On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:55:47AM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote [edited]: > One of the things that came up during the DebConf talk on Women in > Debian is that a lot of women (and men as well) are affected by > impostor syndrome. This is when you feel that you are not good enough > to "be here" (wherever here is, Debian, FOSS, your job, etc). > > I've personally been affected by this many times, I was affected by it > when I started contributing to Debian, when I gave my first talk in my > local LUG, when I gave my first talk at DebConf, and even recently > when I started my work at Google.
I've had similar experiences. > I think that it's important to > recognize when we are affected by it, to try to fight it as much as > possible, but it's also necessary for us to help each other and > particularly help new comers in getting over it. I've found that talking with peers about one's feelings of impostor syndrome can help a lot -- and even more so, of course, when your peers acknowledge such feelings as normal. > One thing that was suggested during the talk is to list the amount of > knowledge that someone needs in order to do a certain activity (like > packaging, or translating, or fixing bugs, or triaging bugs, etc) and > then have pointers to more info about those tasks. I don't know how > much difference this could make, but I don't see any damage in trying > it and seeing if it helps someone realize their worthiness. For sure it helps to know what expectations one is evaluated against. It's kind of difficult to describe expectations for a volunteer role, where the degree of involvement among people varies dramatically, but it's certainly worthwhile. -- Every great idea is worthless without someone to do the work. --Neil Williams -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130816175243.GH4946@mobee
