In over my head. How can I work with more advanced programmers?

<i>This Q&#38;A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange [...] </i><p>In other words, this is some content from a different web site, which we're re-publishing here because we can. I don't get it, what would be the idea of this, except for "content is good"? That people who might be interested in questions like this don't read the relevant SE sites, so they "need" Ars to step in and re-publish it? It's weirding me out.

This is actually a problem I wish I had. I'd love to work with an uber programmer who was better than me as long as they had some patience , not too much ego and were happy to help me learn.<p>What I find is more common though is working with very sub-par developers who have no interest in advancing their skills.

Show you'll put in the time, and I've found pretty much anyone will help you out with areas you are less confident in.<p>Also, I've found the Benjamin Franklin method of "ask someone to do something for you as a form of flattery" works amazingly well to get people to befriend/like you.

For anyone thinking/saying things like this: "they all use the most modern aspects of C++ (C++11, template, lambda, etc, etc)":<p>Take a swim in the ocean of Lisp (Clojure/Scheme, whatever...) and you'll never feel overwhelmed by things like these again. You'll realize that you're all kinder-garden children and the only difference is that the rest had been playing with shinier toys... THE TRUTH IS BEYOND SYNTAX AND LANGUAGE FEATURES :)

I'd suggest: try to understand the code, the problem and re-factor it to get rid of these extra abstractions and templates.<p>You will either be able to a) get rid of these unnecessary constructs b) understand why these were necessary in the first place.

In general, if you need to know something but you don't know it yet, a decent strategy would be to learn it. This is usually one of the more practical and pleasant options.

&#62; Lo and behold, my new job is filled with programmers with 5-10 years experience of pure coding and they all use the most modern aspects of C++ (C++11, template, lambda, etc, etc).<p>Those are noobs. Look e.g. at V8 to see real, advanced C++ code: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/src/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/src/</a>