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

I see a lot of articles and posts about hiring the right person, dealing with underachievers, etc, but still did not see one with underachiever's perspective.

I was hired 4 months ago to work for a quite desirable software company. On my interview and first days I was quite confident and a bit cocky I must admit. I thought I knew more that I actually did, but at the same time was aware that I was lacking specific experience needed for that particular job, but was very willing to work hard to develop myself, and actually saw that as a desirable challenge! I thought that mentoring and time was given to ramp up and learn the missing pieces. Non of that happened.

My teammates have tons of experience, and there is a clear “every man for himself” mentality. Most of them have big egos and really rotten and bitter attitudes. They are stars, they know it, and treat people who are not at the same level like idiots (like idiot me).

As a result, I stress through the work days trying to decode what my co-workers are thinking, and trying not to say the wrong words (which keeps me silent for most of the meetings, work days and then bleeds out into my personal life). By night I have a quick dinner and bury myself in intense study. Honestly, its horrible. My self esteem plunged, I am ashamed to communicate with talk with other people. It is wearing me out. I question myself several times per day if this is really worth it.

Questions:

1. I feel I handled this wrongly, and started with too much confidence. If I am the least knowledgeable person, and a co-worker ignores, despises and almost makes fun of me for your lack of experience, how should I act in order to maintain my dignity but also be humble enough to acknowledge the co-worker's knowledge?

2. Is it normal to be hired as a junior and just being thrown to the lions, with no help or time to ramp up?

3. Do all star/ninja/rock-star software developers have rotten attitudes?

Basically, intelligence is a speed of processing.

Assumedly every human being, given enough time, would be able to solve the same set of problems.

The thing is that we only have 80 years to solve them! And also, there are more problems to be solved than anybody can in this small time frame, even with a IQ of 1000 (speed of processing).

Now what does that mean for the slower minds, in a competitive environment?

You can still provide useful output, by restricting yourself to a small set of problems, and by employing more persistance and constance on solving a choosen problem.

The faster guys will often grow bored with a single problem and will have to skip from one problem to another (ADHD, etc). This is your opportunity: stay on the same problem longer than they can, and you will find solutions while they're busy approaching multiple other problems.

Yes, perhaps over a given period of time, they will be able to find ten solutions to ten different problems, but this doesn't mean that you cannot provide one solution to one problem, that they will have not approached and found.

People who are really great and competent at what they do, are usually very able and willing to teach (or at least give hints) to juniors and newbies, as long as you show signs of personnal studying and researching your problems. They don't like to spoon-feed lazy newbies. In general, you will also find this attitude on the Internet (irc, newsgroups, web forums), where you will find a lot of help, as long as you start by trying solving your own problems yourself, and are able to explain what you tried and where you're stuck.

If your professionnal environment doesn't allow you to learn with your colleagues, then you may consider changing it, because even if you were yourself a rock-star developer, you would still have a lot to learn.

1.- Don't quit. 2.- This is only going to make you stronger. 3.- Rockstar developers are most of the times people with small social skills and/or with little empathy. This is a BIG generalization, but what you say proves my point. Dealing with this kind of people is not easy, you must entice them to show their skills so you can learn from them.

> Assumedly every human being, given enough time, would be able to solve the same set of problems.

In the immortal words of Richard Karn: “I don’t think so, Tim.”

There are lots of things that are out of scope for a given person at a given time, and no amount of study will make them tractable.

The biggest issue with respect to the OP’s Impostor Syndrome is that very few of those things are relevant to the typical work of a programmer in a startup.

That's your definition of intelligence. You could solve problems quickly with a failure rate of 2%, but that 2% error actually kills off, deforms, or ostracizes 10% of your population, and that 10% contains 100% of what you need to solve your next set of problems. You destroy yourself by creating a definition of intelligence in the first place.