Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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.

- 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.

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?

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.

It's up to you...I'm 55, and still going strong... Haven't had any trouble keeping up or finding jobs.

Have Fun!