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.