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The Worst Engineer in the Room
My salary doubled. My confidence tanked.
That’s what happened when I had just joined a five-person startup in San Francisco in my third year as a software engineer. Two of the founders had been recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30. The team was exceptional by any measure.
On my first day, someone made a joke about Dijkstra’s algorithm. Everyone laughed. I smiled along, then looked it up afterward so I could understand why it was funny. Dijkstra’s algorithm finds the shortest path between 2 points—the math underlying GPS navigation. It’s a foundational concept in virtually every formal computer science curriculum. I had never encountered it.
That moment reflected a broader pattern. Conversations about system design and tradeoffs often felt just out of reach. I could follow parts of them, but not enough to contribute meaningfully.
I was mostly self-taught. Wide coverage, shallow roots. The engineers around me had roots. You could feel it in how they reasoned through problems, how they talked about tradeoffs, how they debugged with patience instead of pure panic.
The Advice That Sounds Good Until You’re Living It
You’ve heard the phrase: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
It sounds aspirational. What nobody tells you is what it actually feels like to be in that room. It feels like barely following system design conversations. Like nodding along to discussions you can only partially decode. Like shipping solutions through trial and error and hoping nobody looks too closely.
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