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

Senior people in companies need to act as mentors to advance their careers as well so this will form a symbiotic relationship. Don't underestimate the need to "feel the pain" some of the time. In other words, don't ask to be or allow yourself to be spoonfed. Put in the effort, but escalate quickly. If you get stuck on something for more than 15 minutes, take a break and come back to it. If it happens again, escalate to your mentor, but not more than once or twice per day.

It is a difficult series of steps but it sounds necessary. If you can't accomplish these steps because there is noone with whom you can connect, you should leave. I'd say try for three months and try two or three different people.

2. I don't know what is normal. What is normal for me may not be normal for society at large, and this may not be normal for the company you've joined.

3. I sure hope not.

If you believe those are true, a radical change of strategy is in order, and you should keep in mind that you have very little to lose. Your worst plausible professional outcome is that you get fired soon, and you cannot use this employer or coworkers as a reference. That definitely sucks, but it's already a pretty likely outcome, so don't worry about making things worse.

Sucking hard at the beginning of something is normal. Lacking the support that would help you not-suck faster is sad but common. Having a hard time relating to people further along in the process is sad but common. What will you make of these things?

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Tips:

1. Remember what several have said here, that those with superior attitudes are often themselves insecure.

2. Memorize and internalize swampangel's guidance on taking feedback.

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Strategy:

Do not worry about your dignity or your image. Why did your self-esteem plunge? Were you impressed with yourself because you thought you were smarter/more skilled than other people? You were then and you still are. It's just that now you know a lot more people you are not more skilled than. Unless and until you become one of the tiny minority at the true peak of your profession, this will happen to you over and over. (Even if you reach the peak, many of those who came before you produced work more profound and seminal than yours, and many of those after you will build on your work to do even more awesome things.)

But it's lucky when this happens to you, when you suddenly find yourself in a bigger pond. A much better basis for self-esteem is your character and your progress. "I'm smarter than most of the people I know" is a win condition only sustainable by avoiding opportunities for growth. "I'm more skilled, more wise, more loving than I was a year ago" is a win condition you can hit every year without it ever getting old.

Ask for the help you need, but read " rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>. Do not flatter people or debase yourself, but ask directly, showing concisely whatever work you've already put into solving your problem. "Showing your work" has several good effects (1) it shows you are not intentionally wasting someone's time; (2) it helps your respondent understand what level to answer you at and (3) you may often come to the solution just by formulating your question and work so far carefully.

When you don't understand something, take notes and look it up. If you can't figure it out, just go ask the person who mentioned it--or someone more approachable who is likely to know. Don't worry about your dignity, don't worry about humility.

People understand (and need to understand) themselves in light of their actions. If they don't think much of you, but you get them to help you anyway, you've raised a small contradiction in the back of their mind: "I don't really care about him, but I helped him. Why did I do that?" They will often resolve this contradiction by beginning to think of you as a person they like pretty well after all, or by thinking of themselves as a mentor type. In the future, they will be more likely to act out of their newly-developing concept of you or themselves.

Whenever someone helps you, look for a genuine way to make them look good. E.g., in a status report or team meeting: "I was tasked with adding feature Y to the Frobulator. I was not familiar with the way we use Sporks in the Frobulator module, but Jones took a couple minutes to bring me up to speed on Frobulator Sporks, and I was able to complete feature Y."

If they think of you as their junior, so what? You'll be their junior. If you make good on their investment of time by giving credit and getting better, they will grow to see you as a good investment, and they won't want their investment to be wasted by losing you to another job.

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Maybe this doesn't work. All the stuff I said confidently above might miss the mark because of weird or unusually pathological quirks of you, the people, or workplace. There are a thousand factors we can't guess at from an Ask HN post. I'm just some guy on the Internet.

> every man for himself

> big egos and really rotten and bitter attitudes

> co-worker ignores, despises and almost makes fun of me for your lack of experience

> treat people who are not at the same level like idiots

I hire. I'm on the lookout for Ninjas and Rockstars and all of that. Those mythical 12345x codars. It's easy because I'm a 67890x coder, and at around 1024x, we're all taught a secret handshake.

Ya, right. When interviewing you, I'll try to set you up to both succeed and fail; you'll be given ample opportunity to correct me on anything from blatantly idiotic/wrong statements to minute technicalities (the ones you catch). I'll try to see your patience, assertiveness, helpfulness, communication skills, etc.

You could be $#1_in_the_world in $thing_im_hiring_for. If your ego extends beyond your physical boundaries and into others' minds, you can fuck right off. I'll get a 1234x guy instead that will occasionally help the 123x guys as well. And I'm not creating a toxic environment.

According to my [limited] experience, heck yeah there are ninjas that make it for both themselves and their companies and environments, while a) having good enough social skills so as not to offend unnecessarily and b) have the desire to mentor and guide people, rather than verbally throw acid in their faces. It's an attitude problem more than anything else. Organisations that foster such toxic environments will later on hold meaningless seminars for team building in a band-air attempt to fix their churn.

It doesn't make much sense not to help someone, especially on the same team. So often he'll just be missing some minor concept. A few kind keywords from a more knowledgable person will get him googling and on track[2].

Your environment is toxic. If you're learning even a bit, stay as long as you can stomach it. When you've (learned|had) enough, go somewhere nicer and remember to be nice to your "inferiors".

[1] Hasn't happened yet. To me at least.

[2] This likely won't be the case if there is too big a divide between your levels - e.g. Linus may not answer your polite question about memcpy

[3] bonus orphan footnote: look up impostor syndrome. Ensure you aren't suffering from it. Computing is a vast, vast universe - as deep as it is wide. There'll be someone who knows something you don't, in just about any techie-filled room. Actual impostors often behave in the manner you're describing, which (ironically?) causes impostor syndrome to people who actually know quite a bit.