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Impostor Phenomenon in Software Engineers

Published: 06 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) is widely discussed in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and has been recently evaluated in Computer and Data Science students. There has been no formal research conducted on IP in software engineers in general, even though its consequences may contribute to mental health disorders, such as depression and burnout. This study describes a survey that investigates the extent of impostor feelings in software engineers, considering aspects such as gender, race/ethnicity, and roles. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of IP on their perceived productivity. The survey instrument was designed using a theory-driven approach and included demographic questions, an internationally validated IP scale (CIPS), and questions for measuring perceived productivity based on the SPACE framework constructs. The survey was sent to companies operating in various business sectors. Data analysis used bootstrapping with resampling to calculate confidence intervals and Mann-Whitney statistical significance testing for assessing the hypotheses. We received responses from 624 software engineers distributed across 26 countries. The bootstrapping results reveal that a proportion of 52.7% of software engineers experience frequent to intense levels of IP and that women suffer at a significantly higher proportion (60.6%) than men (48.8%). Regarding race/ethnicity, we observed more frequent impostor feelings in Asian (67.9%) and Black (65.1%) than in White (50.0%) software engineers. We also observed that the presence of IP is less common among individuals who are married and have children. Moreover, the prevalence of IP showed a statistically significant negative effect on the perceived productivity for all SPACE framework constructs. The evidence relating IP to software engineers provides a starting point to help organizations find ways to raise awareness of the problem and improve the emotional skills of software professionals.

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  • (2024)Teaching Survey Research in Software EngineeringHandbook on Teaching Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-71769-7_18(501-527)Online publication date: 25-Dec-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-SEIS'24: Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society
April 2024
210 pages
ISBN:9798400704994
DOI:10.1145/3639475
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 06 June 2024

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  1. impostor phenomenon
  2. imposter syndrome
  3. human aspects
  4. perceived productivity
  5. software engineering

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  • (2024)Teaching Survey Research in Software EngineeringHandbook on Teaching Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-71769-7_18(501-527)Online publication date: 25-Dec-2024

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