Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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.

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?

“If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.” -Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I often feel like I’m working more efficiently towards a goal than colleagues (and I work with others who make me feel inefficient, too), but that’s my opportunity as a tech lead. Help them figure out how to unblock themselves and motivate them towards the vision.

If you look around, you will see that a lot of the struggles of younger age developers are from lack of life experience not specific developer skills.

My problem is that I love code much more than talking to people all day. I have been mentoring Jr Devs for a while now in an official capacity which helps.

I like the idea of "make systemic changes to help your peers become more effective". So that's something I will have to think about.