This article felt very validating for me. I've always done well at school (4.0 in college), on various tests and at work, but it never registered and I've always felt like a bit of an impostor. When I was an engineer at Google I particularly had this feeling because I couldn't really build anything. Well, strictly speaking that wasn't true; what I mean was that my job was so pigeon holed that I only knew how to do specific things really well. I couldn't, for example, setup a basic web business with a database backend (horror!). After I joined YC I had to go through the process of learning about all the tools that were available that would help me piece together a product without having Google's giant infrastructure behind me, and without the help of internal technical mailing lists where any question could be quickly and expertly answered. This was quite daunting, but also enormously gratifying. I finally learned that I can build entire products on my own and have a sense for a full development stack and how to e.g., inter-operate a crawler and an indexer and a frontend, and how to host the whole thing. But even after doing this, I still feel like an impostor! I think this feeling will probably never leave me, but as the author says it can be beneficial. But I think I (and others who suffer from this) need to be mindful of the downsides of this syndrome: the reluctance to ask questions for fear of seeming incompetent. The difficulty in approaching new problems for fear the new knowledge involved might be insurmountable. And of course the general sense of self doubt that afflicts those with impostor syndrome.