Ask HN: How do you deal with envy/inadequacy?

[atleastoptimal]

Even though my job keeps me routinely busy, and I am always "doing" things and have lots of tasks, I look back at months of work and realize it's all just bug fixes, resizing buttons, following tutorials and dealing with the headache of things randomly not working, unexpected crashes, etc. There's nothing I'm making or capable of that makes me feel any more useful than GPT-4 with the right prompting.

I look at the resumes of people like Alexandr Wang, who seems to have a Midas touch of brilliance in everything he worked on. Or Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc. These people are all geniuses as evidenced by their very early, unambiguous competence in highly advanced, technical fields. I did well in high school, went to a good engineering school, but when I started getting into hard classes I could feel my brain "hitting a wall". Even stuff like dynamic programming took me way longer than it seemed reasonable to fully understand.

Besides these 1/10000000 billionaires, it seems that even just most people working in FAANG really are on another level. I remember the OpenAI application question: "Please provide an example or evidence of your exceptional ability." I have no idea, even if I had unlimited time to work hard on something I found very interesting, if anything I could do could reach a level worthy of that designation.

3 years into working in software engineering and I feel very confident that I am only minorly more skilled than I was when I started. How do these people get to this sort of hypersonic level before they're even 20? Is it IQ? Spending their free time more wisely? Better organization? Being able to choose what jobs/problems to work on wisely to maximize non-trivial impact?

I feel that, entering my mid 20s, my chance to have demonstrated any sort of capability beyond the median has passed me by. It's not horrible, I have a job, some friends, I understand tech news and can "get" the things going on in AI, but it seems that for entering the realm of doing stuff that actually matters, there is a glass-ceiling of brain power that I imagine I and most software engineers won't be able to break through.

Does anyone have hope that there are ways out of this, or coping mechanisms for those who have accepted their lot in this field?

[starbase]

First, you're well above the median. If you compare yourself to the median human, you'll find you're powerful as fuck.

Second, you're focused on the most successful person out of a billion. I assume you don't lie awake at night wondering why you weren't the one lottery winner out of a billion, so why worry that your career hasn't eclipsed that of Zuck or Gates or Wang?

My advice is to get out of the bubble. Visit some small towns and eat dinner with the locals. Go to a 3rd world country for a month. To them, you're the rich guy that makes them feel some type of way.

[atleastoptimal → starbase]

When I try to compare myself with less educated/poorer people I realize my advantages can be singificantly if not mostly attributed to my upbringing. I was raised in an upper-middle class 2 parent household, belong to the majority ethnicity of my country, attended private school, had access to test prep, tutoring, extracurriculars, etc. I feel that I am certainly at the median or below among those with my preconditions.

Further, (and perhaps this was the subtextual point of my original post), there seems to be a sense of "getting it" among the intellectual elite, who seem to embody an attitude that 200k FAANG jobs right out of college are a no-brainer, that "failing" is merely being an L4 by 30, that getting into YC or some comparable measure, though obviously a huge feat for any normal person, is just a right of passage for those who who have the knack.

This "thing" that I am reffering to seems to be a presumed cultural mode permeating through the fog of cliquey tech-elite signaling on Twitter and elsewhere. Maybe it's a sort of fear of social exlusion towards those in groups I feel embody the intellectual status I've always envied. Maybe this is all a game of those on the better side of serendipity making it appear much easier than it was, or maybe there is something else I'm just not getting.

[starbase → atleastoptimal]

> When I try to compare myself with less educated/poorer people I realize my advantages can be significantly if not mostly attributed to my upbringing

Probably looks that way to the billionaire founders too. Gates, for example, happened to grow up when only a few kids had computers at home, and working with them was not that far separated from the hardware. He happened to live in a region that needed traffic control software, so he ran with that and succeeded. With one win under his belt, he and his small team were well positioned to parlay into PC software at a time when IBM was uniquely vulnerable. Had any of those variables been different, Chuck Robinson might have become the richest man in the world.

(Chuck, though fictitious, had a mundane career like 99.999% of SWEs that have ever lived)

[theGeatZhopa]

No Hope for you :) I say it because of a few observations. Not to offend you, but to shake you awake in best case.

The ones you named would never ask such questions but rather pursue opportunities and optimize skills out of curiosity. I also think, they've invested a lot of their leisure time into building their dream or vision. Actually all the these guys never rest. They get bored and do something. They're nerds.

So, not everyone is made to be an entrepreneur. It's hard work. And a personality thing. If you don't own such properties, then you also won't excel in such things, regarded "successful".

They way around, what do you have what they don't? It's "Simpler times and living".

Are you ready to work without breaks and weekends in you spare time? Then you might become really good. If not, change your job and perspective. Try to follow your plan. Peace

[catlover76]

> Or Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc. These people are all geniuses as evidenced by their very early, unambiguous competence in highly advanced, technical fields.

You really don't think Zuckerberg was simply someone who got lucky by building the right thing at the right time and tripping onto gold? Even if you want to credit him as a business or product genius, and not merely of luck, he certainly wasn't highly competent in some bleeding edge section of tech.

I think a lot of us have the same problem you are describing, but you're thinking is warped in many ways, so you seem to be experiencing it to a greater degree.

> I remember the OpenAI application question: "Please provide an example or evidence of your exceptional ability."

I don't apply to jobs that ask that kind of question. Absolute douchebaggery.