I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".

Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.

After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"

"6 months."

I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.

He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.

Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"

And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.

It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.

Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.

That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.

There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.

And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)

I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.