How does OP knows that they are low IQ? That seems insulting to me. It is one thing to say they lack right skills or are unmotivated to work hard. But saying someone is low IQ without doing IQ test is same as calling a fat person lacks discipline to eat healthy.

Or reading your or OP's comments and assuming that you have social and possibly serious mental health issues. Not very nice, right?

Untreated ADHD, depression etc. might also contribute to low performance. Beyond that, it is bold to claim "low IQ" without even demonstrating it. I don't think many people are interested in learning and thinking deeply regardless of intellect.

I work at the FAANG considered the “dumbest” - do you think people like me have any hope for the future?

There is no linear ordering on workers! You might be dumb at algorithms but great at stakeholder management and average at coding. Takes all sorts of strengths to make a good team.

You should feel hopeless, you're doomed to having a steady career where you are paid well.

Except I’m not - I make the same as a new grad at other companies.

go bus tables or work a cash register and then complain about your paycheck

I have no idea which FAANG is considered “the dumbest”…

Any thread with FAANG in the title always brings out the weirdest insecurities. Maybe it's because emotionally stable people don't optimize their life and identity around which megacorp buys their time from them.

"If most companies optimize for finding the best talent and the people with the best talent change companies often then logically only the people joining a company have the best talent" - Average people are average and most people are average.

You are confusing IQ and intelligence. It would have been better to say "my co-workers do not seem to be highly intelligent".

I'm tired of the semantics, my co workers are dumb. They passed these interviews by memorizing the answers to questions, and they cant come up with useful software architecture. Everything they code is a one off solution to a one off problem.

Are they better with people than you are? Does that make you dumb as well? If you were “smart” you would have figured out how to work with your leadership team to optimize a solution for all parties. But you don’t know how to, and therefore from my perspective, could also be considered “dumb”.

Honestly some people are dumb and it’s as simple as that. No need to bend backwards to make excuses for them.

This debate isn't really about people being dumb inasmuch as it's about someone accusing every single person around him of being dumb.

This comment feels like cope.

And this one feels like cope.

> Everything they code is a one off solution to a one off problem.

To me, this is more indicative of the company culture than your coworkers' IQ.

Not at all. They are not capable of building useful abstract components.

In school, I noticed that many people don't learn deeply. They get good grades even with a shallow understanding of the material.

They learn by heart and are not interested in why something works. (For example, what a Fourier transform essentially does. A Fourier transform is essentially projecting a target function to the sinusoidal bases. That is what the dot product implies.) I don't think this is necessarily related to intellect. I think it is somewhat related to laziness and lack of interest or curiosity.

They use a bunch of formulas and code snippets and glue it together until it somehow works without understanding it.

I am a big believer in learning deeply by focusing on the fundamentals. Here's what I previously wrote about that very topic:

> Instead of APIs, learn the fundamental algorithms that those APIs provide. Instead of OpenGL, learn rendering algorithms (raserization, Bresenham etc.). The same applies for other frameworks such as Vue.js. Learn how to write a virtual DOM yourself. Learn how JS operates under the hood. Learn how to implement a hash table (std::unordered_map) and a dynamic array (std::vector); understand why you cannot simply delete a bucket when using the open addressing scheme. Learn C and memory management, since many other programming languages are influenced by C. Implement the algorithms in C if you are proficient enough in it (gives you a better understanding).

What should I do, if I have a low IQ?

Find work that speaks to your strengths, whatever they are. Some people aren't very smart but good at communications, or nice, or creative, or attentive, or can do boring tasks over and over without getting bored, or could sell snow to Norwegians in winter - there is a myriad of qualities beyond intellect, and one has to be truly exceptionally unlucky to not be good at even one (usually there are a few). The trick is finding what you're good at, and what you like to do, and if you're lucky there's intersection between the two, and if you're lucky, there's somebody somewhere willing to pay for it.