Story

I’ve been working at YC-backed startups since graduating from university. I’m now at a company building a deeply distributed systems product, and I’m surrounded by incredibly talented engineers who seem exceptionally strong at what they do. They often have knowledge and intuition about things I barely understand.

Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.

On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?