Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer

> I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.

> ... what I find plainly obvious is not to others.

These statements resonate with me so I'll tell you my experience.

Someone outside of work told me "if you're the smartest person in the room then you're in the wrong room". So I changed jobs. I had been working on software that does DNA analysis for a company and had been doing that for six years. I decided I wanted to work more with robotics. I ended up landing a new job writing software for drones.

Now I'm doing what I consider to be much more challenging work. I'm no longer the top dog. I still don't really make mistakes in code. But I make a lot more mistakes with my peers and their process. It's been hard to try to explain to them why a different way is better when they wrote the process in the first place and are attached to it.

I can provide several examples. First and easily the most prominent is code style. Everyone has their own opinion. And their opinions are valid. But code style is something that directly leads to you understanding how the program works. Different code styles lead to slightly different understanding. Some code styles are much more prone to bugs. Try getting your team to change their code style for the better! I just spend three weeks before we were finally able to agree on an updated code style. And that's just styling that doesn't affect program flow.

Then there's repository setup... how do you organize your repository? Well... there's good ways (the way it works now) and there's better ways (the way it can work in the future). A lot of the similar reasons about code style.

And my peers no longer "look up to me" for the answer. Not in so many words. Moreover, I look up to them for the answers too because their experiences are not only different but the whole stack is different. I didn't build the entire stack at the company. I don't know every nook and cranny. So it takes me a little while to read through what the code does and reason about what it should do and reconcile whether they're compatible. It takes a while to make changes too. And it's not just code. They're much much better in mathematics or science or (in my case) aeronautics. It's much more challenging and my answers to problems are questioned in ways that I never even thought about.

It's stressful, too. In a good way. It's hard to meet deadlines that I thought you'd meet because "I've done this before, it'll be easy" but it turns out that... there's a lot of problems to it that just weren't problems at my previous company. Either I avoided them in my first implementation (like you said, a good developer), or I fixed it before it became a problem (again, a good developer), or it was just never within the scope of the industry (eg, DNA analysis software and robotic control software currently have minimal overlap).

Changing the industry I was working in massively helped me to challenge myself by having others challenge me.

It's also about adopting the attitude that "I can always learn more". Just by reading HN that's a really good step, because there are smart people here and interesting posts.

I started professionally as a Pascal programmer on an IBM PC/XT, now I architect OLTP systems and either spend my time debating high level architecture, or I'm down in the weeds watching log files of the apps.

There's always somewhere interesting to go on the journey. Especially if you treat it as about creativity and not engineering :)

When I joined Stripe in 2017, I couldn't get over the number of people I worked with who were smarter, better engineers than myself. It was new to me. It was hard at times (impostor syndrome, feeling like an idiot, etc), but mostly super fun – and of course, incredibly humbling. Humility is really important to me, and it sounds like it is to you, too – you can gain it, along with a sense of camraderie, with the right team.

Switching jobs is normal, healthy, and not a betrayal – you've put in great work at this company and it will outlast you. It's time to look for something new.

Don't just say yes to the first company that comes your way – say "no" to a variety of them and when you feel really excited about the people you interview with, lean in and spend time getting to know them before signing.

If you've never worked at a "fancy silicon valley company" before, don't feel afraid about applying to them. At Stripe, we hired people with backgrounds like yours all the time, alongside folks with fancy Harvard/MIT/Google/etc backgrounds.

Don't worry, you're not anything special in the grand scheme of things :) find a company with lots of engineers better than you and you'll find a lot of joy.

As an aside, what you describe of your current role sounds straight out of the eng ladder for Stripe's "Staff Software Engineer" level. You can read more about that style of work in Will Larson's book if you want more like that, or join an earlier-stage company with a heavy-hitting team.

If you'd like to chat further, my email is in my profile, happy to set up a Zoom.