Interview Prep

Imposter syndrome in technical interviews

Imposter syndrome has a favorite moment: the night before a technical interview. You scroll the company, read about the team, and the voice gets loud. Everyone here is smarter than you. They are going to find out you do not really know this.

It is an incredibly common feeling, and it is usually a bad guide to reality.

Researching the team makes it worse

There is a specific reason looking up your interviewers backfires. You are comparing your inside view to their outside view. You see all your own doubts and gaps. You see only their polished public output, the talks, the projects, the highlight reel.

That comparison is rigged. You are measuring your bloopers against their best moments. Of course you come up short.

The gap is always wider in your head

There is a constant distance between what I know and what I think I should know. For most people that gap feels enormous, and it feels like proof they are behind. It is not. Almost everyone competent carries the same gap.

That has a name. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with less skill tend to overestimate themselves, while more skilled people, who can see how much there is to know, tend to underestimate themselves. If you are worried you are not good enough, that worry is weak evidence that you are more capable than you feel, not less.

Interviewers are not looking for perfect

The deepest misread of a technical interview is thinking it is a test of whether you have every answer memorized. Most interviewers are watching how you think. How you break down a problem, what questions you ask, how you recover when you are unsure.

I am not certain, here is how I would find out is a strong answer, not a weak one. Faking certainty is the actual red flag.

The feeling that you are about to be exposed is not data. It is a known glitch that shows up loudest when you care and when you have been comparing yourself to other people's highlight reels. You were invited because someone saw enough. Walk in as that person.