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.
> 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.
Since you provided no citations yours is just an opinion at best. I'll throw mine in. You are wrong, IQ is about context. The more context you have about a subject the smarter you will seem. Your IQ will increase proportionally with the number of subjects you acquire context in. It is better if the subjects are diverse. Also, the more context you have the faster your processing speed will seem to get (In reality it stays constant, your neurons will only fire so fast)
Sure, raw learning ability, or memorization speed which is what you are talking about, matters. But as long as you don't have a learning disability it pales in comparison to context. And we all have pretty much the same learning ability. Also, those people that are really smart have put in thousands of hours to acquire lots of context. The genius who can absorb new material by reading any subject in a single pass is a myth.
There is a strong correlation between IQ and reaction time. A leading theory is that IQ is basically a measure of reaction time.
On the other hand, IQ is steadily increasing on average. This may, however, reflect how as society develops better abstractions, it tends to increase our reaction time.
Experienced people seem fast at solving problems because they have seen similar solutions before. Not necessarily because they have a faster mind.
It's a mistake to assume that because someone is better than you at something, you are less intelligent. It simply doesn't follow, and as the OP is experiencing - leads to low self esteem.
Not all cultures are unhelpful and competitive. Take it for what it is - a tough culture rather than a group of unpleasant individuals.
You have little to lose by assuming that you are correct in your belief that you can learn and by being respectful but persistent in recruiting your colleagues to help with that.
Intelligence is not about problem solving but understanding. I can explain some complex topic to someone less intelligent ten times in all the ways I can imagine it being explained, I can try to break it up into pieces, I can try to take the pieces even more slowly... but in the end, if the person does not have the capacity, they don't grasp the whole picture.
Oftentimes intelligence translates into speed: speed of understanding new concepts; speed of doing things, but far from always. In fact the latter is typically just practice, no matter how smart you are.
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.
Yeah, so, I would have said it the other way around, myself: speed of processing is an intelligence. To be sure, I subscribe to the multiple-tracks-of-intelligence view.
> 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.
This.
Companies need a balance between 'move fast and break things' and 'keep things stable so we can make money'.
FFS, autism isn't about focus. Find a more meaningful and less insulting word.
You'll find that those on the spectrum who gravitate to technology jobs do so not because they can focus any better, but because they are more comfortable with systems that are predictable (computers) rather than capricious, condescending, noisy and random (humans).
Autism, being "on the spectrum" is very much about focus. It is permanent focus. A chronic pinching of awareness. You are stuck, focused. Bright and narrow. It is a different shape of human. It brings a strength and a weakness.
I speak from personal experience. I've been studying the subject my whole life. My family has much AS.
Also, the discipline of meditation sheds much light on it.
It is very tempting to classify people. It makes you have the illusion of understanding their behavior. Don't fall into the trap.
People my think a certain way twenty years and change in a day. I have heard tjat people think in a million different ways....
I speak as someone "on the spectrum" and the father of a boy "on the spectrum" - it's not a sweeping generalization, it's a matter of how the brain differences affect the "theory of self" in the "autistic mind", to turn a phrase.
Who cares if you can solve the wrong problem quickly. I'll take the person who knows what problem to solve. In my experience those are often independent.
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.