In the Programming Hero post, a lot of us (EAGLE students) recognized ourselves, at least in the situations around it. Since the other perspective usually goes unseen and underestimated, it’s time the Silent Hero got a word in too, and explained why this isn’t about staying quiet.

The Silent Hero

Assuming everyone else understood the topic ages ago, we dare to ask questions only cautiously. For many of us that’s part of everyday life, for some all the time, for some only in certain settings: the moment someone explains their workflow, the first instinct is often to compare, to make yourself smaller. Not because you’re quiet by nature, but because in certain situations you don’t let yourself be loud, even though you have something useful to add. Because next to the others, usually men, you feel less relevant. Which already hints at where the actual problem lies.

Dunning-Kruger, Imposter & Socrates

Confidence and competence don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Quite the opposite, actually, as described by the Dunning-Kruger effect: people with little knowledge or skill tend to overestimate their own abilities. But the more competence someone builds, the more aware they become of a topic’s complexity, and their self-confidence drops. Suddenly you think you know nothing, precisely when you’ve actually built real competence. And when that becomes chronic, we call it imposter syndrome. You become firmly convinced you can’t really do anything, that your success rests only on luck, chance, or something like that, and that any moment now it’ll come out that you actually have “no idea.” Which is also where Socrates’ famous line comes in: “I know that I know nothing.”

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Hero syndrome and imposter syndrome aren’t simply two opposite sides of one coin. They don’t arise independently, they’re symptoms of the same problem, the same system: an environment where confidence gets read as competence. One person gets too much praise for seeming self-assured; another, the quieter one, gets too little visibility for her competent solution. And concluding from this that the quiet ones should just work on their confidence is a fallacy. What matters more is building an environment where everyone feels safe enough to share their ideas, not because they have to, but because they actually feel safe doing so. And it’s worth keeping in mind that being louder, showing up with more confidence, isn’t the same free option for women as it is for men. Studies have shown that the same success reads as appealing in a man and unsettling in a woman.

Staying Quiet Isn’t the Solution

Another fallacy is saying the Silent Hero can just stay quiet. Thoughts, ideas, science that go unheard and unseen have far less impact, and visibility is exactly the key to giving these people the recognition they deserve. Just knowing your own worth privately isn’t enough, we reject that. Quiet people who instinctively hold back, who in the earlier post read as mostly women, are allowed to take up space, to disagree, to voice their ideas and their successes, to let themselves be celebrated. That doesn’t make them a hero in the problematic sense, they’re simply refusing to stay invisible.

Changing the Room for the Better

Everyone has their own experiences, their own wins and their own failures. For some it was lecturers who took their question seriously at the right moment. For others it was fellow, female students who quietly modeled competence and, in doing so, normalized it. But what united most of us were people with power who used it responsibly: lecturers who meet you at eye level regardless of hierarchy, who take you seriously even when you don’t take yourself seriously, who don’t talk you down. And that’s happening at EAGLE and EORC, with both women and men as lecturers. Especially noteworthy for the men, because they hold most of the permanent positions at the chair, and because their role as men grants them more assumed authority by default. But these men at EORC name the unfair dynamics and then act against them, even against their own short-term interest. The people best placed to fix inequality are the ones already holding the mic.

Allyship in Practice

What makes the difference are people who, in a meeting, pass the question on, who credit the idea by name, who don’t repeat what a woman just said as if it were their own, who don’t quietly laugh when someone makes a mistake, who give the floor not to the loudest person, but to the right one.

Curiosity as Key

Part of reality, though, is that most people sometimes perform and sometimes hold back. This isn’t about putting people in boxes, it’s only meant to give an observed pattern some shape. This appeal isn’t aimed at the quiet ones, putting the burden on them to just be louder. It’s aimed at everyone holding the mic: be aware of whom you’re giving it to, whom you might be overestimating, and whom you’re probably overlooking. Curiosity is most productive when it’s turned inward, when you start questioning yourself and your own behavior. Because that’s what you can actually change.

Curiosity is the foundation of science. And science rewards the people who keep their curiosity the longest. That works best when the room is built so that every form of curiosity gets heard and seen. Nobody wants to be admired for being quiet, they want to be admired for the courage to present their own work. The difference gets made in rooms where someone deliberately makes space.