Study Finds 58% of Tech Professionals Feel Like Frauds

Developers run the world. They are among the most accomplished and respected professionals, and yet half of them feel their successes are undeserved. According to a new informal study from workplace social media site Blind, 58 percent of people with technology-focused careers grapple with intense feelings of Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome was first defined in 1978 by psychologists Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance as “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” While these people “are highly motivated to achieve,” they also “live in fear of being ‘found out’ or exposed as frauds.” Sounds familiar?

Feeling like you don’t deserve the job you’re in is more common than you think. According to a 2011 research published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science, an estimated 70 percent of people experience imposter syndrome at some point in their lives.

To get a glimpse of how prevalent imposter syndrome is in the tech community, Blind surveyed thousands of tech professionals using the Blind app. Blind is an anonymous workplace social network for tech workers to discuss, debate, and gossip about compensation, workplace culture, corporate policies, sexual harassment, and more.

Blind’s user base includes 29,000 Amazon employees, 6,000 from Apple, 7,000 from Facebook, 11,000 from Google, 44,000 from Microsoft, and 8,000 from Uber.

Between Aug. 27, 2018, and Sep. 5, 2018, Blind asked its users one question in a survey “Do you suffer from Imposter Syndrome?” A total of 10,402 users on the app responded.

Seventy-two percent of Expedia employees say they experienced imposter syndrome, the highest among companies with at least 100 employee responses, followed by Salesforce (66.88 percent), then Amazon (64.48 percent).

Only 45.45 percent of Apple employees experienced imposter syndrome. The other two companies with less than 50 percent of employees experiencing imposter syndrome were eBay (49.69 percent) and Cisco (46.67 percent).

Over 58% percent of the respondents reported suffering from the impostor syndrome.

The post Study Finds 58% of Tech Professionals Feel Like Frauds appeared first on The HR Digest.

Source: New feed