Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

I think you're an above average developer working at a below average company. This could be the root of all your problems. Nothing is more frustrating than working with peers you know aren't carrying their weight.

Do you want to be an engineering leader? This is what you are, regardless of your official title at your company. Engineering leaders are judged by how much better they make everyone else. You may hear the term force multiplier used. Say you are really a 10x engineer, how much more effective are you if you could improve the efficiency of 350 developers by 10%? Mentor, teach, help establish culture, make systemic changes to help your peers become more effective.

Regardless, I think you're a bad fit for your current company and its culture. And yes, many of us have worked in environments, like a startup, where we knew we were critical to success. Fail to deliver and a funding round wouldn't go through and people would lose their jobs. It's stressful, but I hope you're adequately compensated.

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

I know saying this is easier than doing it, but; seek upward movement until you no longer feel like you're the smartest person in the room.

I would also add, although it's purely personal opinion, that seeking a solution to loneliness through work is a surefire way to feel more lonely. You say you're big on self-improvement, but are you only focused on improving your work-related skills? All areas of life need attention, and it sounds like you've only been focusing on the work part of work/life balance (work/life balance is so much more than just what hours you work).

> I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

Fair worry.

> What can I do to change things?

You should switch jobs.

I've been the top technical person at a couple of companies (not the size of your company, however). It can be exhilarating to be "the person". You get a lot of respect and autonomy. But it can be easy to fall into the curse of the expert beginner: https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

While you can mitigate this to some extent by participating in groups (virtual and physical) for other great developers, the easiest way to handle this issue is to switch jobs.

So, I'd suggest you start interviewing. Either you'll find a better place, or you'll discover advantages of your current situation.

I’ve worked with people who could have written this post with the stats and how they consider themselves, but they were awful to work with. People didn’t challenge them because it was exhausting, because they knew best, despite their constant churning out of garbage code that the business didn’t have the guts to address.

That’s not to say you’re bad or your code is bad, but it’s definitely worth considering whether the way you’re measuring yourself is a true reflection of your value: have you talked to your co-workers about what it’s like to work with you? What value you provide to them? How you can contribute to their careers, their work? The greatest value you can deliver to a business is rarely code: if you can improve every other developer by 1x, the business will be much better off than you being on an island all by yourself.

My measure of myself always starts with whether or not people enjoy working with me, whether I’m providing value to the people around me: I could write 10x as much code as I do now, but I don’t believe it would have better results for the company overall.

I am not a top developer or even close to it (I don't or want to have this trait of "relentless pursuit of self-improvement"), but I have worked with a couple.

It seems to me that being controlling is part of the problem. When I worked with a top developer, every and each code that I wrote they would have written it faster, more elegantly, more maintainable, and more bug-proof. But when they reviewed my PR, they would approve it if it was good enough. They would point out possible improvements, but once they were done, they would approve and go on. If they used their skill level as the bar to accepting other people's code, they would be doing 80% of the work and writing 80% of the code. In that case, I would be very comfortable just doing much less work than I could for some time until eventually I would get bored and leave.

Still, this top developer eventually changed areas completely (in the same company). From web development, which they mastered to cyber security, where they could start again their relentless pursuit for self-improvement, working with people that knew more than them.

That would be my suggestion. Just change areas, inside software development (inside the same company, if you like there, would be easier, as you already have the respect from people and they know your potential). Go learn something that you are not a top developer. But this is just me, a very regular developer, looking from outside what I saw people more similar to you doing.

You're at the wrong company. I've worked at a startup, at Twitter, and at Google and each time there was notable "raising of the bar" in the talent I was around. I know there's a lot of Google hate on HN, and it's such a big company it is true not every team is mind blowing, but... I've been there 5 years and I still have serious imposter syndrome and am constantly amazed by my colleagues. I get to work with some crazy smart and productive people. The suggestion isn't "go work for Google" (but maybe you should) but find a group of people that push you and amaze you and make you want to improve. They definitely are out there.

IT is full of impostors. You're surrounded by them. You like writing code and solving problems. Your coworkers want to get by. Many people working in IT are like that, that's just how it is - it's a field that pays well and it's hard to catch an impostor. Entry barrier is easy.

However, why do you want peers? Why don't you make the most out of the situation? If you're pulling such weight, you're worth a nice sum of money. Use it, create stable life, start something as a side-gig, OSS project or anything that can attract likely-minded individuals you'd like to spend your time with.

The situation you're in is not grim, it's the opposite. You're the one who gives praise, not the one who gets it. You grant approval, you don't receive it. You're the one who is relied upon, and you yourself don't have a "safety net". It's not bad, it's good.

The hard part is realizing how old we are and what our roles became with the passing of time.

- Become a serious mentor. Not just in passing code review, but actually spend time teaching.

- Try documenting your processes and thinking to get to the right code answer. Like a company coding manual. This way it scales your knowledge rather than being stuck as the 'doer'.

- Consider taking on different challenges, like management, either at your company or another company.

- Reflect on what it would be like to really be in a room with other 10x developers - you will all think you have the right answer which is different from each other. Does that really sound like fun to work through on the daily? It was fun when you weren't so sure you were right, it gets less fun the more sure you are.

- Most round B/C startups have ~50 developers. If you have 350, you're in a massive machine. You may think your 10x everywhere, but it's possible your only 10x in your locality, where you know the entire code base. It may simply be time for new challenges at a new company.

- Ask if you can start writing for some open source project you like (new or existing) as "developer relations" for the company in some way. Yes, you will need to reduce your in house tickets - but it will keep you happy and working and contributing and still probably doing 50% of the work. And the company gets other benefits from it.

- Along the same lines, you can start writing technical articles to publish as dev relations/marketing. Theres a lot of value in those seo posts for a lot of companies.

Theres like a million ways to go with this, but hopefully these ideas help a bit. Best of luck and I hope you find some meaningful company to hang out with.

My personal experience is that people who describe their abilities like you do are actually not very good at their job but think they are.

But, assuming, you're right, you should have switched jobs yesterday to somewhere where you can be challenged. How can you be sure? You can't. But making sure to utilise the interview process is a good starting point. If you walk out of an interview just as unsure that the place won't challenge you, then either you've not asked enough questions, or they gave very wooly answers (which is a pretty good sign that the place isn't right for you).

Good luck. Feeling lonely sucks.

Does not scream 10x to me. Your description sounds like you are simply very experienced at this job and the software made and used there. A good senior developer, who has spent a long time at the job should be like that. I think 10x is nonsense anyway, except if compared to subpar developers. You are probably good at thinking about edge cases, while others are too inexperienced or lazy to take care of those.

Sticking to a job can enable you to know most or all of the software there. Over time it forges the connections in the brain, that make you immediately think of important aspects and how things work together. It is good, that people realize, that they should include you in architecture meetings and such to get your input on things.

What you can do is, that you present problems you are thinking about and ask other developers for their input. Maybe even, if you already got a solution. You can also act as a mentor to get them up to speed. It can be very satisfying, if you manage to guide someone else to some learnings and then see how they are able to solve things on their own using that knowledge. Teaching is a very important thing one can do in society.

Also do not forget, that not everyone wants to work at high capacity all the time. People can also lean back a bit, when someone very reliable will take care of the problems. Perhaps decide to not influence some project at all for a change.

The beginning of your post did sound like a lot of bragging. Once I got to the end, I felt that I could have written a large part of it...

Feeling of being rarely challenged, loneliness, frustration with slowness, and urge to go and fix "it" have been very present for me over the past 2-3 years. It's been pretty harmful to my mental health. But it's also forced me to look at the bigger picture. So while I feel like I've lost a few years of my career, it's not all lost.

Some things I would suggest :

Don't express your frustration. You care, that's a good thing ! But you can't let the frustration overshadow your knowledge and your message. Seen it in some uber-smart people, and it just makes everyone feel bad.

Act as a teacher? I'm not sure if that's something that interests you, but it's something that'll take some of your time, improve the team around you, make you feel less lonely and make you seem more approachable for everyone. I also find it very rewarding.

Change jobs ? New team, new company, new role ?

If you're interested by CS in general, find people outside of work in the industry that you think are "10x" devs as well (god, I hate that term...)? Simply people you respect that have similar interest. I haven't solved the "how" myself, so if you're open to having some off-HN conversations about this, just let me know and we'll figure something out :)

You're not a 10x engineer. You're a 2x who hasn't figured out yet how to teach other engineers what you know. It sounds like it's past time you got started, for your own sake as much as that of those around you.

Work somewhere with really, really smart people.

When I joined Stripe in 2017, I couldn't get over the number of people I worked with who were smarter, better engineers than myself. It was new to me. It was hard at times (impostor syndrome, feeling like an idiot, etc), but mostly super fun – and of course, incredibly humbling. Humility is really important to me, and it sounds like it is to you, too – you can gain it, along with a sense of camraderie, with the right team.

Switching jobs is normal, healthy, and not a betrayal – you've put in great work at this company and it will outlast you. It's time to look for something new.

Don't just say yes to the first company that comes your way – say "no" to a variety of them and when you feel really excited about the people you interview with, lean in and spend time getting to know them before signing.

If you've never worked at a "fancy silicon valley company" before, don't feel afraid about applying to them. At Stripe, we hired people with backgrounds like yours all the time, alongside folks with fancy Harvard/MIT/Google/etc backgrounds.

Don't worry, you're not anything special in the grand scheme of things :) find a company with lots of engineers better than you and you'll find a lot of joy.

As an aside, what you describe of your current role sounds straight out of the eng ladder for Stripe's "Staff Software Engineer" level. You can read more about that style of work in Will Larson's book if you want more like that, or join an earlier-stage company with a heavy-hitting team.

If you'd like to chat further, my email is in my profile, happy to set up a Zoom.

Does this identify with you at all?

- You’re checking out everyone else’s PRs and requesting changes for all the bugs you find. The few times you don’t a major outage occurs.

- Everyone’s asking you for help all the time. You actually find a way to “help” all of them but really you’re just solving their problems for them

- You say you love your job, but really it’s not like what it used to be. You’re no longer excited to be woken up at 2am to fix an outage.

- You never aimed to be here, doing this, working here. But here you are and this is now your baby.

Your baby has grown up. As long as you are here the stress will eat at you. But can I encourage you that a better life awaits you. Change will be hard, but what is waiting for you on the other side is so much better. But it takes humility, humility that “project x” will go on without you (definitely not as smoothly but others will step up to the plate). Humility to try something new where you are in the bottom 10% working your way up once again. It will feel like you’re giving up all the hard work you’ve put in, giving up what makes you king of the hill, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because life isn’t about being king, but about the journey. Welcome to a life of freedom, of learning something new every day, of waking up each morning and diving into whatever is on your heart to discover.

Remember a 10x developer means 10 times better than the worst. Which makes you a 2x developer compared to the average.

You've reached the top at your company. You work harder and care more than most. But you haven't reached senior dev status until you realize your extra work and spotlight puts a target on your back. You are a natural target now: management shifts, technology changes, projects fail and the same people patting you on the back in management will be blaming you when things go wrong. You won't be in the room either. You are one political issue away from doom.

Some developers around you see you as smarter and will lean in for advice. Help them because another group exists who dislike your pace and how it reflects badly on them and are hoping to see you fail. Try to keep the first group large and the second group smaller.

But what are you doing this for? You would make more friends by being a friend and doing less under your name and more under others. You have the extra time you spend on your tickets but can you take the ego hit and give credit to others. If everyone is praising you, you really should use that moment to praise others. You need to include others into your moment because it becomes other people's moment too.

Use your 10x power wisely.

If this is earnest, I don't mean to minimize your angst, but I thought this was satire. Measuring by number of commits or story points completed is bureaucratic nonsense. What you're describing is not a 10x developer, but a really good bureaucrat, like Hermes Conrad.

As others have said, get a new job. Prioritize finding colleagues that are better than you are.

If 80% of the code is yours, of course you will be able to work with it faster than everyone else. It's easier to write code than read others' code; you already know how it all works, where the bodies are buried, etc.; and you probably know the other 20% pretty well too because the parts you aren't writing yourself you're reviewing and understanding in the "big picture" context better than anyone else. Not to mention getting pulled into meetings and hallway discussions that give you insights into what's coming next. Long story short: You've amassed company & product specific intellectual capital.

You're being challenged, it's just not a technical challenge. You need to define for yourself what you want out of this situation. You can of course go find another job as others have suggested; I'm sure that will feel new and technically challenging for a while at least!

Or you can accept that your challenge now is to figure out why you feel stressed and alone; why your team seems so slow; why your response is to be more controlling; why you don't trust them to get the job done; and why they just obey your edicts rather than arguing and sharing their own ideas. These are not technical problems, but they are common when engineers take on leadership roles. Is there camaraderie on the team? Can you gently suss out their thoughts on the matter? What are their goals? Try letting them solve the problem; resist urges to take control. Set limits on yourself so instead of taking over with coding, you start to learn why they're slow, and help them improve (are they over engineering? getting stuck and not asking for advice?). Allow them to make mistakes, and develop a culture of sharing in success and failure and learn from both. Recognize that they won't be as efficient given random tasks as you, since you know almost all of it; help them build up their own areas of expertise, and create a "map" of experts so they can help each other directly instead of working through you.

Most importantly, stop measuring your commit count, task count, etc., unless that's really what you want to maximize... in which case, yes, the rest of your team is going to be slower than you, depend on your understanding, and probably not have much hope of surpassing your performance. Instead, focus more on the team's performance, the project's success, etc.; find ways you can measure those if you must; and discuss with your boss so he sees your efforts, can give feedback & advice, and so you both know how you're valued.

You need a hobby to keep you grounded. Work isn't your life, it's just work. Remind yourself for many people work is just work too.

Try writing code, something wildly out of your specialty. Example: if you are good at crud code, try writing game code.

If you want to level up code wise, then you need to connect with people at meetups or conventions.

You have to keep perspective on life and work.

As an alternative to looking for a new company (which is not a bad idea) I can suggest a path taken by a peer of mine in a similar boat. They and another go-to engineer petitioned to start a 'new projects' division and basically work on an internal spinoff. Two people with the backing of the company, a decent amount of freedom, and a mandate to build something that customers will love and buy. They had an exec sponsor and good relations with much of the e-staff. They got to experience all the "fun" of a startup with more of a safety net.

This way you pick those people who you think can help you grow and put a clear and hard challenge in front of yourself.

I haven't experienced being a 10x developer (biologist first, coder second), but I have found myself in the position of being at the top of my game (problem solving and innovation more than LOC), while also being frustrated by the limitations of the company I was at. So, I switched jobs. Everyone at the new startup is equally or more competent than me (in their own domains, which overlap, but not too much). I'm inherently involved in more exploratory work and definitely less "productive" and "in control". I feel like I'm leveling up in a new way. It brings a different kind of stress, but one I'm glad to have.

I don't know if the strict definition of a 10x developer is relative to other people surrounding you; a lot of us could claim to be 10x situationally.

I didn't mind being the smartest person around, but I did find it a relief to be surrounded by other people at or greater than my level when I switched to a different team.

What kind of feedback do you give, directly and indirectly? Do you have any former coworkers you can reach out to and ask them "what's it like to disagree with me?"

Example: I'm currently working on a project led by someone that many people at the company know. Today he shared a sketched out proposal for a problem that's been on our team's plate, and I didn't immediately like it. I started asking him questions to poke holes in his proposal over slack but he had counterarguments ready for everything, and eventually I sort of gave up and said, "ok I guess I just don't quite understand the problem."

His response was to suggest a synchronous video chat, which he started by thanking me for challenging his design. This meant I went from feeling like I was probably dumb and just asking things he'd already through to feeling like I was helping in the design process, even if I couldn't see the problem as clearly.

In the end he convinced me that all my questions had answers and my only counter-proposal would be just as much work and more "surprising" (less intuitive?) within the domain, but I didn't feel argued-down. I felt like my challenges were appreciated, which makes me more likely to raise other challenges again in the future, which reduces the odds that he'll feel like he's working alone.

just an anecdote, but I've worked with high-achievers who had varying ways of welcoming or shutting down input, enabling or crippling the teams around them. I see this suggestion a few places in this thread: if you identify as someone with a relentless drive to improve, then maybe it's time to work on your communication styles and patterns.

Why are you working 8-5?

Work 9-3 and pick up a hobby. You only need to outperform your peers, or train them up if that's possible. Beyond that you owe the company you work for nothing.

Why work harder, when working harder provides you no benefit whatsoever?

If 80% is your code, and you're the one making architectural decisions about it, it's not surprising you're much faster at it.

Being a 10x developer is not about commits, or 0 defects short term. Situational knowledge can also blind you to your actual prowess.

How are you elevating the rest of the team? How easy is it for someone to touch on and improce your code?

If you feel and act as your team is incompetent, they either are incompetent, or will become incompetent.

I don’t understand how you see any kind of causality between being good and being lonely.

I worked with tons of people, some more talented, some less talented, I never felt like not connecting with people less able than me. And I don’t think people more talented than me felt lonely at all.

Keep the coding going and work on being friendly and fun and helpful. That kind of stuff.

Oh and please don’t call yourself 10x. You’re losing a lot of sympathy in that first sentence.

> In my direct team of 10 people, myself included, I have completed 71% of all story points in 2022, the other 9 are responsible for the other 29%

This just sounds like another example of Price’s Law. Seems like you’ve climbed the ladder of competency at your organization, and now there’s nowhere else to go.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Garry Tan:

“At every job you should either learn or earn. Either is fine. Both is best. But if it's neither, quit” [1]

Sounds like you might need more on the side of learning here. Good luck.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/garrytan/status/13776619701789736...

Thia post is kinda the epitome of HN being humble. Especially when each second comment is of the form "Totally relatable, I feel the same". So many x10 devs that soon one gotta be a x100 dev to be above average, yikes...

I am trying not to be an 10x developer. I try to stay around whatever the number of story points is considered ok for my team. If if finish something in 2 hours instead of 5, that means I have more time to do other things. Try new approaches, make proof of concepts for myself, read something interesting, browse the web.

If I'd try to work as fast as possible, I feel I would burn out fast.

My advice would be to either get slower with the work (do only what needs to be done) and do other things in the time remaining or switch jobs for one that pays accordingly to the work you are capable of doing, open your own company.

I've been this in jobs, and am one of these people in my current job, so I can relate to what you wrote here.

There's a lot that goes into switching jobs, so it's hard to offer as general advice – it's much easier to do for some people than others. Switching into any new job is a reset switch for a lot of what you experience in your current role. You come in with no/minimal reputation, domain knowledge, relationships, knowledge of the code, etc, and you'll have to work to build all that – by itself, that's probably a refreshing change. If you switch into a company with a high talent bar, you'll get all that and also be nearly guaranteed of never being the smartest/most effective person in your area. This can be a big ego check, but also means that there's plenty of folks around to learn from.

I'm primarily a startup guy, and I'm good enough that I usually end up being a key person. I spent some time at a prestigious, trendy company filled with really smart people. I didn't like a lot of things about that place, but I _loved_ the caliber of my teammates. Everyone was above average, everyone pulled their weight, followed along in fast-moving discussions, politely/professionally challenged each other's ideas, etc. Definitely not lonely, and definitely a dynamic I miss in my current team.

How good are you really?

Because if you are really and truly excellent, my advice is to not bother with caring about the rest of the room, and to just focus on the quality of your day to day life.

There's diminishing returns on 'success' and a diminishing supply of your time.

I burnt out on the cycle of "excited to finally be in the bigger pond," then "doing really well in this pond," to "wait, this is all this pond has to offer?" And repeat.

There's brilliant people out there. They will rarely be the person on the other end of the check. And even when they are, the person on the other end of THEIR check is certainly going to be a moron.

You'll see potential around every corner. You'll get excited about just what you and the other brilliant people you finally found will be able to accomplish. And then you'll watch what actually plays out and it will crush you.

If you have a nice life, and find fulfillment in what you have outside of work, don't sacrifice your work life balance to put more into work in the pursuit of finding fulfillment there.

Unfortunately society still just isn't quite at the point where it's realized the value in attracting the absolute best by offering them much less work.

If/when that changes and you can find yourself working one to two days a week making a living and networked with true peers - jump to that pond immediately.

Until then, beware of leaping from the pan to the fire.

Sounds like you need a more challenging project. However its a red flag to me if you write 80% of the code. Do you really need to write so much code? I worked with a prolific developer and instead of doing things simply he always wrote another dozen classes. The whole thing was over-engineered because this guy was always adding an extra layer of complexity, it was so hard to understand - the only guy who understood it was you know who. Make sure you're not that guy.

First, a reality check - it’s great that you can ship defect-free code, but that’s table stakes for a good senior engineer. You’re locally a 10x engineer because you wrote most of the code, so you’re naturally going to be a lot more effective than the other people on your team. This probably won’t translate to new projects.

If you joined a new project where someone else had written 80% of it, it would take you years to catch up to their productivity; if they were controlling and continued to write 80% of everything, it would be impossible. The next step in becoming a better engineer for this project is figuring out what you need to do differently for everyone else to be more productive; for example, if other people are pushing bugs, you need to add tests to make that impossible. If people take a long time to ramp up, you need to refactor the code so that someone doesn’t need to understand -all- of it to start contributing; you might also need onboarding docs.

The next step in becoming a better engineer generally is to switch teams and learn new skills. If you enjoy hard technical work, miss feeling challenged, and genuinely feel like you’re a much better dev than average, try switching to a hard field that’s new to you: distributed systems, ml, performance engineering, etc.

I think this is one of my favorite Ask HN's. Just, yay.

Unfortunately, I have to write my thoughts quickly, because otherwise I will not be able to write them at all. Got some things to do :)

When I get to this stage, I can get self destructive. It sounds like you're heading down that path with the negative framing.

I don't know if any of what I say will make sense.

First: negative framing. Commit to positivity. Commit - spiritually, if that makes sense to you - fully, to the idea that everyone is contributing, and can contribute at your level.

Second: communicate (positively). Figure out a way to communicate your concerns to your colleagues in a non-judgemental way. (shit, this is inadequate)

Third: challenge. It sounds like you're not being challenged anymore. Same framework, same issues. This is actually a really bad thing. It means that once this context is obsolete, your finely-honed abilities might be obsolete. Take it from a guy who got his start as a Flash developer, you need some challenge. This could be something else than development, though: start a business, move to a different country, throw massive parties (what I did). Find a challenge that's hard and meet it.

Good luck! I'd love to chat about it more. Contact info in bio. Sorry I could not write a longer letter.

Congratulations on your progress. Guitarist Pat Metheny has suggested one approach to growth is to "Be the worst guy in every band you're in." Dave Hoover applied that to his own learning in software development and wrote it up, first as a blog post [0] and later, with Adewale Oshineye, as part of a book, 'Apprenticeship Patterns.' [1]

The implication is that you could consider finding a stronger team to work with, which might involve a job switch. There are much larger issues there, involving salary, benefits, commute, effects on family and friends, and only you know the the full picture of the effects of those things on your own happiness. I can say there's a place for keeping an imperfect job as part of a pleasant overall picture. Good luck as you explore your options.

[0] https://redsquirrel.com/dave/work/a2j/patterns/BeTheWorst.ht...

[1] https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/apprenticeship-pat...

I've been trying to find answers for the last few months to the same questions you are asking. I could have written 95% of what you just wrote.

I won't try to prove my status as a 10xer beyond that as an IC in the last two years, my company and its customers have nine figures more in their pockets because of stuff I've written. As a result my compensation is in the band for a Google L8.

It's completely clear to me, particularly from your replies, you are an exceptional developer.

My frustrations and fears are *exactly* the same as yours.

I don't have answers for you. I'm right there too. All I can do is confirm that you aren't crazy, you aren't alone.

The only helpful? thing I've found so far is to make my circle of caring smaller. I've chosen half the company's codebase to strenuously avoid knowing anything about. I focus on one important problem or important code review at a time, and try to do an excellent job at it at the pace that it requires, and in spite of the dozen other critical issues or urgently needed code reviews, that are around me.

Try teaching. This world needs more of competent developers to teach. It could also help with your loneliness, and people will appreciate it. Win win situation.

FWIW, one of my friend is the maintainer of one of the most popular FOSS. He doesn't code as much anymore, but instead focusing on building relationships with people, like a dev evangelist. He seems really happy doing it.

"This feeling of loneliness got quantified when the commit number came up. The problem is people just accept whatever I say. I used to get challenged in some of my decisions, which I always appreciated since I could create better solutions. Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

It feels like I don't have peers."

This chunk here is consistent across fields. It means that you are the big fish in this pond.

Some people like that. Some people hate it. It looks like you're in the latter camp, and that means that you want to look for a job elsewhere, in an organization which is bigger in one specific metric: the number of people who can teach and mentor you.

Ascertaining that metric is very difficult.

You should also be aware that if you find such a group, you may not like it as much as you think you will. Humans have a lot invested in status, and your status will decrease significantly if you move to a group where you are merely better than average, or perhaps a little below average. New job energy may mask that for some months.

You didn't mention how many jobs you've had. If you've been at the same company for 9 years, you've likely just built up a ton of institutional knowledge and may not be a "10x developer" in the broader world. As others mentioned, you should probably find a place with better developers than you (I don't know what you're working on, but if you're not like, writing a programming language or a self-driving car or something it shouldn't be too challenging).

> 80% of the code base is my code

It's a bit of red flag imo that you don't seem to consider that being the author of a system naturally makes you much more productive in it, while others have to adapt to your code (essentially, you may be doing a poor job with knowledge transfer). An old CTO used to have a saying "the easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 5 other engineers 2x more productive".

Go through your Rolodex of everyone you’ve worked with that has since left, filter out the high level positions, and contact each to see what they are up too. If you’re the type of person that you describe, they’ll jump at an opportunity to work with you, at a higher pay grade, with less responsibility, and more flexible hours.

As a 35 year old developer who started at about age 32, just want to say: I am glad to see folks in their 40s doing well as a developer.

sometimes i get burned out on it. but, ultimately i am still interested in programming and the creativity that comes with creating products.

so, just glad that I can keep being one for at least 10, maybe 20 more years.

I was/am in a somewhat similar position. I don't consider myself a 10x dev but I have 20+ years at the same company.

Obviously I don't vibe with all the "you should switch jobs" comments, although it can be an excellent next step for you.

My approach was to work more "on the system" than "in the system". I made it my mission to improve the skills of my team. Introducing "Mob Programming" had the biggest impact. It seems counter intuitive but stories get completed faster, knowledge is shared, ownership of code is shared, even small decisions get made together, good practises by positive peer pressure, and you get to code together.

It seems you could use your standing to suggest/introduce changes without even having an official role, that comes with less coding.

I used to be in a similar situation (smartest, most innovative person in a team of nearly 2000 developers), then I jumped ship to a smaller but way more competent team. One one hand, now I occasionally get schooled by some of the smartest people around and love it, on the other, I (very rarely) miss being the king of the hill. I have since come to the conclusion that happiness is not (and should not be) tied to your work identity, what matters is people, friends, family and how one contributes to increasing the beauty of the universe. Sounds lofty and a little vague but that is by design, you have to find what motivates and excites you.

I can empathize with this, but I also have the problem that I'm nearing 60 and I'm working with guys in their 20s and 30s.

So now I'm trying to become more of a "mentor". Particularly now that everything is WFH and remote, a lot of the bullshit that people used to use in the office to promote themselves has been stripped away.

So it's easier to recognize actual talent, and when I do, I try to make sure that when I do something, I do everything I can to get people to understand what I did and, more importantly, why.

So now, I see my "output" as not necessarily my code (I still write it) but the people in the teams I work with.

From the looks of it you _are_ being challenged, just not in the way you expected.

> The worst part is I am sensing within myself this frustration that everyone else appears to move so slowly. The thought of "great, one more thing I got to fix" is coming up too frequently.

I find it very respectable that you are so self-aware. In my worldview, stronger shoulders should carry more weight, but that also means that you have leverage to make things better around you, for yourself and others. You obviously don't want to become grumpy or arrogant. I get that, it feels terrible. But there is a way, possibly outside of the well trodden paths.

This post reminds me of the 'nice guy' asking why girls only seem to love jerks and how he can't get a date.

Except this is 'nice guy', workplace edition.

Just like you don't win at dating by being nice, you don't win at corporate wage slavery by being a hard working slave.

You lose by being a 'nice guy', you lose by 'working hard'. Get it? Because you'd be trying to do the wrong thing? Figure out what the right thing is, but you'll have to let go of your slave morality to get there - as long as you think lying is bad, while working hard to make someone else rich is good, you will be stuck.

Clearly you should change jobs to a place with more devs, hopefully you will find some peers there.

Don't be frustrated with slower people. Part of it is the cannibalization effect. If a team has a dominant striker, some of the others will be scoring fewer goals than their potential. You might actually be doing them a favor by moving on. The other thing to remember is that great players still need water carriers, or they'll be wasting their time carrying water themselves. Lastly, if you don't have some 1X people around you, nobody will know you're a 10X. So be happy that you are so good and so influential.

I can kind of understand what you are saying. However some points I guess cant be true (at least I hope). In a company with around 350 devs I would say there should be at least one other dev who is "really good". In my experience there are devs like you, who just get a lot of work done in a good quality and there are other devs who enable others. They themselves dont commit that often or get a lot of stories done because they are a lot in pair programming sessions or otherwise connected with others. Maybe you can try and look if you find someone like this in your company.

Since you seem to be the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Most probably you have a ton of $$$$ by this time, so leave that damn room (sabbatical, or simply quit), and use that money to do something which you maybe don't even know you like (sports, travels, hell, maybe an expensive car).

This is what I did when I was in your shoes[1]. Then I went to work for something quite different, and enjoyed NOT being the smartest in the room anymore, and not being responsible for 60%+ of commits, docs, etc.

[1]: one of the best times of my life, BTW. And I also like coding.

Most developers pivot to harder things until they are reach the level where they are barely able to stay productive since the tasks are too hard for them. This means it is really easy to be much faster than everyone else just by not pivoting to new things, just continue mastering the same thing. Many people never master anything and just stall though, but the way other developers handle your problem is to move on to something harder, that is what everyone else did who didn't struggle with the tasks you currently work on.

I think you are not defining the problem broadly enough. Working or coding in general can not provide all the challenge and social belonging in life. Pick something that you are not good at and recapture satisfaction of growth. For example, I took up kickboxing about a year ago and I am still not great at it, but I can see improvement month by month. Or an ultimate 100x - have/adopt a kid or another kid, no more boredom for a decade.

Next, even when it comes to work, you are not replicating your results at scale yet. Can you discover people with great potential and train them until they are able to challenge YOU and suggest improvements to whatever you come up with.

Finally, is there truly no individual challenge left for yourself as an individual contributor? Have you looked at state of the art in 3D graphics, machine learning and quantum computing and expanded your expertise in these areas? Or if you prefer traditional programming, try coding for low end embedded devices where extreme ingenuity is required for production functionality and performance. Don't mean to jump straight into recruitment, but if you want, ping me some ways to contact you and I bet we can keep you challenged for a while.

Or, for non work fun, check out retro computing / demo scene. This cuts down tedium of writing lots of code - can't fit that much in 64K or even 640L - while maximizing fun of making every line count.

>The worst part is I am sensing within myself this frustration that everyone else appears to move so slowly. The thought of "great, one more thing I got to fix" is coming up too frequently.

I see this as a point of opportunity for you because you have some part in this and just need to figure out what it is. Based on what you are saying, the key might be found somewhere between when you do what comes easy for you in terms of getting work done - and - doing what is very hard/unpleasant for you but would produce more work in others. You are exercising control with a high level of expertise and this could be exercised differently.

An example I could give is the case of a tech help forum I co-moderate. If I want more help from the community and to see increased participation with ideas and suggestions, I have to let the unanswered question just sit there. If another moderator takes it upon themselves to efficiently get things solved and jumps in and answers it, then others don't see a need.

I'm not sure how this translates, but it might mean that the next big challenge for you is found in choosing to NOT doing something rather than doing it. Like, being available to others during that time, rather than actually doing it, could be a strategic step. This would increase interaction, help you see the effort made by others regardless of their productivity, and man - we all benefit when someone competent is not constantly busy. I love asking questions but hate to interrupt others. Open office hours the way professors do it, or something like that.

As someone far younger than you, yet at times infinitely jaded, through what have >0% odds of being at least related circumstance:

If you haven’t come across DFWs This is Water, I’d highly recommend you give it a sincere listen: https://youtu.be/PhhC_N6Bm_s

What is your goal? Have to make hay while the sun shines, if you perform so we’ll see if you can find another opportunity to realize that gap you’re in? If that’s not fruitful, try and try again and at the end of the day, find resolve in knowing you’re doing what you can and, while you have that going wrt opportunities, give your thoughts and time to things around you that do inspire you and provide some degree of fulfillment. As someone in the field as a moderately tenured, and currently unemployed, “software engineer”: it is hard to unplug but god is it so necessary for being present and being able to see what else is going on you can nurture&enjoy. I’m a bit scared, given the macro picture rn, about being unemployed. But, at the end of the day, we are all in this ocean of chaos with 86400 seconds to allocate everyday however we choose. Bit of a lengthy rant, but feels good to capture some thoughts I’ve been having honestly, and hope you are most excellent!!! At least it’s almost the weekend haha.

> What can I do to change things?

Find a talented Junior developer which is able to think in your in presence (not stunted by your presence) and out spoken enough to disagree while you stand them character wise and take them under your wing. Mentor them as far as you think you can be effective mentoring them. Then let them grow on their own and after some break pick the next candidate.

Edit: Oh i see you are already doing that. Different suggestions: network with fellow professionals and contribute to a trade publication.

I looked at Jira stories and story points. In my direct team of 10 people, myself included, I have completed 71% of all story points in 2022, the other 9 are responsible for the other 29%.

If someone on my team can do 20 1 point "fix this typo" tasks, with 20 tiny commits, in the time it takes me to complete a 5 point task that I squash into 1 commit, that doesn't mean they're 4x more productive than me despite completing 4 times points and 5 times more commits.

Points and commits are a measure of complexity more than time. If you're doing far more of them then (in general, but not necessarily true for the author) you're working on simpler tasks. If you're getting through lots of high point stories very quickly then that's a sign that you're padding your estimates too much. Story points should judge complexity relative to other stories.

Neither points nor commits are a sign of being a 10x developer. A 10x person is 10 times more effective, not 10 times more productive. When you look at someone who is generally considered a 10x dev like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack, they're not just doing more work than their peers. They're moving the state of the art forwards, and building apps that are fundamental building blocks thousands of people use to build on top of.

Put a "10x developer" bullet point near the top of your resume and look for another gig?

Random thoughts trying to answer your beautiful, passionate post - which I really liked.

1) As others have said, it might be that the company you work at is below average, and you are above average. This might be frustrating in the long term, and cause most of the issues you have listed.

2) I'm 45, you're 42; I sense that you might be going through a period similar to the one I have experienced, where I suddenly didn't have a manager/boss who inspired me, or someone I wanted to be when I got older. Perhaps you need someone to challenge you, either/or your boss, or your co-workers.

3) It might be that you want to stay at this company, and moving to another one is not an option for you. In that case, see that as a powerful, maybe useful, constraint, and work around it. How can you make your job AMAZING, despite you cannot change company, or other things happening in your current role?

4) You write wonderfully, and I would love to read more and more. Maybe you could start a newsletter focused on developers, and that could be a way to find some of the exchange, the challenge, the smartness that you seem to lack now.

5) Want to chat? Ping me on email, we'll chat. Sometimes a stranger can be a little helpful, because he doesn't have any vested interest in influencing the direction of your career.

It sounds like you’re contributing too much. If you’re the backbone of your company’s technical org and you’re not the CTO or at least a director, you’re being undervalued which causes a lot of psychological distress over time.

I recommend you figure out how to get to that position, which will probably involve training other developers to take over for you.

If you don’t want to get into management, you could join a large company >3000 employees where there will be dozens of people like you.

>I don't think that the number of git commits actually proves anything, other than I commit, code review, and merge code frequently. I wanted a better metric to quantify my feelings of alienation. I looked at Jira stories and story points. In my direct team of 10 people, myself included, I have completed 71% of all story points in 2022, the other 9 are responsible for the other 29%. That jives with my number of git commits compared to others as well.

You joke that you are a 10x dev but do you understand why? In fact doing the math... 71% vs 3% is more like 23x.

So you're a 23x dev. But it's not because you're 23x better than the average dev. You're 23x better than those devs. They achieve nothing and get away with it. Same pay either way. You are 23x against devs who are probably watching youtube, doomscrolling facebook, or playing video games.

>It feels like I don't have peers. I'm solely dragging my entire team and everyone else around me with me for the ride. This leads to stress, it feels that if I am not working on the "thing" it won't get completed.

You are lonely because everyone else isn't showing up to work. They are getting away with it because the managers also are doomscrolling facebook and playing video games.

If not for you holding shit together and getting abused someone would eventually ask why nobody is getting anything done.

You might be frustrated but any amount of holding back or trying to get this fixed will never work. You might think you can fix this situation but you cant.

The only option is to find a new job.

10x or not, you’re ready to reframe your role in your company. Perhaps in your industry too. However I find it interesting that you didn’t come out saying “I think I want to find a new job.” Like there’s something keeping you at this job - you like something there. I’ve felt similarly alone at my company and I’m no doubt at least a 2x engineer in my architectural engineering capacity. Here’s the bottom line - psychedelic medicine helped me with anxiety and depression. I still get frustrated with slack-jawed engineers assisting me but ultimately I find satisfaction in the tight execution of a project even when they feel like layups. It’s not trivial work - there are new challenges but I had to adjust my mindset to see them. I wanted challenges to look one way, but with a wide angle psychedelic driven perspective, I see that they’re nearby but not what I expected. Moreover at the end of the day, I have rapport at my company. I’d need a pretty strong sense to leave a good company that respects me for some place that pays me more to scramble like a beginner all over. That’s not the chapter of my life that I’m writing right now. Feel free to write your next chapter outside of the office.

Thanks for the post. I can related to what you posted and would like to offer few perspectives that might help you.

1. Start with accepting the fact that you are the lead developer who is responsible for the long term success of the project thus the team. This is really important in that it puts the project and team as the same level.

2. Start mentoring and delegating more core pieces to others in the team. Allow them to make mistakes of their own so they can see the bad and appreciate the good. As long as their work is good enough, let them take more ownership so they can grow be the lead developer if you are ever to move on.

3. The last point is to always remind yourself of the fact that the project will eventually continue regardless of you being there or not. As a lead, it is your responsibility that it will continue smoothly after you move on to other things. As long as you keep doing "one more thing you got to fix", you will accumulate more responsibilities that will eventually burn you out. So for the good of the project, the team and yourself, you should start working towards a scenario where either the project or the team does not need to depend on you to be able to move forward, which will eventually happen whether you like it or not.

One word: move.

I left one job, as it turns out pretty early in my career, because I felt I'd run out of headroom. I'd gotten pretty good at some things, and management very much wanted me to do more of those things. I really really liked the people I worked with, including said management. But I felt like I was always the question answerer. There was nobody I could go to for information or advice. I was stagnating. I went to another company where everyone was significantly senior to me - willingly choosing to be the n00b again. It was scary as hell, but it really helped me grow, and I've never regretted the choice. As it turns out, I worked with some of those people twice more at other companies, so I didn't even miss them for long.

BTW this has nothing to do with being "10X" or not. It has more to do with where you are in your own growth vs. what roles are available where you are. If you're in an RPG, but you're level 30 in a level 20 area, it might feel like you're 10X but you're really just in the wrong place. The "10X" idea might in fact be a significant impediment to doing what you need to do. Sometimes you need to go outside your comfort zone to grow.

Change jobs, but not because of others moving slowly.

It's amazing that people trust you, but you're worried you'll let your team down. One of the biggest reasons why people leave jobs is because of a lack of growth opportunities, and the longer you stay in your position, the more likely it's going to beat the ambition out of others on the team.

And if most of the code is written by you, this doesn't make you bad for leaving. The easiest code to maintain is code that's written by one person. Sure, some people might get mad and try to shame you, for leaving them to maintain all your code. However, this might be a result of people not believing in themselves. They need encouragement, and some nurturing.

So I don't think the problem is whether you're a 10x developer or not. If you're good, it's like a white tablecloth at a restaurant. The cloth isn't bad just because it got stained. The problem is you're lonely, increasingly resentful, increasingly complacent, and it's not going to be good for those around you.

If you leave the company and it goes well for you, it's also motivating for others since they know the company won't try to sabotage them on their way up. If the company does sabotage you, then this is also good since it'll help you determine the difference between a team that has your back vs a team that wants to use you. Either way, it's important to appreciate them regardless.

So you got to your position because a you cared about others. It's important to not let your accomplishments blind you and overshadow just how much of your success comes from your care for others.

Sounds like you aren't being properly motivated and your talents not used. Sign up to a project which is guaranteed to fail if you were the only person working on it. Then you will very quickly find out how your conceit dissolves, once you realize there's very little any one of us can do individually that is of great significance and why building software, like any other large effort, is necessarily a team effort.

I think it’s time to find an environment where you’ll be challenged. You currently aren’t even though you’re exceptional at what you do. If you’re still hungry for more, it’s time to move on and challenge yourself somewhere new. If you’re currently a 10x dev at SpaceX or something then I’m afraid you’ve hit the stratosphere of mere mortals and have graduated to iddqd land. (Shout out to the SpaceX team killing it).

I have the exact same feeling though I have only 6 years of experience(being 29 years old). At this point ~90% of the code we have, was written, touched or refactored by me, so I know everything in my org, I know services we use, even 3rd party ones, I do my work usually twice as fast as other developers, my contributions double the amount of the developer behind me. I am the guy that everyone comes to with problems, issues, ideas, architecture questions. I had similar experience in all previous companies.

At the same time, I feel the impostor syndrome hitting me hard, I never worked at big tech, never worked on multi-million-user applications. I know there's a lot that I don't know or things that I have never done. Yet, whenever I look at tech 'influencers', people who give talks, write articles, I feel like I'm nothing compared to them, like I don't know anything. That's why I'm switching jobs now again, to see new stuff and meet new people, see what's out there. This way I have somewhat of a challenge for at least the first year of new work, new environment, new project.

I've recently been faced with an opportunity that has put me somewhat in a similar situation.

I'm lucky that I have someone somewhat close to the team that I can ask for feedback on the solutions I come up with, which are not always the best, to be honest.

I very much know the feeling of "what I find plainly obvious is not to others". My solution to it has been strong emphasis on knowledge sharing and education. It doesn't matter if I go slower as long as the team in general starts going faster.

With the knowledge sharing I've also been able to share more of the load of the architecture, because my teammates also understand what's the guiding principle (or at the very least, they know that the "weird pattern" they see in the code has a purpose and they try to follow it).

They still come to me frequently with questions. I have spent many hours explaining the same thing to the same group of people, every time they have new questions.

Personally, I've noticed a reduced reliance of the team on me as a consequence of my knowledge sharing efforts. The team has also noticed it and at least one of them has commented on it positively.

One thing to watch out for -- all the problems you list can also be symptoms of you simply being the only one who understands most of the code. This could be because you are the only truly competent dev, but it could just as easily be because there is something about your code that makes it difficult for others to navigate and/or modify. Probably not the issue, but always something to watch out for.

Dear 100011_100001,

in the olden days hacking was not only a job of producing code, there was a hacker culture. There were the gurus, the diciples, and the anarchists. It was about dediction, love, and fun. Programming is related to Zen.

You are a hacker because you love what you do. But you lack the spirit of Zen and the spirit of community. That's not your fault, it is the fault of the work environment you live in.

A good culture is one of peers who teach each other, not one of workers who get the Jira issues done.

Maybe these good olden days have never existed and Zen is a lie. But to attain enlightenment and contentment, you need the Zen mind. And Zen says that you have to keep the beginner's spirit. You are overconfident. You think there is no one who can teach you at your work place. That is horrible. You obviously are not able to teach your peers how to program like you do! That's worse. You should know: you are truly successful when you have managed to teach your peers how to outperform you.

If that is not possible in your work place's culture then you should go and look for a better place.

In that situation most devs have evolved into a tech lead in their career, meaning that they have the mental responsibility for architectural decisions in software.

That also implies that the mental burden of responsibility won't allow you to stop, and you probably catch yourself trying to fix problems at night in bed that technically aren't your responsibility.

But at some point you have to reflect: is it worth it? And I mean worth in the sense of health, culture, stress and not money.

And is your team better off with the current situation or is your skill not better used in guidance and evolving team members so that they can help you more? Why not do paired coding days so that skills and knowledge can be shared? Why not hackathon days to inspire creativity for automating annoying tasks?

If I've learned any wisdom in agile teams over the years it's that a Lead also has the responsibility to lead...and not overworking themselves to death.

Giving away responsibility is very hard. I understand the reluctance to do so. But you should plan your life for a better future, and not a better present.

You didn't mention your actual life and what makes you happy, aside from mentioning you are lonely and stressed.

If you're happy with the pay/location, work less. Most people really only have a few hours a day of full-on productivity. A large part of many jobs is station.

Maybe teach or do something so working less is less obvious, because that would be noticed. But get a life, something that lets you enjoy moving around and engage with people who aren't part of work. It's very, very unhealthy to just work. And don't forget, the only 'reward' for being a committed worker in this situation is more work. You will be taken for granted.

A lot of comments are about becoming an "actual" 10x developer. But that's contextual. If you're solving problems for a company or people you care about, great. Otherwise, tech comes and goes, keep the focus on quality but otherwise it's unlikely there's much meaning to "better" work unless you're creating something deeply reusable or are in research.

Maybe you need a change of a team. Or of an area of application - try to find something you might be interested in, but never really did before. Different language, different area (backend/frontend/data/UX, etc.), different tasks. It will be frustrating and even maybe overwhelming at first, but if you're as good as you feel to be, you can take it, and you will enrich your knowledge and your abilities on the way. And sometimes you'd also get to know how it feels when others pick you slack instead of you doing it, which would be helpful too.

Also, I'd try to seek out professional orgs and groups where you could be among people smarter than you - there's always people smarter than you, and even more knowing more than you in certain areas. Find the areas that could interest you - and seek out to meet people that know a lot, and learn from them. Bonus if it's really hard for you - you probably can use some stretching, in the intellectual sense. If you have some failures on the way - it's ok, as long as you learned something, even if it's your own boundaries and weaknesses.

On the other hand, try to delegate more. I know it would feel like you could do it better, try to ignore that and let others do it anyway. If they do it slightly wrong, try to just wait and see if they can figure out why it's wrong and learn from it. If they do it absolutely horribly wrong, try to suggest them better ways, but do not be overly pushy. Instead, try to figure out, as a personal task for yourself, why they are doing it wrong - do they just don't know a better way? Teach it to them then. Do they disagree with you on which way is better? Ask them to argue it and see if you can learn anything from their argument - even if it's only about whether they have different priorities and preferences. Try to encourage them to step up, even if initially it means sacrificing some efficiency.

This is pretty typical in most organizations. There are roughly 2-3 people on a team that carry 80% of the workload in a given period. It's not out-of-the-ordinary.

Even average developers can become the "workhorse" in an organization.

The problem seems to be a dysfunctional organization. You should feel safe to take a vacation, to turn down the heat for a while and let others take over while you recharge your energy, etc.

If you start to feel like you can't control the amount of stress you feel in this position that's a big, red flag that you're heading down the road to burn out. It's never worth it. Even if you have to take a financial hit to get out you should seriously consider cutting your losses and run. If you can talk with your org leaders and let them know what you're going through and that you want to take some serious time off.

Then take some serious time off. Disconnect from work and do not respond to emails, messages, etc. Find a good therapist for you and start seeing them regularly. Etc.

TBH, the last time someone told me they were a 10x developer, I asked his co-workers what he was like when he left the room and everyone said that the 10x was all in his head and he was pretty close to being the worst performer in the group. He just had an inflated sense of his own skills. Despite getting fired from multiple jobs (including that one) for performance reasons, he continued to exist he was a "10x" programmer and he was just getting fired because the managers and CTOs were jealous of his leet skills and didn't want to spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.

I'm not saying that you're this guy, but this weird humble-brag post doesn't come across as sincere, and it's the kind of post I frequently see in reddit.

If you really are a 10x, then share the wealth by mentoring other programmers. A true 10x isn't measured by the amount of code they output, they are measured by their multiplicative effect on the productivity of their team.

It seems you have outgrown your current job. You have two choices – you can choose to stay in the same company but define yourself a different role/responsibility that would be personal growth for you and grow into it or you can leave your current company and try a different place.

Based on some elements in your description – POC, Architectural discussions, code reviews, code stats etc. – I think your organization may not be very bad. They seem to care about reasonably good things and they seem to have recognized your contributions and pull you into discussions and enable you to contribute and expand your influence. You can take a goal for yourself to uplevel the people around you and also help hire better talented/skilled people.

Also, if you simply spoke with your manager about your feeling of having to pull the most weight in the team, you may get more information – it may be as per your perception or you may get a new perspective. Best of luck.

> The problem is people just accept whatever I say. I used to get challenged in some of my decisions, which I always appreciated since I could create better solutions. Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

This struck to me as familiar. Not because I'm anywhere near as uber, so to speak, as you seem to be, but because I've noticed the pattern with junior developers, especially people new to the company/team and myself.

What I've tried to very consciously do is to make sure I ask other people about their opinion. I also sometimes deliberately add stuff like "not sure if I'm correct, correct me if you think I'm not, but..."

That usually makes these type situations a bit more interactive and probably less lonely. Also great opportunities to really have conversations about technology choices. I often learn new things along the way as well.

If you are with a really good company (I know people at microsoft who had this) you can get a very senior person to meet with you regularly as a mentor. YOU need a mentor. You are giving a lot. I think it's possible you need to work for a better company or at a division that is better in your current company.

How do people get hired at your company? Are you a major part of the process?

Frankly it sounds to me like the situation where you're being taken advantage of by the management, probably because your personality is not aggressive and you don't push in their face how much better you are than most of the other developers.

I'm betting you could earn two or three times what you're making now by moving to a more competitive environment at a company with higher standards. Maybe you don't care about the money, but it could give you the flexibility to retire early and work on whatever you enjoy.

The truth is, people have an odd tendency to value something more if it costs more. By the sound of it you should be making a lot more money than your peers, but I'm betting you're only twenty or 30% above the next developers salary.

Basically, you're undervaluing yourself.

I agree with the sentiment here around leaning into mentoring/teaching. Watching videos of myself teaching others and iterating on it has been one of the best things to happen to my communication (and thus teamwork) skills.

Hearing you say things like:

> Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

> I catch myself becoming more controlling because at this point about 80% of the code base is my code for the applications my team is responsible for.

> The thought of "great, one more thing I got to fix" is coming up too frequently.

makes me wonder if you might benefit from reading organizational books like Turn the Ship Around? You seem to be getting to the point where cultivating leadership throughout your organization might be the best way for you to affect change, and with the right mental models you can often do that with slight nudges or answering questions differently.

I felt this way at the first company I worked for; fortunately I started hacking on g++ where I definitely was not in the same grade as the other devs. That started a life-long career in Open Source, where I never maxxed out again.

But I agree with everyone else here: time to move to a bigger pond.

I can't empathize. Im only good when my edit compile run cyclus works normally and that's unfortunately never the case.

But I have a tip. What I think is really important for senior developers is to be team players and not try to hover over your colleagues work. Like right now there's this guy who is more experienced with some things than me. But now he's often checking out my branches, testing them and fixing things on them, often in the evening when I'm off the clock. I would like to be able to finish some of my work myself, ideally. With him on the team its just not going to be possible for me to be of much value, because it always will look like I need help. Even though I could possibly fix these things myself. Could be that this applies to you or maybe it doesn't, but it's important regardless.

Congratulations, you're a 'senior developer'.

It's a bit 'isolating' whatever industry or 'job' you do, once you mature to a certain point.

That's definitely not the same things as '10x developer' - I'd recommend never using that term again. Maybe there is 'such a thing' (doubtful), but even if there was, nobody should ever say that about themselves. Past the 10 year mark, one should start to develop an intuition for all the things one does not know, in which case in all humility, it becomes harder to refer to oneself as '10x' ergo, more likely a sign of possibly a hint of lack of self awareness.

What you are experiencing is normal, common.

If you have serious malaise you can change jobs but also respect that companies need senior people, it's one of many roles that need to be fulfilled.

I've been programming for almost 30 years, 15 of it on essentially the same code-base, and 5 years ago I could have written something similar to what you posted.

The part of being over-protective of the code-base particularly resonated.

In the end, it's not worth it. Yeah, you might do a lot of the work, yeah, it's good stuff, but that just means your good at your job. Help others up to your level, be patient, slow down, and make friends of your co-workers.

And then go ahead and learn something hard - that always does great for knocking me down a few pegs and remembering I'm not all that. I'm just a medium sized fish in a small company pond and there are people out there doing really significant work and you can learn from them. Hell, just switch JS frameworks, that's enough for a year's worth of feeling lost.

It seems similar to my situation. Probably I'm not as praised as you are and people do discuss with me, however everybody else seem slow and I feel I don't belong, because my thinking is totaly different and I can't do much about it, because verbal arguments seem not to work well (performance does, but it probably lead to problem you've described, that people stop to argue and take your words for granted). I practically never spend full time on working, I have a lot of time to learn which is awesome, but nevertheless it doesn't feel right.

I think that it's partialy right what @ctvo said "above average developer working at below average company" — that's why I'm looking for a new job more carefully. On the other hand, I think that it's not all in my case. I just happen to work as a programmer, it's just tiny part of my interests, so that most of the people seem very narrow minded (I don't judge them, it probably works for them, but not for me).

Maybe in more sophisticated company I would find better matches. On the other hand, as I don't care too much, my current situation has its advantages, because I can decouple self-development from work. This is good because I have some values I would like to implement and it seems they can't be achieved inside this system (because it's too specialized and my approach is too holistic), I need `f*k you money` so that I can act freely. For now, alienation at work is ok, as I'm quite introverted so I prefer to spend time alone in nature (that's why I work in countryside) and just from time to time I go to the city to party with my friends or play some games with my neighbour.

So along with "look for a new job", there is an "adapt" option. Just relax and think out of the box how to use this situation. You can reduce significance of your work and do stuff you please. It's ok to do this, because you are 10x dev so you need only 1/10 of your time to match your company. The only question is if you have what to do with remaining 9/10. :)

As someone who has experienced similar feelings. (I average about 250k-300k lines of code a year)[Yes I know lines of code is a terrible measure of productivity, you don't need to @ me]

Take 1-2 months off to travel. If your management team isn't run by a bunch of morons this shouldn't be a big deal. You probably want to go somewhere and you should do it while you're still young. During this time, your team will probably get a bit better. The other plants can't grow if one is taking all the sunshine.

My other piece of advice is to find a new challenge. Start a new hobby and get the feeling of sucking at something again. If you want to stick to computers, there are a boundless number of topics that you can dig into. Only start a company if you feel like you can't imagine doing anything else with your time.

"10x" is too linkbaity for an HN title so, in keeping with the site guidelines (no link, sorry - I'm on my phone) I've replaced it with one of the OP's other self-descriptions.

(Considering how linkbaity it was, the thread is surprisingly good. I guess sometimes people do read the article?)

"I have completed 71% of all story points in 2022, the other 9 are responsible for the other 29%" -- this is close to the 2080 rule: 20% of the people doing 80% of the work. And yes "If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

I work in a similar situation(a startup), the few very senior peers I work with basically can not code, they're probably much better compensated than me. There a few junior developers actually pick up stuff faster and can produce some code at the end of the day. Overall I could hardly learn a thing and feel lonely all the time. And yes I'm thinking about leaving but in the meanwhile changing company too frequently is not good, I will just hang on for a few more months.

The OP should just find a more challenging company to work for is my suggestion.

> I never set out to become some kind of uber developer, but in the last couple of years I have noticed a shift in behaviors around me. It started with little things. Tech Leads inviting me into meetings to express my perspective on things. Developers pinging me when I have never worked with them, because "you probably know the answer". Being asked to weigh in specific Code Reviews outside my department. Lately if I join a meeting with people I haven't talked to before they already know who I am. Even my manager has started introducing me by just saying "This is X, you've probably heard of him".

Sounds like you have ownership of most of your company's engineering. What's your personal ownership in said company?

It sounds like you enjoy being part of a team where there are plenty of opportunities for personal growth. And being an unchallenged lead developer constantly fixing everybody's problems doesn't provide this, and just furthers the feelings of loneliness. Is this about right? Or am I off?

What would you ultimately like to accomplish with your development? For example, is there a specific problem domain that you would love to help tackle that is maybe beyond your current capabilities?

Who would you love to work with? What might working a different team altogether look like for you?

Ultimately you have all the answers. If I were to provide any advice, it would be seeking out a career coach who can help you bring clarity on where you're at and where you want to be.

You need to expand your social circle.

You are not alone in this. As a 25y dev I can relate to this. I wasn't disciplined as you, that's a big difference. I entertained myself learning techs outside my job box.

This loneliness happens in many aspects of life. Reading is an example. I always encourage my children into heavy reading. Even I pay them for challenging books. As a result, their way of thinking is above average in almost everything.

But I constantly warn them to look for good peers, people that share their taste in reading, people who they can talk and enjoy the talking, or else they will end up feeling alone.

So my advice, expand your social circle and find people smarter than you, people you can admire and enjoy listening. It worked for me. Good luck and good coding!

You should consider stepping back and spending 25 or 50% time mentoring instead of coding. But what I've found is that it's REALLY hard to do something 20% without doing it 100%, so perhaps a few weeks (months) of NO coding, then starting to code again.

Sounds like you are really good at coding and designing software! But sadly, as you are finding, that this does not imply being good at "life".

Reading between the lines of your post, there might be a very deep rooted assumption that being amazingly well at something in life, would automatically lead to being good at life itself.

Chemically speaking "life" is just the ability to handle the naturally generated body chemistry well and cultivating it.

Remember that time you were so incredibly in love? How Happy and fulfilled you were?

Now, you did't take substances for that right? Just by accident you found some signal-patterns though your optical nerve, ears, smell and touch that allowed you to release all kinds of fancy chemicals into your bloodstream.

YOU FELT GREAT!

But now?

You are good at code, but that does not keep your body-chemistry high enough that you feel like flying. Ofc I know you feel it a little when you find a very nice solution, or when you finally fix that one thing that bothered your whole team for a week and so on...

But it is not enough or you wouldn't have made that post.

Now what if I told you, that people have found ways and means to cultivate and "train" those glands that make you feel high and ecstatic? We all know that diet and workout (and what people call a "healtyh" lifestyle) is exactly that. Enhancing the quality of your body chemistry. But is goes much further than that. Sadly these techniques have always been in the mystical and esoteric landscape which fu*ked it all up so badly.

But still the techniques work, I can confess that myself and science is also getting there more and more.

If such shit interests you at all, I recommend that you go straight to the secret techniques of the ancient yogis from high up in the Himalaya mountains. Get the real stuff and not that washed down, new-agy nonsense! I could recommend a few resources, but I trust you will also find some.

I wish you all the very best <3

You can shift your focus to mentoring your teammates and presenting at developer meetups / conferences. Simply tell your manager that you are greatly concerned about the bus factor (cite the 71% figure), and hopefully you two will figure out how to proceed.

Two options come to mind:

1, as others have suggested, find a bigger pond so that you are no longer the biggest fish. You’ll learn and grow from working with more experienced/better people.

2, found a company. You’ll still be the biggest fish in the pond, but you’ll get a substantial equity stake which might make that role worth your while, and total ownership may give you room to grow in new dimensions (eg, now you need to figure out infrastructure, security, IT, business ops automation, hiring, training, careeer progression, etc. - if this sounds exhausting goto 1)

In the current economic climate, and given your (my impression of) general malaise I’d suggest that 1 has more chance of injecting positive energy into your work situation.

I hear you.

The one problem with being so useful is that all problems slide your way.

While it is hard to hear, you might be enabling the problem. If everyone believes you know the best way or are the most efficient problem solver, they will default to you. There's long maintenance tails in certain problems... so even if you are great at what you do it can quickly become overwhelming.

Making opportunities for others will improve your peer group, improve your life and reduce your stress.

Loneliness is not going to be fixed overnight, and certainly is not "one more thing I got to fix". Give people space, time and mentorship to grow. If you don't see progress after doing this, move on. Perhaps you've been too long in your role.

I start with that I feel similar type loneliness in my project. I always got a solution that other people were positively surprised of, I'm the problem solver in my small project team, and I also am able to write bulletproof-ish code. And I have exact same feeling, that I don't have anyone around that could, or want to challenge me. I've recently been chatting with my friend, he works for another company, he has the same issue of being not able to discuss solutions with anyone.

I always wished there was a way or a place that people with this 'problem' can meet, chat and ideally brainstorm ideas in their projects or on some other project that they would contribute in.

Why not take your skills and professionally contract with yourself. You mention..

>> This feeling of loneliness got quantified when the commit number came up.

What if instead of commits, it was the # of external contracts you are able to maintain per week.

If that doesn't make you feel better, then maybe you need to invest into building a portfolio that people can contact you externally, while you are still managing/maintaining more internally.

Additionally, when you work for yourself, you have the ability to set the terms upfront, to minimize meetings/back+forth communication, and you send one-way updates with progress updates..

My two cents. I've self-contracted for myself the past couple of years and I feel much better about myself.

"I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent"

Congratulations, you have the most useful attitude towards personal growth and development. This attitude has allowed you to continuously grow and improve to an extent that most people around you couldn't even imagine. This attitude also makes you dissatisfied, unhappy and insecure.

Ultimately, it's a question of values. What do you want more, happiness, or continuing to grow? You will likely never have both, at least not in equal measure.

If you choose to continue challenging yourself, consider finding a new group of people to work with. One where you're going to be the dumbest person in the room. Such a group almost certainly exists.

> I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

I'm reminded of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody about the band Queen.

Freddie Mercury had gone solo from the rest of the group, then realized they were his proper peers. So he was apologizing and asking for forgiveness...

  FREDDIE: What's it gonna take for you all to forgive me?

  Is that what you want, Freddie?
  I forgive you.
  Is that it?
  Can we go now?

  FREDDIE: No.
  I went to Munich.
  I hired a bunch of guys.
  I told them exactly
  what I wanted them to do...
  and the problem was...
  they did it.
  No pushback from Roger.
  None of your rewrites.
  None of his funny looks.
  I need you.
  And you need me.

Perhaps the root of your loneliness comes not from the flaws of others but from within. Have you considered that it's source is actually your feeling of superiority to everyone around you, not their lack of (what you perceive as) ability?

Could it be that you're at the point in your career where you've hit the limits of your own scalability?

No matter how well you perform, you're always you. The single one of you. Carrying the burden of excellence, knowing people depend on you to know the answer can wear you out, i empathize with that.

Maybe try finding a role where you aren't contributing individually, but where you are helping others become their own little centres of excellence. Find a new way to scale your abilities, beyond coding yourself. This might mean mentoring, leading a team, if you're up for it. This could be something novel and fresh to do, without entirely abandoning software.

Not to be flippant, but I have often felt if I look around and feel that I am the most capable or smartest person in the room, I am probably in the wrong room. Have you thought about applying to work at a company known for engineering excellence? With remote work becoming more mainstream, why not try it at a big Fang-type shop? I know I felt I was a 100x type engineer until I joined Google for example - a ton of people to learn from in a company like that :D

Another option is to embrace the role and lean into mentorship at your current company. But it sounds like that is not something you are interested in at this point, so I would start applying to companies.

I don't think you 'brag', and I can also understand how the situation is making you feel. I have known and met guys like you where I have worked, which had similar experiences. It's a bit like being the tallest in your class. It feels better than being the shortest, but it can feel very lonely just the same. The normal advice is to search and find a group of peers to work with. The trouble is, if your skills are mostly technical, and not matched in social/networking skills. Google the phrase 'never be the smartest person in the room' to see some perspective on your situation, you are not the first :-)

I can relate, not necessarily as a software developer, but as someone who recently completed a PhD in natural sciences.

When working on something niche for a couple of years, it is natural that you become a specialist of some sort in your daily environment. This why in academia there are conferences and workshops where such specialists can gather and exchange ideas. It seems to me like you are passing up on opportunities to socialize outside of your day-to-day. Why not look up an event that might challenge you and ask your boss if you can participate? There is always room for improvement and companies should support that.

I think you’re learning that there is more to this career than just slinging commits. I can relate to the experience you are having.

At a certain point, the code just wasn’t enough for me. I still love code and systems, but it isn’t the only way I make impact anymore.

When I reached the point that I wanted something more rewarding, I started learning other skills. I have found business, sales engineering, delivery enablement, product development, and people management are really interesting.

I echo others who say to switch jobs. You’ve got to find a role that will let you branch out.

I’ve got a lot of those opportunities at a small tech company if anyone wants to chat btw…

The Venn diagram identifies most job related burn out warning signs: https://blog.darlingmagazine.org/what-is-ikigai/

;-)

I used to think I was a 10x developer but then in grad school I spent an hour with a university post doc optimizing an embedded OS to decrease its power consumption. It took 1 month for me to understand what he did in that hour.

And then I took a graphics class with an undergrad in that same school and he created a ray tracing program in 30 minutes or so and it also ran the first time he did a run on visual studio. He then went out to do a dance practice with his friends. I sat there in the lab for the rest of the night trying to understand Ray tracing and what happened.

80% of drivers think they are above average. Unless you are a top performer at a top company - and it doesn’t sound like you are - how are you giving yourself such a high assessment?

I thought I was “above average” in my area of expertise until I landed a job at BigTech coming from a 60 person company where my “specialty” was table stakes just to get a mid level position.

I use to always say with a point of pride that it never took me more than a month to get a job. Does that make me a 10x developer or is it because I only applied for no name companies until my current one?

Maybe try shifting to coding custom firmware for High Frequency Trading firms. The money is great and they need talent like you. If you can be a 10x developer in this field you will be worth millions.

Why not just quit and do something else that interests you. A different industry, or your own project or startup. Sounds like you’ll easily be able to get re-employed if things don’t work out. Or even do consulting for your current employer. Most 1x developers probably don’t feel confident enough in re-employment prospects to throw away their current gig where they’ve built up some credibility.

Also, I’m curious what you did before, if you didn’t start until 33? I figured most 10x devs were people who mastered computer systems as children.

Hey OP,

I sometimes feel the same way as a director-level UX'er. That said I take great pride in mentoring juniors so if you do the same maybe it's time to think about giving back (you'll probably also find that you also get rewarded personally and professionally by doing so).

Also, at my company we recently hired another senior ux'er whom I consider a peer. She works alongside me on many of the same projects and the feeling of "the two of us against the world" is SO MUCH better than "individual against the world".

I can relate. I was 10x, that was a decade ago. Now approaching ~100x.

I've studied. I learned every language, I know too many app patterns, framework, protocols, blablabla.

I study the tricks of every role. I sense bugs before I even realize, its subconsciously unsettling. I feel like neo in the matrix.

I don't have answers for you other than I can relate.

Try to work on harder things and you will only keep getting better.

When you are the person who gets all the hard problems, you are forced to keep getting better, faster, and you take on and consume all the experience for the entire team.

I used to feel exactly that. Then I joined a different company where everyone is super smart and now I feel perfectly average. If you're unhappy, maybe try another company?

I can't say I'm a lot happier. People will challenge me occasionally now which is nice but I have to spell out my concerns to get any kind of response. Everyone is busy with their own shit and the product is so big and complicated that no one can have the full picture to properly critique your work. The code itself is never the problem.

I was one of the top developers at my previous job and recently took an architecture role at a new company where I spend most of my days improving processes and mentoring other engineers. I guess you could say I'm pretty lonely here, but it really doesn't bothered me at all. Sharing knowledge and mentoring has really given me new a new insight into my career and I really love what I do here! So, become a mentor either at your current place or elsewhere. It might surprise you.

I felt this way somewhat recently. Switching companies to a place that had top tier engineering talent put me in my place pretty quickly. Now I sweat like the rest of them — and trust me this is a good thing. You want your peers to challenge you, trust but verify, question assumptions. You want to cover each other’s backs. I’ve never been happier than I am now, because even though I’m working harder, I’m able to trust and lean on the people around me, and that’s so valuable.

This is a 42 year old with an emotional maturity of a 22 year old.

It sounds like you’re good at what you do, and that it comes relatively easily. Be thankful for that. Many people don’t have that. It sounds like your performance has made you a bit of a superstar. Be thankful for that. Many people work in obscurity. Don’t let it make you feel lonely. Quite the opposite, it sounds like you’re popular. Use your “status” to create the network you want. Stay humble and remind yourself to be happy. You’re in a good place.

I'm not a great developer but I can pretty much do everything that is needed and I noticed the pattern in my career that I tend to drift towards messiest, hardest, least flashy jobs because I'm the one who can find his way around there. And I tend to be left alone in those jobs as others move to greener pastures. I'm left on some stale but key project as lonely one man army. The way to get out is to switch an employer.

Change job if you can looking for smarter colleagues and/or just reflect what are your priorities: you do not need to carry all the responsibility in your shoulders. You have room to give more time to your health, for example, and still be a good contribution to the team. You do not need to do it all. For what you say this change will not come natural to you and you will need some discipline. Just start and see how it feels.

Why do kevin durant & steph curry play on the same team?

Switch teams dawg, join a place where there are other freaks like you. I used to feel the same, until I switched.

Few thoughts ideas … as tech founder maybe this advice helps.

1. Pick an outside of work hobby… for me it was to teach myself electronics. Arduino, soldering, 3d printing , 3d modeling etc…

2. Remember using a computer is going to pull you down - I’m sure there are studies that show increased depression from using and being connected 24-7, I’m not saying disconnect - I’m saying be self aware and pick yourself back up. Live for the problem solving.

Hope this helps

What do you want? Do you want to be challenged? Do you want to be a teacher? Do you want to help your peers elevate? Do you want peers that will help elevate you?

If you want to be a teacher and your peers want to learn perhaps you would enjoy staying where you are. If not, FAANGs, startups, and consultancies (like Thoughtworks) will challenge you.

Or, if you want to feel like a boss and a noob most of the time, start a startup. :)

The point: it’s okay to move on.

I was trying to figure out my multiplier the other day and came to 1.05x. I'm an average engineer who works longer hours - hence the 0.05 premium.

> worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

Find something more challenging? Plenty of people find themselves at this place and start doing something more "ambitous" whatever that might be. Start a framework, a startup, a research in the field or maybe just look for company with bigger problems. I bet you won't feel complacent working in some bleeding edge team at FAANG.

A lot of comments saying you should find new opportunities. Another path in case thats not what you want:

Consider taking a step back. It seems like your worry about becoming complacent is what might prevent you from doing that. If you stay in your current role, try to anyways. Channel your drive into a hobby or personal project or ... Take a month off in order to reset baseline expectations with your org.

Learning to teach what you know will help more than working more hours. Don’t try to force teaching on the uninterested. Invest in the curious. Surely some of your team would like to be more like you. Have you asked?

And find a physical hobby you enjoy. Weights, zoomba, climbing, whatever. Even better if it’s something you can share with your wife or one of the kids.

Movement and teaching will do wonders for your state.

> I catch myself becoming more controlling because at this point about 80% of the code base is my code for the applications my team is responsible for. I don't think that's a good thing, at the same time what I find plainly obvious is not to others.

I heard once from people who prepare for math competitions: "If your are the smartest person on a team, you are on the wrong team."

Hi, thanks for your post, you mentioned in the comments that you have good systems that allows you to write code well, do you mind sharing what are those systems? Or where could we learn them? I definitely don't see your post as bragging but more inspirational and I would like to learn how to type code like that and be that kind of developer that ships good quality products.

Kind regards.

If I can input anything, I would encourage to single someone out that shows real promise and invest in their skill level. Having a humble outlook and asking if they would be interested, would be key in starting. Review and ask their point of view often. Let it be their discovery, your just leading them. It will not be so lonely and You will find yourself again.

I find number of commits is a lot more correlated with development ability than people thing.

People who've made lots of git commits... have made lots of stuff.

Experience and knowledge is commensurate with ability.

Even though we say "lines of code don't matter, it's about the importance of lines of code."

Anecdotally, lines of code is a very good proxy for how much time you spend puzzling through the machine.

Ive moved between segments unlike alot of devs. the experience you have for me highlights just how degraded the dev community has become.

ie. in defence, the standard is always ok to great devs. In Enterprise, its a mix of crap, crappier and ok and great.

What your doing is holding up the team of crappy to ok devs. the fact that you cant have technical converations anymore just highlights this.

I catch myself becoming more controlling because at this point about 80% of the code base is my code for the applications my team is responsible for. I don't think that's a good thing, at the same time what I find plainly obvious is not to others.

Why don't you get into management? You may be one of the rare devs who successfully makes the jump.

Echoing other comments, the issue might be as simple as not being at the right company.

Interviewing elsewhere seems like the right thing to do. I'm confident there are environments out there where other engineers would challenge you.

It's possible that could be the case at my company, PicnicHealth. If you'd be interested in chatting, reach out (email in profile)

Time to find a new gig.

Starting fresh somewhere else with no reputation, no karma, and the potential for being the small fish again will pay dividends.

At the very least, different social and organizational challenges may exist there and allow you to grow in a different light.

(also, be sure your enjoying non work-related hobbies and adventures as much as you can. Life isn't just work)

Ill tell you a cool trick: just halve your hours. This is what i do. You’ll still challenge yourself but with more constraints.

Learn to let go of things and let them get a little fucked up. It makes the people around you feel better too.

Find ways to expand yourself but not technically. See how much joy you can inject into your workplace rather than story points.

How much do you get paid? If it is less than $300k/yr (assuming you're in America), then you're just in a company that doesn't apparently value tech.

Go get a job at a FANG, and I guarantee you you will be pushed to your limits, and a number of staff/senior engineers there will make you feel like a little baby developer.

Regarding the distribution of commits and story points, I’d bet it follows the zipf principle if you look at the distribution across the team. That may not change anyone’s opinion regarding what is acceptable, but it might bring a little comfort knowing your “performance” fits with the universe’s plan in some unavoidable way.

I think the problem is the gap in your social life. most people are good at their job the way you describe it. and they think about the business as much as they should. You think you're an artist, but you're not sorry. I understand you well since we have similar thoughts and I think the main problem is loneliness.

This does feel familiar -- except that in my case, after a couple of years in that position, all-of-a-sudden I realised I wasn't that good a developer any more. That I had stopped learning a while before. The solution for me, and it worked, was to leave, and work for a company with a more serious engineering culture.

No amount of xing is going to make you less lonely.

Happy to knock you down a peg though: You've written code, but what does it do? It's easy to be a big fish in a small pond. If you're that a code you shouldn't even have to be on a team anymore. Why aren't you capturing the value of your work efficiently?

Have you switched jobs on a while? It sounds a little like you’re also describing being deeply embedded in your organization and having social capital there.

I’d suggest switching jobs. You’ll lose the social capital and have new tech to learn. The stress and work of reaccumulating those should distract you for a hot minute

I'm 37 and probably have a solid xp, 'probably' because I'll never call myself a 10x or senior, just by some sort of personal modesty. And maybe that helps me to stay motivated, to stay ground to earth, just my 2cents, no criticism, just some relief on the situation, best continuation!

It sounds like you are ready to move into a higher level of 'work'. Your skill means ability to influence and create impact to people and projects is far greater than the code you write. Maybe it's time to redefine your definition of who you are and the work you do?

Change company, felt this way three times already and I started to learn again after changing job for three times. Now I am in like a sort of bridge between code and business so it's more challenging and I actually enjoy to step down, code and solve things that other are not able to ;)

I've heard CEOs say "it's the loneliest job in the world". Their solution? Peer groups; CEOs of different companies meeting informally on a regular basis.

If you're not angling for a CTO position, though, switching jobs is the best way to find a better IC "peer group".

Pick a couple of promising juniors to mentor. Commit less code. Work through them. Rotate occasionally when one of them reaches escape velocity or proves to be a letdown.

Let your manager know about this plan and get their buy-in. It’s healthier for the org to have fewer single points of failure

Some heuristics:

20% of a team usually does 80% of the work.

The square root of team members or employees generally produce around 50% of the work.

You are 10% if your team producing 80% of the work?

Seems like you are in an outlier situation, maybe you do need to seek out peers that challenge you more, even if that is moving teams or moving jobs.

Try dipping your feet into open source, there are a lot of incredibly talented people out there, working on very complicated things, you might camaraderie with some of them. Open source is also a very social thing, especially when attending various conferences.

Another front page item is pretty appropriate: https://integritytalk.substack.com/p/the-eternal-battle-for-...

I think other responses to this thread are insightful, offer valuable ways forward and get at the heart of the matter but I wanted to add one idea that I don't think gets enough traction which is that being a "10x" developer is highly context dependent and is not a fundamental attribute of a person.

Deep familiarity within a code base provides the knowledge to recognize, diagnose and fix problems at a rate that's orders of magnitude faster than someone who isn't. Familiarity with tools, corporate structure, programming idioms, toolchains or other technical factors also provide potential orders of magnitude speedup.

Take a "10x" developer in one context, put them in another, and they can easily become a "1/10x" developer. One company I worked for hired an intern that had created a well used FOSS package with 10k+ GitHub stars. Though a bit of a stretch to my argument, there are other anecdotes about corporations mishandling productive programmers [0]. My point is not to lash companies too harshly but to point out that the incentives are misaligned for the skillset these programmers have versus what skillset companies need and/or are willing to pay for.

My bet is that there's probably a small army of programmers that basically do mundane "1x" programming but create FOSS packages that generate millions in worth (that is, they are "10x" outside of the confines a corporate environment).

As an aside, I'll mention a talk about "The Ideal Language to Write Open Source Software" [1]. On the face of it, it sounds absurd but the argument is essentially that corporate environments select for programming languages that don't need deep proficiency whereas open source software projects select for programmers with deep comprehension of their tools. In other words, corporate environments select for programmer fungability whereas open source software projects, since they often only have a single developer, select for languages that offer high productivity gains from expertise.

[0] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210306150046/https://ftp.osuos...

It sounds like you need a bigger pond. I'd recommend either a high performing big tech or a fast growing startup. Each will challenge you in a different way. On the other hand, it might be risky changing jobs now so take it with a pinch of salt.

That's why I always aim to be the dumbest one in the room, as I found it's the only way to grow. I would say leave and try to find a team where not only are you are blown away by their knowledge and talents, but embarrassed in comparison.

I feel that I have no peers as well. I had a manager that took advantage of it until I had enough and started to say no. It was one of the best things I learned to do. Say no when you don't want to do it. I took a month vacation, it helps.

I feel the same way. I wouldn't classify myself as a 10x developer, but I'm the most experienced and most senior developer at a smaller company and I have no peers, technically. It's good in some aspects because I get to work on secondary skills like mentoring/coaching and such, but it's a step back, technical experience-wise. I consume a lot of technical content like blogs, books, conference records, meetups, and podcasts so I can continue to get the learning I'd normally get from a peer. Side projects also help to a certain extent.

It is lonely because I have no one on my team to go to for different views on most technical or software decisions I make in my everyday work. I like being challenged because that's where a lot of my learning happens.

I'm currently contemplating moving to a larger company (or a more mature software org) where I can have some peers to lean on.

Is it bad I just want to say come join me? I am approximately at 3x ticket count of anyone else in my company for this calendar year while having taken about 15 days PTO so far. We could race, it would be fun. And it's super chill here.

You could try working on a cross-functional project where maybe you're the only coder on the project, working alongside e.g. one 10x biologist, one 10x mechanical engineer, and one 10x optical engineer on something cross-disciplinary.

It has to do more with being over 40. People respect age when there is a solid track record. I don't understand the anxiety about becoming complacent. Your age is the most frequent age at which people spin out their own startups

You need to get back to your edge of proximal development.

I would venture you’ve done well and have saved up a bit. Take a dive off the stage into something new that gets you excited, and you are challenged. Find smarter people to collaborate with.

Maybe you should quit and freelance for a while, and offer to help your company fix their problems as a contractor every now and again for 3x your current hourly rate.

Whenever I feel dissatisfied more money for less time usually fixes it.

I can empathize. And Bbecause you asked: Don’t worry. Stay Self-critical. Excel at being an informavore - learn, learn, learn, and be patient. Not long and coding will start to bore you. Then you can leave it behind.

The problem I'm having is it's lonely and stressful. Do you drink? Take a Vitamin B6 (thiamine) supplement. and don't listen to the hessian bots telling you to "fast"

Get a better job, make some money, find hobbies and other things in life that you find fun. Work is just work, better to be good at something and get paid well than to be shit at something.

> Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

If you don't have management aspirations, this is a very clear signal that you should leave. Growth is almost impossible in this position.

Tldr; Start coding less. Start teaching more.

It is super fantastic that you have been able to learn, grow, and achieve so much. You do sound like a super star. It also sounds like you have reached a point where transition is required.

I respectfully disagree with those who say "get a new job". This may be a good idea, but it is certainly not a solution to your issues which are very likely to come with you wherever you go.

I suggest that you stop contributing so much under your own name, and start helping others contribute under their names. "Not much grows under a great oak". You may be casting a shadow that makes it hard for your colleagues to grow?

10x developers are awesome, but very hard to scale. Far more powerful are the "super colleagues" who make everyone around them 5x better. Add a 10x developer to a team of 10 and you 2x the team's output. Add a super colleague to the same team and output rises by 5x.

You might have fun becoming a developer evangelist, from what I can tell it is more social and you can help teach customers with development teams. Not sure if such roles exist anymore.

I think others have pointed this out but this is a small company problem. I was a rockstar in a previous company and then went to a FAANG and lets just say, I am not a rockstar there.

You seem good at writing. Knowing roughly what to do is half the battle as a developer. You could help set the direction for others — they’d probably end up getting more stuff done.

Is this satire?

The comments section has brought out the absolute Reddit of HN hahaha

Ey, it's time to move on, this "loneliness" it's a kind of comfort zone. What if you search another position in another company?, this would be a challenge.

Curious how someone who can solve problems so well can't solve the problem "My coworkers don't challenge me." The solution is to find better co-workers.

Imo you can't be a 10x+ developer without extracurricular activities. That is: writing books, academic papers, OSS contributions, GitHub projects with 100+ stars, blogging, conference talks, being in the top ~5% of Stack Overflow, etc. Merely "being good at your job" is just the baseline (and often not even an important one; rockstar engineers get fired often; Max Howell was famously not hired by Google; etc.). Not trying to be a jerk, I just think you're seriously overvaluing your ability.

Sounds like you hate your job though, so I'd probably quit/take a break and re-evaluate what you want out of life.

If you're as good as you say, you can easily swing to a team at a different company full of engineers better than you. It'd be a nice humbling experience.

You should join a startup where generally everyone needs to carry their weight for the company to succeed which creates camaraderie opposite of loneliness.

Switch jobs. I felt similar until I went to Amazon and met some principal engineers. You need to be humbled, and then your real growth can begin.

You’re run of the mill prima donna and one exists in every org. How do I know? Because 10x developers are on the other side of the Dunning Krueger spectrum. They struggle with insecurities and second guess themselves all the time. They wonder if they’re making bad decisions and actually listen to their peers. They hide their competence and even come off as dumb because they don’t want to alienate coworkers. They’ve started companies. They don’t need cards or stories. They can just build shit and it’s right.

Start your own thing... ask for help. I'll help. KSP2 is going to bomb hard and there needs to be "the next thing".

I'll never have this problem. But it sounds like you need to move to a company with a better reputation for engineering rigor.

Every time i get the same feeling in some enviroenment, i switch, advice you to do so, advice you to go for freelancing too

Something I've found very useful in my dev career - if you're the smartest person in the room, find another room.

Quit your job. Go somewhere else. There are always challenges to take on and learn from if you just go look for them.

Become the other definition of a 10X developer - the developer who makes the other developers around them 10X better.

Yes this is the life of a 10-100x dev. Sounds like your team and company suck. Find a new one with smarter people.

Take a sabbatical, give your team the opportunity to work without you. You might be surprised to see them step up.

Im at my nth company and I feel lonely because there was almost noone that could follow my speed of thinking.

Ive met ppl that could, but they are now either Lead Developers or moved abroad.

I dont want either. I want a good team where we build cool stuff and have fun doing that.

Finding few ppl that think likewise and actually have skill and capacity to do that seems extremely hard.

Now Im stuck in boring as hell disfunctional corpo with fat paycheck just so I can focus on my own things..

Change jobs to a company where you can continue to grow.

“If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”

You know there is a saying about this;

`If you are the most intelligent guy in the room; then you are in the wrong room.`

You need to change that.

Sounds like you want to switch jobs. And maybe even go into a different field. Why not, you are still young ;)

Have you considered teaching people in your org how to become like you, how to take over your code?

If you want to stay in your current gig, focusing on mentorship is the next logic step for you.

Try to find another job where people work at the same level you do so that you are challenged.

"Always be the worst player in your band."

Sounds like it's time for you to look for a new job.

Sounds like I got recruited for a job change just in the nick of time. This was almost me.

Get a job in a startup or in a big tech in a team where ppl care about the things they do.

Demand a 25% raise, hire a great therapist, and take an extra vacation to somewhere sunny.

I've been there too. I recommend you mentor someone, it's humanly rewarding.

You are taking it too seriously. You are allowed to make mistakes like everyone else.

If you want to feel like a noob again join a different company with different stack.

Have you spent 10 years in the same company?! Your post make it sound like it.

If you are the smartest person in the room and you do not like it, change room

Probably the thread should be renamed “The loneliness of being an asshole!”

Have you been working at the same business for all (or most) of this time?

If you're the smartest in the room, you're in the wrong room :)

Leave and go work at a company where you feel stupid and incompetent

> What can I do to change things?

Tell your higher ups to hire above your level.

Are you Fabrice Bellard?

I understand your frustration.

It becomes hard to find a job you can live with.

start going to the gym during work hours

you mentioned its an area you haven't focused on

i don't know your fitness level, but anything that makes you huff and puff a little sure feels nice

Been there. It's time to find a more challenging role!

Find a new job. It will help you and your company.

Have you talked to your manager about all of this?

How did you become a more productive developer?

It's time to learn a new trade.

Read Tao Te Ching, perhaps it helps.

I...don't know how to put this, but... I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I have many leather bound books.

Hi, Shabang!

Good on you for asking this question. If you are looking for a sign that you are not conceited, asking “am I too conceited?” is a great first signal that you are not.

You ask how you can get feedback when you intimidate others with your success/output/influence. A very good question.

1. Be relentless in your admission of weakness. You see someone nodding at a half-formed idea as if it were genius “I’m sorry, I am barely making sense to myself here, I hope it's helping and I see you nodding along, if you're seeing something I am not seeing, great.”

2. Actively solicit. If someone else says your input was really helpful without feedback, “can I ask you for a favor? I'm trying to be more clear and succinct in how I communicate, and this looked kinda successful maybe, but was there anything I could have been more clear and succinct on, or any, like, important details I didn't really understand but just blew past?”

Some people on my team ask for approvals, “please approve my merge request.” I am always asking for feedback, “please tell me if anything looks unclear, if I need to comment something, whatever.”

After onboarding someone to a new system, “what was the hardest part of this to wrap your head around, is there a way for us to make it easier?” Or, “genuine question, if I asked you to just clean up tech debt on this repository for a month, where would you start?” ESPECIALLY do this with newbies. Someone who comes in as a blank slate has so much to give, the moment that they say “oh that surprises me, I would have thought we would have done this this way” you can rethink, “oh yeah why DON'T we do it that way?” and if you code it up and see no obvious reasons to do it the way you originally did it, you can ask them to rereview that code and you can ultimately merge it ... What an egoboost! Your newbie feels they delivered value from day 1, meanwhile you are seeing things from a different perspective.

3. When people are asking for your opinion, don't just give them one opinion. Even “Which would be better, A or B,” you can answer “well, I don't really understand the problem as well as you do, so I can't answer the question for you, I would choose A in situations that look like OPQ and I would choose B in situations that look like RST and for that matter I would choose C in situations like UVW and if it were a personal project or situation XYZ, I might just brute-force it with option D. But I don't know which of those trade-offs are the best in your case, your hunch is way better than any experience I have.”

Now to your other big question, you ask how to become less controlling and less frustrated with others. Two tips there.

1. Let it f**ing go. Seriously. 90% of these decisions are not important enough to justify blocking merge and release. They didn't insert a null check in a place where it comes automatic to you—so what? Here's the deal, learning is pain, more accurately learning is the relief that comes after feeling a pain over and over. Your desire that this other person never feel pain is this a desire that they not learn. You need to have the attitude of, “if I am wrong then I have learned something, if I am right then we can fix it later.” Just let the damn thing go, and your subordinates will learn and skin their knees and delete the prod database and grow.

2. Often people become 10x developers in a certain context because that context is full of landmines which they are able to avoid. The other people in that context are running into them and dying. But, you can find yourself in a rut.

Next time you are brushing your teeth, take note of what side you normally start on. Start on the opposite side. It's weird, uncomfortable, but not wrong. Next time you find yourself building code, maybe you start from a function that you're pretty sure you will need, start with some small examples, build out, eventually the larger structure will crystallize in your head? If that's you, reverse it. Pretend that you have an AI bot that, just by naming a function, will properly implement it for you, and start from the outside and build your way down to the details and the nitty gritty. Or if you program outside-in, flip this advice and program from the inside out.

You KNOW there is more than one way to do it, you are a smart person, obviously. But you have to FEEL that there is more than one way to do it, that is harder & needs to be drilled and trained.

3. Invest your surplus. You are 71% of the story points vs 9 others, correct me if I am wrong but that makes you a 22x developer. You commit to investing 20% of that and you become an 18x developer, nobody is going to complain. 2 hours a day or one day a week, however you can arrange it. What do you do with that time? Many options.

Maybe you mentor others on your team. “Oh Shabang, I can't take up your time, your time is very valuable.” NO! There is literally nothing more valuable that I can be doing than making you more productive. Because that's linear versus quadratic growth. Actually if I can get you trading the next generation too, it's exponential growth. It doesn't matter what the coefficient is, quadratic beats out linear eventually.

But you have indicated that you are not so interested in the management track and that is totally fine, you should be able to remain an individual programmer without needing to become a manager in order to get ahead. So what does that look like? One way: You invest in a new technology. Say you decide to do machine learning, you go learn some PyTorch, you build some models and train them, see if you can't apply it to some random problems at work. Another way, favored by the late Joe Armstrong, you invest the 20% in rewriting. You deliberately take 25% of your remaining story point load and nominate things to be implemented twice. You build it once and learn the shape of the problem and then you build it again. Can be combined with the previous idea, you decide to learn functional reactive programming or μKanren or Rust or what have you, by taking 10% of your story points and reimplementing them in those styles, assuming that you need to spend at least as long as the original bug just understanding what the new idioms are.

The goal here is to get to the point where, if someone else has a novel approach, you are no longer saying no to them, rather you are coming up the next day and saying, “hey that sounded really interesting, I wrote this proof of concept, is that what you were going for?”...

The golden rule of standup comedy, you never say “no,” you say “yes, and.” when someone says “We will just leave the authentication token off of that endpoint,” you suppress your sense of saying “no, every endpoint needs authentication, don't be ridiculous” but instead try to see their needs and say “yes, and we can build a way to instead authenticate by cookie/track the requests some other way/automatically audit accesses and limit the rate at which they are provided so it's not useful unless you know exactly what you're are doing/whatever.”

Hope those bits of advice help?

Update your LinkedIn

Learn to delegate.

"If you are the smartest person in the room, you are on the wrong room." (Groucho Marx, maybe??)

But in all seriousness, if you love to code then search for a harder challenge probably at a different company.

What is 35_33

Change job.

Hi, Shabang!

Good on you for asking this question. If you are looking for a sign that you are not conceited, asking “am I too conceited?” is a great first signal that you are not.

You ask how you can get feedback when you intimidate others with your success/output/influence. A very good question.

1. Be relentless in your admission of weakness. You see someone nodding at a half-formed idea as if it were genius “I’m sorry, I am barely making sense to myself here, I hope it's helping and I see you nodding along, if you're seeing something I am not seeing, great.”

2. Actively solicit. If someone else says your input was really helpful without feedback, “can I ask you for a favor? I'm trying to be more clear and succinct in how I communicate, and this looked kinda successful maybe, but was there anything I could have been more clear and succinct on, or any, like, important details I didn't really understand but just blew past?”

Some people on my team ask for approvals, “please approve my merge request.” I am always asking for feedback, “please tell me if anything looks unclear, if I need to comment something, whatever.”

After onboarding someone to a new system, “what was the hardest part of this to wrap your head around, is there a way for us to make it easier?” Or, “genuine question, if I asked you to just clean up tech debt on this repository for a month, where would you start?” ESPECIALLY do this with newbies. Someone who comes in as a blank slate has so much to give, the moment that they say “oh that surprises me, I would have thought we would have done this this way” you can rethink, “oh yeah why DON'T we do it that way?” and if you code it up and see no obvious reasons to do it the way you originally did it, you can ask them to rereview that code and you can ultimately merge it ... What an egoboost! Your newbie feels they delivered value from day 1, meanwhile you are seeing things from a different perspective.

3. When people are asking for your opinion, don't just give them one opinion. Even “Which would be better, A or B,” you can answer “well, I don't really understand the problem as well as you do, so I can't answer the question for you, I would choose A in situations that look like OPQ and I would choose B in situations that look like RST and for that matter I would choose C in situations like UVW and if it were a personal project or situation XYZ, I might just brute-force it with option D. But I don't know which of those trade-offs are the best in your case, your hunch is way better than any experience I have.”

Now to your other big question, you ask how to become less controlling and less frustrated with others. Two tips there.

1. Let it f**ing go. Seriously. 90% of these decisions are not important enough to justify blocking merge and release. They didn't insert a null check in a place where it comes automatic to you—so what? Here's the deal, learning is pain, more accurately learning is the relief that comes after feeling a pain over and over. Your desire that this other person never feel pain is this a desire that they not learn. You need to have the attitude of, “if I am wrong then I have learned something, if I am right then we can fix it later.” Just let the damn thing go, and your subordinates will learn and skin their knees and delete the prod database and grow.

2. Often people become 10x developers in a certain context because that context is full of landmines which they are able to avoid. The other people in that context are running into them and dying. But, you can find yourself in a rut.

Next time you are brushing your teeth, take note of what side you normally start on. Start on the opposite side. It's weird, uncomfortable, but not wrong. Next time you find yourself building code, maybe you start from a function that you're pretty sure you will need, start with some small examples, build out, eventually the larger structure will crystallize in your head? If that's you, reverse it. Pretend that you have an AI bot that, just by naming a function, will properly implement it for you, and start from the outside and build your way down to the details and the nitty gritty. Or if you program outside-in, flip this advice and program from the inside out.

You KNOW there is more than one way to do it, you are a smart person, obviously. But you have to FEEL that there is more than one way to do it, that is harder & needs to be drilled and trained.

3. Invest your surplus. You are 71% of the story points vs 9 others, correct me if I am wrong but that makes you a 22x developer. You commit to investing 20% of that and you become an 18x developer, nobody is going to complain. 2 hours a day or one day a week, however you can arrange it. What do you do with that time? Many options.

Maybe you mentor others on your team. “Oh Shabang, I can't take up your time, your time is very valuable.” NO! There is literally nothing more valuable that I can be doing than making you more productive. Because that's linear versus quadratic growth. Actually if I can get you trading the next generation too, it's exponential growth. It doesn't matter what the coefficient is, quadratic beats out linear eventually.

But you have indicated that you are not so interested in the management track and that is totally fine, you should be able to remain an individual programmer without needing to become a manager in order to get ahead. So what does that look like? One way: You invest in a new technology. Say you decide to do machine learning, you go learn some PyTorch, you build some models and train them, see if you can't apply it to some random problems at work. Another way, favored by the late Joe Armstrong, you invest the 20% in rewriting. You deliberately take 25% of your remaining story point load and nominate things to be implemented twice. You build it once and learn the shape of the problem and then you build it again. Can be combined with the previous idea, you decide to learn functional reactive programming or μKanren or Rust or what have you, by taking 10% of your story points and reimplementing them in those styles, assuming that you need to spend at least as long as the original bug just understanding what the new idioms are.

The goal here is to get to the point where, if someone else has a novel approach, you are no longer saying no to them, rather you are coming up the next day and saying, “hey that sounded really interesting, I wrote this proof of concept, is that what you were going for?”...

The golden rule of standup comedy, you never say “no,” you say “yes, and.” when someone says “We will just leave the authentication token off of that endpoint,” you suppress your sense of saying “no, every endpoint needs authentication, don't be ridiculous” but instead try to see their needs and say “yes, and we can build a way to instead authenticate by cookie/track the requests some other way/automatically audit accesses and limit the rate at which they are provided so it's not useful unless you know exactly what you're are doing/whatever.”

Hope thpse bits of advice help?

> This feeling of loneliness got quantified when the commit number came up. The problem is people just accept whatever I say. I used to get challenged in some of my decisions, which I always appreciated since I could create better solutions. Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

> I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

> ... what I find plainly obvious is not to others.

These statements resonate with me so I'll tell you my experience.

Someone outside of work told me "if you're the smartest person in the room then you're in the wrong room". So I changed jobs. I had been working on software that does DNA analysis for a company and had been doing that for six years. I decided I wanted to work more with robotics. I ended up landing a new job writing software for drones.

Now I'm doing what I consider to be much more challenging work. I'm no longer the top dog. I still don't really make mistakes in code. But I make a lot more mistakes with my peers and their process. It's been hard to try to explain to them why a different way is better when they wrote the process in the first place and are attached to it.

I can provide several examples. First and easily the most prominent is code style. Everyone has their own opinion. And their opinions are valid. But code style is something that directly leads to you understanding how the program works. Different code styles lead to slightly different understanding. Some code styles are much more prone to bugs. Try getting your team to change their code style for the better! I just spend three weeks before we were finally able to agree on an updated code style. And that's just styling that doesn't affect program flow.

Then there's repository setup... how do you organize your repository? Well... there's good ways (the way it works now) and there's better ways (the way it can work in the future). A lot of the similar reasons about code style.

And my peers no longer "look up to me" for the answer. Not in so many words. Moreover, I look up to them for the answers too because their experiences are not only different but the whole stack is different. I didn't build the entire stack at the company. I don't know every nook and cranny. So it takes me a little while to read through what the code does and reason about what it should do and reconcile whether they're compatible. It takes a while to make changes too. And it's not just code. They're much much better in mathematics or science or (in my case) aeronautics. It's much more challenging and my answers to problems are questioned in ways that I never even thought about.

It's stressful, too. In a good way. It's hard to meet deadlines that I thought you'd meet because "I've done this before, it'll be easy" but it turns out that... there's a lot of problems to it that just weren't problems at my previous company. Either I avoided them in my first implementation (like you said, a good developer), or I fixed it before it became a problem (again, a good developer), or it was just never within the scope of the industry (eg, DNA analysis software and robotic control software currently have minimal overlap).

Changing the industry I was working in massively helped me to challenge myself by having others challenge me.

Well, how much do you make? Compare your comp with the numbers on levels.fyi to see if you fit in the expected band.

oh give me a break

change projects.

TL;DR: 1. no offense 2. mee too 3. join the elite club 4. pet projects 5. teach

1. First of all, don't take what I write as a personal attack; I am a bit aspie, and can't detect the fine distinction between being honest vs rude, I'm just unable to separate. Also, I don't speak English very well, so I may use phrases, which I think different that it sounds.

2. Sorry, dude, you're only an average programmer - as I am. I have 32 years of experience in software development, started at age 18, and I'm programming since I'm 13, but I would have started earlier if there had been computers (in a socialist/communist country, see COCOM list). I'm pretty good at setting up a moldel, a solution, choosing platform and tools, writing well-readable, fast and resilient code. My superpower is to cut out features, which looks necessary, but I know they aren't, and I'm always right. I am not too good at math, okay, bool algebra is my blood, and I can set up good KPIs, but other areas, e.g. trigonometry (not a random pick, see later) is not my table. Also, sometimes I create music, not the dumb write-one-pattern-then-switch-on-off-tracks style, but normal pop, smooth jazz, house, rock, punk etc. stuff. I love to make covers. Restricted platforms is my real home, writing music for C16/Plus4, ringtone, buzzer, bytebeat etc.

3. As I said, I'm pretty average. I'm not measuring myself to clerks, bus drivers and our PM, not even to usual programmers. There's a scene, where we count as "nice try" or "well, interesting". This arena is called demoscene (a good intro: https://www.wise-geek.com/what-is-a-demoscene.htm). I am a medium-low known member of this community. As I'm not too good in math (remember, 3D), which is recommended in this genre, and also I'm not 16 yo any more, so I have no time to release full demos requires months of work of more people, I found my way in the sizecoding category, I am releasing and contributing in 256-byte intros (and also musics, of course). As sizecoder, I still count below-average-talented, other dudes are writing raytracers and other jaw-dropping effects in 256 byte (usually we use 16-bit x86 code), so I'm trying to shine out doing funny or unusual things. For example, one of my latest intro plays a 549 notes piano piece on the MIDI interface (my friend helped to optimize it out, also there's a presentation about how it's made https://github.com/ern0/549notes/tree/master/prez).

So, if you feel yourself lonely because you're high above the average folks, come, join demoscene, and feel yourself lonely on the other end of the spectrum, above the average. Okay, it's not true, not every demoscener is pure genius, but they're way above average, so you'll enjoy. Sometimes these guys are weird, but this is a usual side effect. If they accept you (don't worry, we're not complete jerks), it will be a good feeling to belong to such smart people. Not least, it's a great _inspiration_!

4. You not mentioned, but I assume you have pet projects. It's a fatal mistake to not have pet projects. This is the difference between Real Programmers and this-is-my-job-meh. Even if you work as Universal Problem Solver, there will be several areas which you never deal with before, and some of these are too interesting to just ignore them.

I show you an example. Thanks God (despite I'm atheist/agnostic) that I don't have to deal with web dev, but I was curious what the heck WASM is (web without JavaScript, doesn't it sound good?!), and wanted to write just a plain helloworld C program for it to try it out... and there were no such, all examples were for Rust/Emscripten, so I made a small skeleton: https://linkbroker.hu/stuff/howto-wasm-minimal/ - it became somewhat famous, a bunch of folks thanked it, finally I felt that it wasn't complete waste the time spent with it (2-3 nights).

A special area of pet projects is, where not-too-complicated electronics plays role - keyword is: Arduino. It's a pure joy, even if only a small led blinks in your hand, driven by the program you wrote!

If you have such pet projects, sorry for the redundancy.

5. As I'm getting older, I'm creating presentations from my pet projects and other experiences more and more often. Remember your early career, it would be great if someone had explained clearly how things work: pullup resistor, abstract syntax tree (compiler tech.), version control, key-value databases, LaTeX, build systems, Unix pipes etc.

If you can suggest optimal solutions for a certain problem at work, you should not only justify why you chose that solution, but you should also teach how to do it.

Oh, needless to say: Maybe I'm Wrong. Your way might be complete different, I don't want to iterfere your life (as silly joke goes: - Have a good day! - Please, don't tell me how to life!).

I would describe myself having been that person in my previous role (of six years). Started as dev#2, grew to ~100 people, you grow along with the company, having seen everything, had a hand in making most of it, it'd make anyone an expert.

Eventually it got to the point where our engineering manager would assign maybe 10% of my sprint capacity. 40% of it; I already knew what to work on. Stuff my manager, and the manager's manager, had no clue how to plan for. I was rarely included in product planning because "we need you to focus on the work". Literally none of them seemed to care that they didn't have visibility into what I do. Whatever; I'll just create the tickets myself, basically manage the sprint planning for a team of one (me). That worked well. Actually pretty nice. The other 40% was just Slack. Messages all day. "Ramp up meetings" with new hires. "Hey man can you document this thing" (no one ever reads it) (three months later 'hey man can we meet for two hours to talk about this thing I'm not understanding it') "Can you hop on this customer call in two hours, we need someone to talk about single sign on" (sure man, I'll recite the same script I've used for the last fifty meetings, and that I posted in our internal help database, that your team has somehow spent three years NOT learning)

Oh, I'm missing 10%. That was Overwatch. Maybe more like 30%. Because it turns out, you get to a position like this, and short of a company failure, you're set. I once had a project go maybe 3-4 weeks past when it was planned to be done, partly because I took an impromptu week-long trip in-country with a friend, telling no one. I could have taken PTO. We had unlimited PTO. And not fake-unlimited PTO that no one ever takes; real actual unlimited PTO. But that's a process, gotta fill out a form, tell people, and I was in my "fuck process" phase. Spend an hour a day in meetings from the hotel room hungover with a virtual background, respond to Slack messages as they come through. During a retrospective or something my manager commented that "product really screwed up planning how long this would take". I planned it! I gave the timeline! I screwed it up! Absolutely wild.

> I used to get challenged in some of my decisions, which I always appreciated since I could create better solutions. Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

The best days of my role at this company were when we hired on a former senior engineer from Google, of all places. I don't know how we got him or why he joined on, except that he really wanted to try a (no-name, small) startup. It was the first time, ever, that I felt like there'd be someone else with the knowledge and confidence to challenge me. He did. Then he left a year later. Probably for the same reasons I eventually left (if you haven't caught on yet; the management were amazing people; and absolutely horrible managers).

> I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

You don't have to become complacent on the tech. The thing I miss most about this role was; if there was some tech I wanted to play around with, I'd just do it. There was no one to question me. I'd deploy it all the way to production. I'd maintain it; grow it; mold it to whatever the business needed. You learn a lot doing that; probably more than being a cog in the Big Tech machine, though its a "different" but still extremely valuable kind of knowledge. A year later that tech is in job descriptions for the new hires and I'm helping them learn it.

But, what I found myself becoming complacent in was (you guessed it): work ethic. Everything was so easy, and the expectations were so low, that a typical day quickly became... 11 to noon, then an hour lunch, then an hour digesting that lunch, then maybe 2 to 4, then a friend just texted he's at the brewery across the street, lets roll out.

> What can I do to change things?

Leave. Everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room. Actually being the smartest person in the room: sucks. There are two ways to fix it; find a smarter person to bring into the room, or find another room. Hire, or Switch Jobs. Hiring the smartest person in the room is, probably, a predominate focus of someone, somewhere, in your company; as it is in every company, and they've failed. Who can blame them; hiring engineers SUCKS. So, find another room.

I've never made a better decision than leaving that role. In literally the first WEEK of onboarding at my new role, I learned five things about how they architect things, plan work, design systems, that induced the autonomic thought "shit let me write that down, this is fantastic and would work great in {SystemXFromOldCompany}", before having to realize I don't work there anymore lol (not to mention, you know, intellectual property, autonomic and such). When I put in two weeks, the old company offered to beat the offer at the new one by 10% (it was already an... 80% increase in TC). Nah, see ya.

That's the thing. You may be the most capable engineer at that company. You spend long enough in isolation there and you may just start convincing yourself you're god's gift from heaven. This isn't personal: you're not, because no one is. But, you're probably pretty good, and you're at a plateau because there's no diversity of thought in your environment. So, you gotta find it. Ten-x engineers are relative. The creator of homebrew couldn't get a job at google.

The alternate option is to find happiness where you're at (or, similarly; don't go big tech, find somewhere else you can be the smartest person in the room). It doesn't sound like that's a good solution for you, so I present it last, but it really is a fine road. There will always be many people smarter than you, and many people not-smarter. It sucks to be the smartest person in the room; but if you can go on impromptu trips with friends, spend time with your family, explore hobbies; hard to call that a bad hand. Work/life dissociation is actually healthy.

If you are a truly a 10X developer(TM pending) and this is not one of those copy-paste kids love these days, you could found your own company or consulting agency.With the huge competitive advantage you have (probably unique in the world ) : a 10-men-strength worth development capability that only have to maintain 1 family. If mere mortals have founded companies solo or in pairs, imagine what you could do with 5-10X the productivity and brain power.

Honestly I've been coding for 10 yrs. It's not a social activity, in that moment you're an introvert. You load up the case study of code in your head and work on a few features.

Socializing after isn't easy, do you DM someone, follow up, schedule a time to talk? That's unreasonable.

My latest startup Vibehut.io can help, here's an open video room for Developers, join when you want to chat, screen share your work, shoot the shit

w/e you want, here's the link, login with Twitter.. do with it what you will

https://vibehut.io/rooms/6286f6a8650b7c00166fdbb0

Re-balance your priorities, cut back in areas that stress you out, and evaluate frequently to see where you are trying too hard and where you are not.

Get a job at a FAMGAN and capitalize on that talent.

I can't help you with the loneliness part, because I'm just a married, middle-aged techie with no friends of his own. I don't claim to be a 10x developer either, but I tend to deliver cleaner code faster than many of my colleagues and have been roped into many of the same discussions/meetings as you.

It seems to be a situation where there are a surfeit of apprentices and a plenitude of journeymen, but a relative dearth of actual masters. I could be wrong, but I'm a journeyman myself -- one who can see mastery glittering on the horizon.

The hard part is when people start treating you like the Smartest Person in the Room (SPITR). Keep hearing that often enough, and you'll start to believe it. You'll lose the growth mindset that had gotten you this far and start thinking that it was your intelligence that made you and not your effort. This will righteously fuck you over when you eventually do foul up, because you won't see it coming even if somebody rubs your nose in the bug you committed because you'll be busy thinking, "I can't have introduced such a bug to the codebase. I'm smart."

I can't tell you how to counter this. I once lost a job after being introduced to a bunch of executives as the SPITR and saying, "If I'm the smartest person in the room, the rest of you are fucked." That's what I get for misreading the room and actually thinking that maybe I was the smartest guy there, smart enough to get away with mocking a bunch of execs capable of spending on Sunday brunch what I pay in monthly rent without a second thought.

It's the same trap that a shitload of kids get shoved into once their teachers figure out that they're reading beyond their grade level and must therefore be GIFTED AND TALENTED. They keep hearing from the adults around them that they're so smart and eventually they start to believe it. How could they not; they're often too young to have figured out that the adults around them are only human and all have pre-paid annual passes on the Dunning-Kruger Express. And when these GIFTED AND TALENTED kids finally fail, it feels like their entire world has come to an end because they've leaned so hard on their "intelligence" that they never learned any other way of dealing with the world around them.

I know this from personal experience. I got labeled as "gifted" in the 1980s because I didn't have the sense to hide my hyperlexia from the adults around me.

Getting back to your concerns: I can't help with the loneliness. I've dealt with the stress by discreetly working less. I can see the other developers' velocity, and rather than outshining them by a substantial margin I pace myself so that my metrics are only slightly better than theirs. Work that takes them a solid eight-hour day only takes me two, so I quietly take the rest of the day for myself.

Rather than rail against the fact that I've become Peter Gibbons and only do eight hours of "real work" per week, I'm learning to take advantage of it.

Well, you're good at making the rest of us feel inferior - perhaps that's the problem?

Why not move into a domain where you're a beginner again and feel what it's like to struggle to learn from scratch?

In 2 months I went from “hello world” to writing APIs, training neural nets, hacking video games and reversing android apps.

When I made a post on Reddit, I was viciously attacked and the post was deleted.

It’s 4 months now and I am finding faults in nearly everyone’s code, standard libraries, bloatware etc. Yes its lonely being at the top of the bell curve.

The majority of humanity will always be petty and stupid. A few of us with sound reasoning and high IQs excel at programming and it indeed leads to a very lonely path. For instance I am one of the few people I know who programs in C. Everyone else has succumbed to using that bloated extension-extension that shall not be named.