How impostor syndrome becomes the pike effect for software developers

•Updated: Jun 08, 2026•15 min read
#psychology#software-development#career#mental-health#impostor-syndrome#learned-helplessness#redundancy#job-search
Share:

Most writing about these two patterns treats them as separate things you might happen to have. The pike effect (a popular name for learned helplessness) on one shelf. Impostor syndrome on another. After seeing many devs going through a redundancy and trying to land another senior role in 2026, I do not think that is how it actually works in dev careers. They are not parallel. They are a chain. One turns into the other, and the trigger that runs the chain is something most senior, staff, and principal engineers are going through right now.

This is the chain:

Redundancy or stalled same-level job hunt
        |
        v
Repeated rejections at your level
        |
        v
Impostor reading: "Maybe I am not really senior"
        |
        v
Over-prep, hedge, reduce effort
        |
        v
Sustained reduced agency
        |
        v
Pike effect: stop applying even when the context changed

This guide walks through each stage. It explains what the literature actually says, where my framing goes beyond it, and what to do depending on where in the chain you are sitting today. It is written for software developers, with examples from code review, interviews, promotion cycles, and the senior-and-above hiring loop specifically.

A few key takeaways

  • The senior-level dev job market in 2026 is a textbook trigger for the impostor-to-pike chain. Repeated rejections at the level are the catalyst.

  • 52.7% of software engineers report frequent to intense levels of the impostor phenomenon, with gender and ethnicity gaps (Guenes et al., 2024, n=624 across 26 countries).

  • The pike effect (Seligman and Maier, 1967) is what impostor syndrome (Clance and Imes, 1978) hardens into when reduced effort produces more rejection, which produces more reduced effort.

  • Where you are in the chain dictates the fix. The impostor stage responds to cognitive work. The pike stage responds to behavioural re-exposure. The wrong fix at the wrong stage entrenches the pattern.

Stage 0: The setup, redundancy or a stalled, same-level job hunt

The chain has one common starting condition in 2026 dev careers. Either you were made redundant or laid off, or you are voluntarily trying to move to another role at your current level (or up), and the search is dragging on.

The senior, staff, and principal market, in particular, has a specific shape right now. You get through four, five, or six final rounds. You feel like the conversations went well. Then you get the same email every time. The names change, the company changes, and the phrasing varies, but the structure does not:

Hi {name},

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us about the Senior Software Engineer position. We truly appreciated the opportunity to get to know you better and to hear about your background and experiences.

After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision not to move forward with your application for this particular role. This was not an easy choice, as we were genuinely impressed by your skills and the insights you shared with us. In this instance, we’ve chosen to proceed with candidates whose experience is more closely aligned with the specific needs of the role.

Sounds familiar? Actually, how impressed are they, right?
It's like they all feed an AI of their choice with the prompt from promptoptimizer.tools' rejection letter template, out of care. They all look the same with different touches, but all of them are impressed by your skills, moving on with other candidates whose experience is more closely tied to their role and inviting you to keep applying, yada yada yada...

The first one stings. The second one stings less. By the fifth or sixth, the rejection email stops being a rejection of one role and starts feeling like data about you. That is the bridge into stage 1.

Stage 1: Impostor reading takes hold

This is the cognitive turn. Impostor syndrome, as described by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, is a pattern where someone with real evidence of competence does not internalise it (Clance and Imes, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 1978). Each win gets discounted. Each loss confirms the suspected truth.

In the redundancy / stalled hunt scenario, that suspected truth has a very specific shape: maybe I am not really at the seniority level I thought I was. The auto-rejection template provides the evidence the pattern wants. “We were impressed by your skills” reads as a polite cover. “More closely aligned candidates” reads as “You are not at the level you claim.”

A 2020 systematic review by Bravata et al. analysed 62 studies covering 14,161 participants and found prevalence estimates between 9% and 82%, depending on the population and the measurement instrument (Bravata et al., “Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: A Systematic Review,” Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2020). Software engineering sits high on that range. In a 2024 study of 624 software engineers from 26 countries, Guenes et al. found that 52.7% reported frequent to intense levels of impostor phenomenon. Women came in at 60.6% versus men at 48.8%. Rates were higher in Asian (67.9%) and Black (65.1%) engineers than in White engineers (50.0%) (Guenes et al., “Impostor Phenomenon in Software Engineers,” arXiv:2312.03966, 2024). The pattern is not equally distributed across the industry. Under-represented groups carry more of it.

In this stage your activity is still loud. You are over-preparing. Two weeks for a one-hour screen. You are reading the job description three times to make sure you really meet every bullet. You decline the conference talk you were invited to give because they would realise they invited the wrong person. The behaviour is anxious and effortful, not absent.

Stage 2: The handoff, impostor turning into pike

This is the stage most articles miss and the one that matters most if you are in it.

Each rejection adds to two different ledgers in your head at the same time. One ledger reads, 'I am not really senior.' That is the impostor ledger. The other ledger reads, 'Applying at this level does not work.' That is the helplessness ledger. They are both being updated by the same email.

For a while the impostor reading dominates. You explain the rejection in terms of yourself. As the count of identical rejections climbs, the explanation starts shifting. You quietly stop seeing the rejections as referendums on your skill and start seeing them as referendums on the activity itself. Not “I am not good enough for this,” but “Applying does not move the needle.” That sentence is a pike effect sentence, not an impostor sentence, and the shift is rarely conscious.

Behaviourally this looks like over-preparation slowly being replaced by avoidance. You stop applying for a few days. Then a couple of weeks. You are still browsing listings every day, still telling yourself you will send out a batch tomorrow, and tomorrow keeps not happening.

I have lived this part personally. After five final-round rejections in a row I stopped applying, not officially, for a few weeks. Looking back, I crossed from stage 1 into stage 2 somewhere between rejection three and rejection four. The over-prep had quietly switched into not bothering. I was not aware it had happened until I noticed the calendar.

Stage 3: Locked in, the 'pike effect' takes over

Once the helplessness ledger is winning, you are in 'pike effect' territory.

The fish-and-glass story you have probably heard is the popular version. A pike (a predator fish) goes into a tank with smaller fish behind a glass divider. The pike strikes the glass repeatedly, fails, and stops. Pull the glass out, and the pike still ignores the now-reachable prey. The image is sticky, which is why business books use it, but it is anecdotal rather than experimental.

The scientific term is 'learned helplessness'. In 1967, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier published the founding experiments (Seligman and Maier, “Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967). Dogs exposed to unavoidable electric shocks later failed to escape when escape became possible. Action had been catalogued as futile, and the catalogue persisted.

Seligman and Maier revisited the work in 2016 and inverted the framing (Maier and Seligman, “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience,” Psychological Review, 2016). Neuroscience showed that passivity is the default response to prolonged aversive stimuli. What is learnt is control, mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex inhibiting the dorsal raphe nucleus. So the real story is not “we learn to give up”. It is “we fail to learn that we can act because we have not experienced agency in this context yet.”

For a developer in stage 3, the catalogued “Applying at this level does not work” runs the show. New manager, new market conditions, hot company in your inbox. The catalogue is still what runs.

Short video walkthrough of the pike effect. Source: YouTube Shorts.

This stage often gets misread as burnout. Burnout is a distinct construct: exhaustion plus cynicism plus reduced efficacy (Maslach and Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience,” World Psychiatry, 2016). The 'pike' stage can sit on top of burnout, but it is not the same. Burnout improves with rest. The pike stage does not, because nothing at rest disconfirms the catalogued forecast that applying does not work.

How do you tell which stage you are in?

Three questions usually narrow it down.

Where does the doubt point? At you or at the activity?

  • Stage 1 (impostor): “I am not good enough, even though it looked like it worked.”

  • Stage 3 (pike): “Trying does not work. The market is rigged, or I am unlucky, or something.”

Has your behaviour dropped or stayed loud?

  • Stage 1: usually loud. You are still trying, often over-trying, while feeling fraudulent.

  • Stage 3: dropped. You stopped trying.

What does fresh evidence do?

  • Stage 1: gets reinterpreted. The good signal at the second interview happened, but they were being polite.

  • Stage 3: bounces off entirely. You do not register that things might be different now.

Stage 2 is the awkward middle. Over-preparation has started being replaced by avoidance, but you still mostly explain rejections by attributing them to yourself. If you can catch yourself there, the climb out is shorter.

A useful test: pick one concrete action you have avoided. Sending that application. Filing that PR. Asking for the raise. Now imagine doing it and predict the failure mode. If your brain produces “it might work, and then they will find out I should not have been there,” you are in stage 1. If your brain produces “it will not work, they will say no, this whole process is broken,” you are in stage 3. Stage 2 produces both at once and switches between them sentence by sentence.

What to do, calibrated to the stage

The interventions diverge because the mechanisms diverge.

If you are in stage 1 (impostor reading dominant)

Name the pattern. Clance herself recommended this and it remains the most studied first move. People who can label “this is the impostor pattern showing up” disrupt it earlier.

Run evidence audits. Write down what you actually did and the skill it took. The pattern wants to discount it. The audit slows the discount. CBT specifically targets the attribution loop and has the best (still modest) evidence base in the Bravata 2020 review.

Talk to peers. Bravata’s review found that simply learning that peers have the same pattern reduced symptom severity in several studies (Bravata et al., 2020). For senior-level devs, this often means joining a small group of peers also between roles, not a generic dev community.

What does not help at this stage: a brute-force volume push of more applications. That puts you in front of more rejection emails, which feed the ledger, which accelerates the handoff to stage 3.

If you are in stage 2 (handoff in progress)

Slow the rejection rate temporarily. The handoff happens because rejection volume is outrunning your cognitive recovery from each one. Take the screening rounds down for two weeks. Use the time to do the evidence audit work above.

Then re-enter with smaller exposure. One application per week, hand-picked, on a calendar. The goal is not throughput. The goal is to keep the activity alive without feeding the helplessness ledger.

If you are in stage 3 (pike effect dominant)

Behavioural activation. The pattern only updates with new lived experiences of agency. Reading about it does not help much. You need a concrete action small enough that you actually take it.

For me, the fix was embarrassingly small. One application per week, on a calendar, regardless of fit. The point was not whether each application converted. The point was that my brain had catalogued “applying does not work” and the only thing that updates that catalogue is the act itself, not more thinking about it. New evidence about my skills would not have helped, because my skills were not what the pattern was rejecting.

Change context where possible. The learned helplessness is often tied to a context. Sometimes the fastest fix is applying through a referral, or to a different market, or to a different sub-specialty, where your default catalogue isn’t yet “applying does not work.”

Stack small wins on purpose. Not as a productivity hack. As evidence collection. You are trying to update a learned forecast, and the only data that updates it is action plus result.

Across all stages

Pay attention to which stage you are in, not which one you have heard about. A stage 1 dev who treats the problem as stage 3, by forcing themselves through more rounds of high-stakes performance, will reinforce the impostor loop. A stage 3 dev who treats the problem as stage 1, by collecting evidence of past wins, will not shift the forecast that future action is futile. Past wins are not the data the catalogue is rejecting.

Frequently asked questions

Does this chain always run in this direction?

In the post-redundancy or stalled same-level scenario, the chain typically runs impostor first, then pike. In other scenarios (a hostile codebase you tried to fix for two years, a manager who shut down every RFC) the pike pattern can develop without ever passing through impostor reading. The two patterns also exist on their own. The chain is the canonical version in the senior dev job market right now, not the only possible sequence.

Is the 'pike effect' a real scientific term?

Not exactly. “Pike syndrome” or “pike effect” is popular shorthand for learned helplessness, and the fish-and-glass story is anecdotal rather than a rigorously documented experiment. The scientific term, coined by Seligman and Maier in 1967, is learned helplessness.

Is impostor syndrome an official diagnosis?

No. It is not listed in the DSM-5-TR. It is a recognised psychological pattern with a substantial research literature, including the Bravata 2020 systematic review of 62 studies and the Guenes 2024 study specifically in software engineers.

Why do software developers seem prone to these patterns?

High feedback density (constant code review, visible bug counts), high comparison surface (open source, public profiles, levelling rubrics), rapid change in required skills, and a hiring process that produces a uniquely high volume of explicit rejections. The Guenes 2024 dev-specific data found a 52.7% prevalence of the impostor phenomenon, with higher rates among under-represented groups.

Will rest fix this?

Rest helps burnout. Rest does not fix either stage of this chain. Both involve learned cognitive or behavioural patterns that update through new experience and reframing, not through recovery. Many developers stack burnout on top of stage 2 or stage 3 and assume that resting will resolve everything. Usually it only resolves the burnout layer.

Bottom line

Impostor syndrome and the pike effect are not two separate diagnoses to choose between. They are usually two stages of the same process, triggered in dev careers most often by a redundancy or a stalled same-level job hunt and propelled by the uniformity of senior-level rejection emails.

The questions that matter are, 'Which stage are you in, and is the fix you are reaching for the one that updates that stage’s mechanism?'

If you are over-preparing, hedging, and explaining away wins, you are in stage 1, and cognitive work is what moves the needle. If you have quietly stopped applying and rest is not bringing it back, you are in stage 3, and only acting differently and noticing the result will update the catalogue. If you are switching between the two from one sentence to the next, you are in stage 2, and the priority is slowing the rejection rate while you rebuild evidence at smaller volume.

The trap of the chain is that the fix that helps in stage 1 (more action, more applications) accelerates the slide into stage 3 if you stay there too long. And the fix that helps in stage 3 (any small action, even a bad fit) does not look like enough effort if you measure it from the inside of stage 1.

Pick by stage, not by what the pattern is called.

Sources

Share:

Comments

Loading comments...
Back to all posts