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Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

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Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#261

Post by zelphirkalt »

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.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#262

Post by kareemsabri »

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".

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#263

Post by selimthegrim »

amelius wrote: post #192
hoten wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to say I aim to be the second dumbest person in any room.

And Feynman was in the wrong room his entire life.

The mathematicial physicist Ray Streater on his website did tell a story where Feynman was definitely in the wrong room.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#264

Post by jslaby »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #211
phphphphp wrote: post #24

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 t…

From my experience, a person claiming to be a 10x developer probably isn't one. All real performers I knew were pretty humble people.

Like someone saying they're an alpha male... imo most devs, junior or not would love to tackle problems without the oversight of a lead. Maybe his code reviews are so heavy handed that devs would rather get his okay before rather than getting scorched after.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#265

Post by SamBam »

tsss wrote: post #134
100011_100001 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that is exactly what I don't want. Pretending I am this amazingly productive developer and my code is just trash. I just checked. In 2021, only two defects were created against my specific code changes. If I had to home into a weakness of mine is that sometimes I solve today's problem well, but don't think extensively about how tomorrow's problem in that space might look like. The struggle is between creating sim…

It's not about behavioural defects. It's that the _code_ is trash. It is unmaintainable and slows down all future changes, exactly because the person who wrote it didn't take the time to think about the future or even good architecture in the present. Every time I touch their code I have to almost redo their work because: - It's impossible to understand what is going on (For example when people load huge json or sql…

I am confused why you are just taking the least charitable assumption based off OP's short post, and writing these long screeds just taking it as given that your assumptions are true.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#267

Post by skellera »

kareemsabri wrote: post #262

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 somethi…

To the last point, seems like he hasn’t brought the other devs up with him. Either by lack of company culture or personal avoidance, being “that” much better than everyone else should be shared. He should be teaching others.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#268

Post by throwyawayyyy »

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.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#269

Post by weq »

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.

Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

#270

Post by wayne-li2 »

nathan_phoenix wrote: post #229

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 really don’t think that’s how people interpreted this post. I left one of those relatable comments but I skipped over the 10x comment. In general, if you are consistently above average (which I would argue a large crowd in HN could be) you will end up with similar feelings as OP.

Coming back to this thread now after a few hours, people seemed to have fixated on their 10x comment. It seems like a weird fixation to me.

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