Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

(Cool translated profile name, though :P)

Because if you are really and truly excellent, my advice is to not bother with caring about the rest of the room, and to just focus on the quality of your day to day life.

There's diminishing returns on 'success' and a diminishing supply of your time.

I burnt out on the cycle of "excited to finally be in the bigger pond," then "doing really well in this pond," to "wait, this is all this pond has to offer?" And repeat.

There's brilliant people out there. They will rarely be the person on the other end of the check. And even when they are, the person on the other end of THEIR check is certainly going to be a moron.

You'll see potential around every corner. You'll get excited about just what you and the other brilliant people you finally found will be able to accomplish. And then you'll watch what actually plays out and it will crush you.

If you have a nice life, and find fulfillment in what you have outside of work, don't sacrifice your work life balance to put more into work in the pursuit of finding fulfillment there.

Unfortunately society still just isn't quite at the point where it's realized the value in attracting the absolute best by offering them much less work.

If/when that changes and you can find yourself working one to two days a week making a living and networked with true peers - jump to that pond immediately.

Until then, beware of leaping from the pan to the fire.

- You’re checking out everyone else’s PRs and requesting changes for all the bugs you find. The few times you don’t a major outage occurs.

- Everyone’s asking you for help all the time. You actually find a way to “help” all of them but really you’re just solving their problems for them

- You say you love your job, but really it’s not like what it used to be. You’re no longer excited to be woken up at 2am to fix an outage.

- You never aimed to be here, doing this, working here. But here you are and this is now your baby.

Your baby has grown up. As long as you are here the stress will eat at you. But can I encourage you that a better life awaits you. Change will be hard, but what is waiting for you on the other side is so much better. But it takes humility, humility that “project x” will go on without you (definitely not as smoothly but others will step up to the plate). Humility to try something new where you are in the bottom 10% working your way up once again. It will feel like you’re giving up all the hard work you’ve put in, giving up what makes you king of the hill, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because life isn’t about being king, but about the journey. Welcome to a life of freedom, of learning something new every day, of waking up each morning and diving into whatever is on your heart to discover.