Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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.

"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.

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.

Difficult to say without knowing the OP personally, but in my experience, all of this can square.

There’s complex dynamics at play that are a product of the genius developer mythology: someone produces a lot of code, the system becomes an extension of that person, everyone becomes dependent upon that person regardless of whether the person is good or bad, enjoyable to work with or not, because they’re the genius system-whisperer.

Earlier this year I spent some time at a company that has an incomprehensible system that is deeply problematic and painful to work on — so much so, they brought on dozens of developers to try and speed up the rate of delivery (I was one of them) — but the person who built it (and is most productive in it) has been elevated into a position where he now owns the entire technical implementation for the company, and is responsible for designing the solution to the nightmare he created, despite clearly demonstrating he has no business doing so: he’s simultaneously a linchpin and incompetent.

There’s probably some version of the Peter Principle that applies to software engineering: a software engineer’s output will rise to the level where it’s a burden.