How Did Impostor Syndrome Hit Emma Wedekind and Ali Spittel?

Emma Wedekind opens Ladybug's impostor-syndrome episode by saying it gets worse as a career and a follower count grow, because thousands of people are watching. Her worst case was a Google interview. Whiteboarding data structures, algorithms, and JavaScript, next to people she saw as lead engineers, she seriously considered canceling. Ali Spittel's version came in college. She loved Python, then hit C++ as a sophomore, including a backtracking assignment in the first weeks, and pulled all-nighters for a B. The department did not look like her. She quit computer science. She now calls that impostor syndrome, and she wishes she had stayed.