n
Practicing the high-stakes situations that trigger the feeling most. For a lot of engineers, that’s interviews. The evaluation format, the time pressure, the expectation of clear verbal explanation under observation, all of it activates exactly the fraud feeling. Rehearsing lowers the novelty. Lower novelty means less of your cognitive load goes to managing anxiety, which means more goes to actually answering the question.<\/p>\n
What we notice in mock interviews<\/p>\n
Candidates using LastRoundAI for mock interview practice tend to describe the same shift: the first session feels exposing, the second feels manageable, and by the third or fourth session they’re focused on the content of their answers rather than the feeling of being watched. The format stops being the threat. That’s the point. You can’t think clearly about a system design problem if part of your brain is running threat-assessment on the interviewer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
I want to address one common piece of advice that I think is partially right but often lands wrong. “You were hired for a reason. Trust the company’s judgment.” That’s true in the technical sense. They did evaluate you and make an offer. But it can feel hollow if the hiring process felt like a game you happened to win rather than an accurate signal of your abilities.<\/p>\n
What’s more actionable is this: the hiring process, whatever its flaws, is looking for whether you can contribute to a specific team on a specific set of problems. You passed that filter. The question isn’t whether you’re universally smart. It’s whether you can do this job, with these people. Most of the time, you can.<\/p>\n
And the reverse is also true. Plenty of technically strong engineers don’t get offers because they communicated poorly under pressure, not because they lacked ability. Imposter syndrome hurts you most not during the work itself but during the interview, the presentation, the performance review conversation. Those are exactly the situations where practicing, rehearsing, and managing the anxiety state matters most.<\/p>\n
Affirmations and “you’re not a fraud” reassurance probably don’t help much. They’re arguing against a feeling using assertions, and feelings don’t respond well to that. What tends to work better is behavioral: doing the thing that triggers the feeling repeatedly until the novelty drops and the feeling diminishes.<\/p>\n
Talking about it openly with colleagues helps more than most people expect. The first time you admit to imposter syndrome in a team setting, you’ll almost always find others who recognize it immediately. That normalization matters because it disrupts the “everyone else has it figured out” story that the feeling depends on.<\/p>\n
If you’re preparing for interviews specifically, the most useful frame is: treat every practice session as a chance to make the format less threatening, not to prove you’re good. The goal isn’t performance. It’s making the situation familiar enough that you can actually think in it. Our mock interview practice<\/a> at LastRoundAI is built on exactly that principle. See also our guide on behavioral interview questions<\/a>, which are the format where imposter syndrome tends to hit hardest since you’re asked to narrate your own accomplishments.<\/p>\n One more thing that I think is underrated: work on the things that are making you feel genuinely unprepared. Adjusting your self-perception is different from building missing skills. Sometimes imposter syndrome is a distorted read of a real signal. If you’re in a role that genuinely requires skills you haven’t built yet, the answer is building them, not adjusting your self-perception. The two things aren’t always separable, but it’s worth asking which is actually true.<\/p>\n You can also check out our guide to passing coding interviews<\/a> if the technical round specifically is where the anxiety spikes, which for a lot of engineers it is.<\/p>\n