Types of impostors

Like “Among Us”, but in the workplace

After writing about bad types of coworkers and extensively about lemons, impostors deserve especial attention, for two reasons:

1. Many competent people suffer from the impostor syndrome. If you are not actively engaging in one of these types of delusions, you can give yourself some credit, keep improving your skills, and enjoy the success you are achieving.
2. If you are not an impostor and you find yourself in a team of impostors, you would benefit from identifying the type of impostors that they are, and keeping a low profile until you can get out of there. Impostors tend to work with other impostors in a kakonomy. If you are working with them, trying to expose them is likely to backfire, since they may use their actual deception expertise to delude anyone involved into believing that you are the impostor. Move away, compete with them, and then you may choose to expose them (still may be a lose-lose, be careful). Or just ignore them and put the past behind you, life is short, and normally there are better things to do. If you need more advice on this, my next post will be a basic survival guide about what to do when surrounded by charlatans. There are many ways to get updates on new posts, let me know if you need help with that.

Disclaimer: artificial intelligence is a great field to find impostors, as it is always new and unknown due to the artificial intelligence paradox, and impostors thrive when talking with someone that believes their delusions. Most or all of the types can be extrapolated to most or all other areas, but some of the examples are specific.

Note that different types of impostors may overlap. Let us see 16 types for today:

1. PowerPoint delusionist: This is the most usual type of impostor, as most other impostors have a component of PowerPoint delusionist. They live in a world of PowerPoint, only loosely connected to the shared reality of everybody else. When something in the real world supports the narrative in the slides under any interpretation or misinterpretation, it is included. Anything that would imply contradictions is ignored and kept out of the slides, because “it would be confusing”. PowerPoint delusionists are experts in boxology, and stock photos showing a digital future that feels very old. For delusionists, UML diagrams do not exist, and formulas might be found as ancient ritual incantations in the slides of the biggest impostors.
2. Satellite: Everyone looks like a small ant, and everything looks the same from such a high level. Every architecture diagram of a satellite is a table. The columns are potential customers, clients, products, or in general goals to cover. The rows are at least three. Row 1: What is going to be sold, according to the goals from the senior leadership (one per box), who are the only relevant judges for the presentation. Row 2: What is going to be made, in a simplified Conway law, putting each of the teams, projects, or people involved as a box to cover. Row 3: What is going to be used, normally something from outside the company, free riding on open source, and some technology that is “disruptive”, which the senior leadership thinks is going to be “big”, triggering their FOMO, e.g. deep learning, blockchain, quantum computing,…
3. Manager: After years of experience on some area or technology, just telling other people what to do and with zero hands-on experience, managers pretend to have that hands-on experience, or mistakenly think that they have it for familiarity with the jargon. Managers are less insufferable when they stay as Satellites in the highest level, micro-managers that are self-deluded about their expertise in some area may act on it, e.g. edit the code. Having to explain that tests should pass before merging (or committing) to the main branch is never fun.
4. Author: Publishing is a numbers game and they are “crushing it! If you publish it, citations will come”. In some cases some papers and expertise may be legit, and followed with a faulty generalization to areas possibly related to their publications. A worse offender is the author of patents. Patents are not peer reviewed and hard sci-fi is normally accepted for a patent. Useless patents may in fact imply expensive costs with small returns for the company paying for them, converting patent authors in great fifth columnists. Eventually authors find that the numbers game does not provide the results they want, in their careers or bank accounts. This realization causes their inflated egos to explode in a tantrum. You want to be as far as possible from that explosion by the time it happens.
5. Metalhead: The solution to every problem is in the metal, i.e. hardware. Metalheads replace common sense, experience, or any thinking with brute force, and eventually solve some problems, reinforcing the idea that “this is the only way”. They consider themselves the true experts in squeezing every drop of performance from the hardware. When using cloud resources, metalheads are also good fifth columnists. When having some management responsibilities, metalheads may have access not only to hardware but also to “human resources”, which are then wasted on useless endeavors, creating the worst type of bullshit job, the one that keeps you busy. Metalheads, as other types of impostors, are rarelly self-aware of being impostors.
6. Experts: You can recognize experts by the ratio of times that they use linear regression (or something more simple, like counting) divided by the number of times that they say that they are using linear regression. They would instead mention “machine learning”, “artificial intelligence”, “advanced analytics”, or the fanciest words that they can find. Sometimes experts may use the fanciest technology that they can find too, in the worst possible ways, but contrary to hiding linear regression, using fancy technology leads them to believe that they are not impostors. For example many different approaches may be used for data augmentation, without improving the results, blaming then the quality of the original data.
7. Saviors: Any of the previous may combine with superiority complex and the Dunning-Kruger of a savior. Saviors address problems that are very challenging for anyone else and (in fact) impossible for them. By their superiority complex, those problems seem easier to them, and worth working on. Obviously, this does not work for them, but a true impostor never acknowledges a mistake, instead the blame is usually on: “being surrounded by idiots” (manager), not enough hardware (metalhead), or not enough data (expert).
8. Fortune tellers: Most impostors are not aware of being an impostor, many fortune tellers think that everyone is an impostor, and they happen to be better at it. Fortune tellers will ask you for examples, clarification, and any information that they can get about what you want to hear, and then they will tell you exactly that. If a fortune teller at the manager level asks you for something, and a fortune teller at the engineer level is working on something similar, play fool and redirect them to talk to each other. Try to witness or record that meeting if possible, results are usually wonderfully surrealistic, even oniric.
9. Misnomers: While experts use fancy words to hide incompetence and ignorance, misnomers weaponize the use of words. Misnomers may just relabel old stuff with new words, hence causing the confusion around similar areas, e.g. business intelligence, operations research, data analysis, data analytics, data science,… The new label allows them to become an authority in it, as technically they invented the label. In an even more dangerous variant, they may relabel bad practices with the names of good practices, e.g. “grad student descent” may be “collecting data for a data-driven approach”, or “brute force” may be a “rigorous scientific approach”. Important note: If your line manager is a misnomer of the latter variant, you have to stay out of that reality distortion field (RDF) to keep your sanity.
10. Researchers: The most important aspect of a researcher is pushing further the state of the art. In the case of impostors, this is done in inane ways that lead to big claims, requiring further practice and refinement to fool the reviewers and become an “author”. For example, further training of pretrained models like BERT may achieve “better results”, especially for specific datasets or benchmarks, while losing generality of the model. Five lines of code using Simple Transformers may generate an accuracy number better than the original BERT, and a PowerPoint presentation claiming “we are better than Google”.
11. Politicians: The true experts of being impostors are politicians, deluding masses from a distance is even easier when an entire party is helping you on it. In the workplace, many people take example of politicians in related aspects, e.g. the focus on networking, connections, teams and team building, “synergies”,… the actual work is of no importance, “anyone can do that”. Before an impostor can be a politician they need to have someone to delegate to, but even without anyone they can stretch the limits of PowerPoint and meetings until an incautious intern is captured for the task.
12. Go-getters: Any impostor can become a go-getter with enough amount of caffeine in their blood. Lacking the skills or knowledge to work smart, or to even understand what they should do, they work hard, produce many “results”, and none of them amounts to anything. If their activities imply costs for the company, they make good fifth columnists too. Go-getters can ignore any possibility of doing a good job, sometimes in a fraction of the time, engage in busywork with passion, and make life a bit harder for everyone else in the organization, especially anyone having to refactor a codebase that is just unmaintainable. They may be greatly appreciated in companies that do not eat their own dog food and sell it instead, as go-getters produce great amounts of dog food without a second (or first) thought on the purpose or best approach to the tasks at hand. Misnomers may put them as examples of the “agile” approach, or the “results-driven” culture that the team should have.
13. Gurus: Vagueness and tautologies are the sign of a guru. They may assert that “average approaches provide average results”, pretending to be above the average when they are below. Gurus are normally appreciated as visionaries or strategists, often evolving from satellites. When defining a strategy, it is defined as a goal, which is only vaguely defined, resulting in always achieving them, as a good politician. “A goal without a plan is a wish”, making wishful thinking the greatest skill of a guru. With a strong enough reality distortion field (RDF), they may achieve cult leader level status and results.
14. Team players: When the density of impostors is too high, team players start to emerge. A team player has only met impostors, or has met enough of them to assume that everyone is an impostor. Consequently, “being an impostor” does not mean “pretending knowledge or skills” to a team player, but “being exposed at that”, i.e. “not being a good impostor”. Team players do not have a personal RDF, they consider it to be a team effort. Making questions or acknowledging not knowing something sets off their alarms, as that weakens and puts at risk the RDF. Team players take the role of thought police to protect the RDF, and you may face serious consequences if you do not play along as a fake impostor. If you are facing a team player, proceed with extreme care.
15. Lazy: The least ambitious and therefore the least harmful of the impostor types are the lazy. The lazy simply pretend that the task at hand is more difficult or requires more time than it actually requires, while pretending to be extremely apt at it, which is true in some rare occasions. They may automate their job (if they are good at it), delegate it, or just enjoy the spare time and slack from pretending to be working for weeks, while the actual work takes hours. Surrounded by impostors, competent people that feel that their work would not be understood or appreciated may take a lazy approach, and get comfortable.
16. Meta-impostor: A meta-impostor is someone competent faking to be an impostor, sometimes as a reaction to a team player. Meta-impostors normally mean no harm and are the quietest people in the company. Obviously, keeping the meta-RDF is exhausting and has no other benefit for them than avoiding trouble, which they can do more easily just by staying quiet. You may not notice meta-impostors before they leave the company.

Reminding the two initial points:

1. If you are not in one of these types, chances are that you are not an impostor. Relax and keep on improving your skills. As previously explained, normally impostors do not think if they might be an impostor, you should be safe.
2. However, if you are surrounded by impostors, keep calm and try to escape before the shit hits the fan. Remember, my next post will be a basic survival guide about what to do when surrounded by charlatans, but if you need something now, you may find meta-impostors inspiring.

I hope this helps,
— trylks