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