The imposter thing doesn't go away. But it changes shape.

I spent a lot of my early career waiting for someone to notice I didn't know what I was doing.

Not because I didn't know what I was doing — I did, most of the time, well enough. But there was always a gap between how much confidence the room seemed to expect and how certain I actually felt. The assumption that the gap was visible and damning took years to revise.

The thing about imposter syndrome worth knowing: it doesn't correlate with competence. I've met genuinely mediocre engineers who were absolutely certain of their own ability, and I've met exceptional ones who carried chronic low-level uncertainty about whether they belonged in the rooms they were regularly invited into.

The feeling is, in that sense, useless as a signal about actual competence.

What I've noticed over time is that it changes shape rather than disappearing. The early version is: am I technically good enough? That one fades because experience accumulates and you have evidence to counter it. The version that persists is subtler: am I the right person for this specific thing? Every new domain, every new responsibility, every novel kind of problem reactivates it.

Starting a PhD is activating it in a new form. Am I rigorous enough for academic research? Do I have the patience for the kind of sustained uncertainty a dissertation requires? Will the practitioner lens I'm bringing be an asset or a limitation in academic work?

I don't know the answers yet. I'm choosing to read that uncertainty as appropriate rather than disqualifying.

The most useful reframe I've found: imposter syndrome is a fairly reliable indicator that you're doing something new. The absence of it, in my experience, usually means you're operating in territory you've already mapped. That's not a bad place to be, but it's not the only one worth being in.

If you're feeling it: that's probably not evidence you don't belong. It's probably evidence that what you're doing is genuinely new enough to be worth doing.