First, I seriously doubt you're in the bottom 1% of HN users when it comes to programming ability. Not only is it statistically very unlikely, but there are many people who read and participate here who aren't programmers at all. While I realize you probably didn't mean that statement literally, in my experience being self-deprecating is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. You're almost certainly more skilled than you believe yourself to be.
Second, speaking of skills as "ahead" or "behind" without context isn't very precise. I'm mostly a back-end web dev, but I have a little over a decade of experience. A brand new developer fresh out of a bootcamp that teaches modern React would be "ahead of me" if the task were to build a SPA front-end for an existent API. On the other hand, I would be far "ahead of them" if implementing the API itself was part of the task.
Two things about this:
First, I seriously doubt you're in the bottom 1% of HN users when it comes to programming ability. Not only is it statistically very unlikely, but there are many people who read and participate here who aren't programmers at all. While I realize you probably didn't mean that statement literally, in my experience being self-deprecating is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. You're almost certainly more skilled than you believe yourself to be.
Second, speaking of skills as "ahead" or "behind" without context isn't very precise. I'm mostly a back-end web dev, but I have a little over a decade of experience. A brand new developer fresh out of a bootcamp that teaches modern React would be "ahead of me" if the task were to build a SPA front-end for an existent API. On the other hand, I would be far "ahead of them" if implementing the API itself was part of the task.