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

I personally find the most difficult people to work with are the people who have trouble filling the gaps in their knowledge themselves AND are evasive when they don't know something.

I do think it's troubling that you think everyone you work with is unhelpful. This is not normal and sounds like a potentially toxic environment. I'd make sure this is the case though before jumping to conclusions. Maybe some are just busy or you're asking for help at the wrong time (maybe try asking in advance through email/instant message and scheduling time on their calendar). Maybe it's neither of those, but just giving the benefit of the doubt. How often are you asking for help and have you already tried other (easy) means of assistance like the web/documentation/etc? Do you take notes to avoid repeating yourself or forgetting what you learned when you do get assistance?

Those in your team though should be the most helpful though since in theory, they depend on you and you depend on them, so assistance is mutually beneficial. Sometimes I will leave a junior developer to work out something on their own when they have already been through a similar scenario before. It can be hard to resist (learned that was rarely the best idea when tutoring a friend in school) rushing in and helping them too quick, but I tell myself they'll learn more if they try to think it through and refine those problem solving skills. In those cases, I have a pretty good idea that they know the answer, but it hasn't clicked yet. I mean if they get stuck on it for too long, I'll help them a long, but as a more senior developer you when you're helping and when you're just doing their work for them (the later rarely helps them to learn/understand).

My other thought it's maybe they're not helpful because they just suck at communication. Not talking so much about general communication as much as trying to convey a complex topic to someone else in a way that is relevant to the person trying to understand. Some just don't know as much as they claim about a subject to actually teach it to someone else or have the patience to do so.

I retaliated by calling them rainman behind their backs. It worked surprisingly well to make me feel better.

I think that engineering gives people braindamage, or chars their soul, or something like that. I'm serious.

Yes, I left at end of contract.

I've seen all sorts of failure modes with that:

* People asking overly broad questions, e.g. if they are having trouble using, say, a dictionary class: "How do dictionaries work?" rather than "I'm trying to do x with a dictionary and I can't figure out how to make it work - I tried the put() method but it doesn't do what I thought." This makes it very difficult to dig into what's actually being asked and provide a relevant answer.

* People not admitting what they don't know. E.g. maybe they just don't have a clue what a dictionary is, yet won't admit it.

* People making a lot of assumptions and not articulating them. This tends to manifest as a really specific question that doesn't make sense. E.g. "I tried to build a spellchecker and dictionary is not returning the right thing." Then it turns out they assumed dictionary was prepopulated with the English language. This is even worse if the person can't/won't explain their thought process when prompted.

* Not reading any of the docs. I ran programming tutorials at one point and it was remarkable how many questions would have been answered by the introductory paragraphs of the tutorial if they'd read them instead of skipping it then spending 10 minutes struggling with a problem that didn't make sense to them.

* Unwillingness to talk through things systematically, e.g. explaining code line-by-line. It's surprising how often people will ask for help, then lose patience with you once you want them to spend any amount of time explaining things. This is enormously effective - half the time they realize their mistake on their own.