Ask HN: I am the dumbest person in the room. What should I do?

This is a classic fight or flight situation [0] where you are choosing flight.

There is no use being quiet at work. Everyone knows you are a junior so it's ok to act like one. Ask questions. Say "I don't know how to do this. Can you show me?" You'll find that even the "rock stars" don't know everything. It may be hard to ask those questions without feeling discomfort, embarrassment or even anger. Leverage those feelings to ask the hard questions. This might help alleviate some of the suffering you experience after work.

If none of that works then it's time to look for another job.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response

The "worst case" scenario (in terms of this current company) is that you are let go or quit—that's not so bad in the grand scheme of things. So, what experiments can you try to either improve your reception or learn as much as possible before that moment..?

Ask questions.

Your 'supeeriors' may be ninja rock star behemoths, but they are not immune to simple psychological techniques, like reciprocity. Asking questions and requesting favors has a tendency to make the other person actually like you more and be more willing to help you out further down the line.

It's counter-intuitive, but it has a lot to do with the sunk-cost fallacy and leveraging others' cognitive dissonance; i.e.: "if I'm such a great person/talent and I spent the time/effort to help this person out, they must be more like me than I previously thought."

Beyond the persuasive benefits of asking questions, you'll (ideally) learn more about yourself and come across as more open and approachable to your peers, which is good.

More importantly, don't compare yourself to your coworkers to determine your worth for the company. Are you better today than you were yesterday?

The best leaders and most productive people I know ask more questions than anyone else and are very skilled at listening to what people are telling them. Just because you were "thrown to the lions" doesn't mean you have to become one via trial by fire. Lions have too much pride.

Just ask questions. Position yourself to be better tomorrow than you are today.

Worst case: you're out of there and on to something else (which could very well be the same). Best case: people start seeing your value and you improve your rate of learning.

You said you are in a "quite desirable software company", so I assume it is not a small one (especially if people have a bad mentality). Just hang on for a while, and try to move on to another team: you can claim that the culture in your current team doesn't fit, and try to find one that's more open to juniors. From my experience a lot of senior engineers are more than happy to help if you "do your homework first", which you seem to be doing since you work very hard every night.

Hey! I just want to share an experience, hope it helps. I am a mechatronics engineer who got into a software company in my last year. I did it for the experience, I didn't even know JS, just C++ and some java. They thrown me into front end develpment in a framework I didn't even know it existed. Some hard months came through. Some people where nice and humble, some well selfish and didn't bother to explain anything. So I kept on learning, started with JS, Html and CSS. I downloaded books and videos, read a lot of blogs (I got to know HN there and I am a user since), got into the world of develpment, started to ask questions on StackO, trying to answer some. Latter got into Angular, ExtJs, mongo and many other stuff, I am glad I got in in the first place, the fact that I didn't know anything and that I felt I didn't belong made me study harder. Nowadays I work there part time, got my first big project and some customer for it, and I am in charge in the whore software part. I got to realize that the software industry is a wide wide field, just look for something you feel confortable at and give your best. There is always news things to learn, that is why I love software develpment :)

Ask lots.

Its easy to feel intimidated in an environment where you perceive everyone as smarter (like my first job). Even what you consider stupid questions. That happened in my first job. Not so much big ego's but smart and introverted, and not very good at communication. Don't worry about looking stupid.

As a result I didn't do very well. Appraisal time came around and I was told I was close to getting fired.

Basically I took another job before that happened, and learned from my mistakes. At the time it seemed all my fault, but looking back it was pretty poor management. Next job I asked about anything I was struggling with (it helped the group were a bit more extroverted in general).

If it doesn't get better after a few more months, its probably time to move on. There are plenty of decent places to be a junior.