This is certainly very real, I feel it quite a bit, I recognize references to this more frequently. And they all tend to assume that imposter syndrome means that people are truly capable.
This is an interesting assumption as true imposters also feel like imposters. I don’t mean con people, they are quite brazen. I mean incompetent people also feel like imposters.
I suppose it’s nice to help false imposters overcome their anxieties. But I’d like to see data on false vs true. Assuming that true imposters are false can lead to just lots of noise about BS accomplishments.
I had an employee who would laundry list accomplishments during their annual reviews and it was hard to distinguish true accomplishments vs things like going to a meeting (listed many times) or preparing meeting minutes (listed many times). That employee was challenging and more so because they ascribed to a philosophy of “celebrating all accomplishments.” It was like having unbirthday parties with people not as much fun as the Mad Hatter.
When peers say "that's just impostor syndrome, don't worry about it!" they're reinforcing a groupthink that we should ignore the truth. The truth is that we often do excel despite our own shortcomings - but those shortcomings are real. We shouldn't hand-wave them away just to feel better, we should be focusing on improving ourselves.
Isn't that just what impostor syndrome means? It's not a syndrome to correctly identify yourself as an impostor. That's just "being an impostor".
Well, not all. Does the share of people that feel like imposters increase or decrease with expertise? I have anecdotal evidence pointing both ways, and no good real study to get data from.
Anyway, imposter syndrome hurting competent people is way too common to ignore. You are just combating the reciprocate hypothesis, what is ok as long as it doesn't also harm the original one.
PS. There's a typo in the html <title>.
But... It is only half the equation.
If your manager isn't doing same, they suck at their job and you should leave.
Your manager should keep a file on every single one of their reports that details that report's accomplishments, fails, training, wants, likes, dislikes, etc. They get this info from talking to everyone - constantly.
When review time comes, there should be no surprises. If you walk into the room for you review (or call or whatever), and you don't have a strong idea what your rating is, your manager sucks and you should leave [0]. There should never be surprises during reviews. You should never have to remind them of your accomplishments - though you should be prepared to.
A manager's job is to manage. If they're not doing the above, they suck and they're not doing their job and you should leave.
[0] Or you suck and can't pick up on what their trying to tell you, but that's another rant.
Even the managers who I considered to be good at their jobs didn't record this stuff.
A good manager once drilled all this into me.
I wouldn’t pay for this but something to think about is an organisation might because they should want to know what their staff have achieved. Otherwise all they have to go on is completed tasks - which we all know isn’t everything. There is value in gap fillers.
A org focused product would be great especially if it was rounded with 1-1 and performance review stuff. products like that already sell which is a good sign.
I signed up for Pro. I think you may want to make a "pay what you want" option with $10 as the threshold for Pro features. I would have paid more, especially as it's a one-time payment.
One note for you: the title of the pages on mobile are "Accoumplishment App" rather than "Accomplishments App." Probably an html title tag to edit.
Things like "designed and created an algorithm to index the internet using c++" or "developed an online platform for selling books using php".
My reminder is stepping into the transport tube home. I spend maybe 3 hours in 5-15 min blocks a month.
I feel as though I'm your target customer in that it would give me better visibility of what I have recorded and more ready access to analysis of it.
(here comes the but...)
Please don't take this as a slight on your product or your work but somehow it feels too expensive for the quality difference between my current process and what you are offering. I couldn't give you feedback as to specifically why or what features would convert me to a paying customer just that I wouldn't purchase it or evidently sign up for the free account.
At least one other person has signed up per comments here and yet I am comfortable with my enormously long horizontal rule separated... work blog diary?
On a side note, I think a market exists for it and I applaud the effort in creating it - can you comment on your tech stack?
I recommend enabling accomplishments.app/username listing the accomplishments publicly for those that enable that. Vanity is a powerful pull.
I originally thought this would be useful for every todo. Once done, it would be put on the list of "done" accomplishments. But, accomplishments of too fine a granularity are not really motivating anymore. I'm interested in trying to zoom out and see what it's like to receive a summary of "accomplishments" instead of "tasks."
Nice work!
If I fix something big or get something done, I just move to the next thing, perhaps an app like this can help me document that if I am not too lazy to use it.
It's great for helping me look up "what was that fix I did a couple years ago?", but it's also invaluable come perf review season. I go through literally every day's notes for the last year, summarize each day into a bullet, then re-summarize into higher-level tasks and accomplishments.
[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/09/coding-career-advi...
- Organizing text (e.g. source files)
- Ordering text (e.g. based on dates)
- Syncing text to a backup (e.g. gdrive)
- Setting up a reminder (e.g. crontab)
All of the above are kind of core competencies of a lot of engineers. So I think it has to do more, such as drag-and-drop images like Evernote, integrate with Jira/Slack, integrate with Anki (for whatever reason), I don't know...
I like the idea, but personally, I wouldn't buy it because I can do all of the above myself with literally minimal effort. I hope you can make it a more compelling offer. Looks great to me though, I wish you all the success!
Note that maybe the solution is to target different users than engineers. Students wouldn't care about Jira/Slack integration, for example. Then again, students wouldn't pay for this, they get their stuff for free from Microsoft.
/s
This!
Also, do it like backups the Linus way: let other record them for you :)
Apps distract / disrupt flow too much for me.
Just create a text file with vi(m). Type ":r !date" to get the date, then type in what you did at the top of the file. Then ":wq" to save and quit.
That's it. I've done this for decades and it's perfect. An app? Are you insane? As if an app is going to last for more than 5 minutes.
While that's a bit of a joke that gets tossed around occasionally, i don't think that this makes it any less worthy of a discussion. Sure, Dropbox might have bunches of complexity, but if you have a simpler alternative that works for you, why not consider that in earnest?
Thus, i think the comment stands and if nothing else, will probably lead to some folks sharing more information about their setups and what works for them, like i did in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29932945
Oh, and put it on a server somewhere if you want to share it with people without needing to email it to them.
Maybe transform it into HTML+CSS if you want it to look better than the browser default text, and change it a bit for people on mobiles.
You could also make a form and a service so you can update it when you're not using the one computer the original file is on too.
Oh dear, you accidently built your own app.
You mean like it's possible to do with cron + rsync? Or maybe something like BackupPC, or Bvckup, depending on whether you also feel like you should automate backups of your own devices, not just a particular file?
> Oh, and put it on a server somewhere if you want to share it with people without needing to email it to them.
Come to think of it, why not have this folder (that's also backed up) be a part of your own Nextcloud install?
> Maybe transform it into HTML+CSS if you want it to look better than the browser default text, and change it a bit for people on mobiles.
Nextcloud handles both the remote storage aspect (e.g. a copy in another location), sync with your devices when you want it both on desktop and mobile, as well as allow sharing stuff through its web UI, if you expose it (or a separate instance of Nextcloud) to the outside world.
> You could also make a form and a service so you can update it when you're not using the one computer the original file is on too.
Curiously enough, they also allow editing many file formats in the browser, should the need arise, so it's not like you need to create that functionality for your specific file/data type when it already exists for text files in generalized form as a part of their software.
> Oh dear, you accidently built your own app.
No i haven't, because while it would be a nice educational pursuit and perhaps just something fun to do over a weekend, i use tools that are better suited for the general use case (preserving and sharing files, optionally with a web interface) and that are actually maintained by others for this.
You don't always have to reinvent the wheel for everything, depending on existing software that's probably both stable and popular (and hence well supported) is entirely valid for this. Text files are perfectly well as the actual storage medium.
Of course, if the OP wants to make an app for this, let them! Nothing wrong with that either, different things will work for different folks. For example, i almost always use LibreOffice for working with documents locally, but others do it almost only online with Google Docs or whatever Microsoft offers nowadays.
That said, i still think that there is perhaps some merit to the critique over micro apps popping up but many of them probably not being viable long term and just being bound to disappear eventually.
No one is saying that though. People are only saying everything can be a website.
