I think I was the 'not quite smart' at my current job, for a few months at least. My only advice is to try to pair program with him. First you take the screen,

I think I was the 'not quite smart' at my current job, for a few months at least. My only advice is to try to pair program with him. First you take the screen, then you let him handle it. Build his knowledge and confidence. Our best engineer is so clever it becomes intimidating sometime. He regularly takes some time to explain what he's doing and why, create then present new abstractions to make our job easier. That helped, understanding why some design decisions were made, and knowing our tools better. The second best engineer of the team building me up in the beginning also helped me a lot, my previous job was a grind where I lost all my motivation and a lot of love for programming. Having someone that good using his time for me helped. I'm now middling and not as much of a dead weight I used to be, but some subjects I tend to still have issues with. I like teaching though, so I took it upon myself to help new team members with a lot of pair programming (or I stay in our daily conversation with my screen shared and respond to any questions new members have until lunch)