Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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.

As in teaching college courses or other developers?

Currently I train new developers with all the tools we are using, and our CI/CD process. I mentor one new hire in six month cycles, and yesterday I got an intern mentee.

I also write a lot of technical docs mainly as a way to explain to others how different parts of the system function. As I make code changes, I update the docs as my own personal definition of done.

In terms of a college career, I'm not sure a college could pay me as well.

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.

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.

If you're the smartest one in the room, you're probably in the wrong room..

I mean, if I would perform so much better than my coworkers, in the end that would lead to me doing all the work for basically the same pay. So it would be an opportunity to find a more challenging gig.