
Ask HN: Best way to help a young prodigy? - saddle_point
There&#x27;s a very talented guy that joined my team last year.<p>He&#x27;s just 22 and already mastered key concepts in software engineering, from things like Dependency Injection and closures to backtracking algorithms and graph theory. Even though he has no college degree, he finds no problem talking with peers with Bachelors or Masters in almost any subject.<p>I found this guy one of the most prodigy people I&#x27;ve met, not for the knowledge he has but for his ability to grasp and absorb new concepts a way faster than everyone else.<p>Last week, he talked to me in private as I&#x27;m his &quot;Team Buddy&quot; about career, saying that he don&#x27;t like our current job but is afraid to leave (it&#x27;s a well recognized company and the paycheck is nice). I think it&#x27;s because his talent is being downplayed in a lot of ways here: even though he was promoted to &quot;Senior&quot; some months ago - the youngest &quot;Senior&quot; here -, his work hasn&#x27;t changed so much and he still spends most of his time cleaning and parsing some shitty datasets instead of effectively using and further developing his programming abilities. Yeah, our management has no vision.<p>I really would like to help him, but have no idea about what to suggest. I just really think he should leave. I just don&#x27;t know where to recommend. Would someone like him be a better fit for some &quot;cooler&quot; startup or some more traditional business? Or how can I and others create - or at least try to - a better setting for a &quot;prodigy&quot; like him to develop even further, in the current workplace?
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quaquaqua1
He needs to just make money and work on a side project until he has FU money
to choose his destiny.

