Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
I'm a 10x developer and I hate it. If you consider yourself a "top" developer I would appreciate your perspective.

It didn't start this way. I became a Jr Dev at 33 years old, people consistently assumed I was more experienced than I was. I'm not sure if it was my life experience or my relentless pursuit of self-improvement but I have been continuously improving my capabilities.

Around the time I turned 38 years old I felt competent. My code started to become defect proof. The drawback was it took me an extra 20% more time to complete. The Product Owner used to say to me, "I know it will take you an extra two days to a week to complete something, but then I never have to worry about it again". So, solid code, but kind of slow in comparison.

I'm now 42 years old, my code continues to have minimal amount of defects, but I complete stories fast, and I'm not working crazy hours, just the standard 8-5. Of course I'm involved in a lot more meetings nowadays, architectural discussions, bleeding edge Proof of Concepts etc, however that has not slowed me down. It has made me faster.

I never set out to become some kind of uber developer, but in the last couple of years I have noticed a shift in behaviors around me. It started with little things. Tech Leads inviting me into meetings to express my perspective on things. Developers pinging me when I have never worked with them, because "you probably know the answer". Being asked to weigh in specific Code Reviews outside my department. Lately if I join a meeting with people I haven't talked to before they already know who I am. Even my manager has started introducing me by just saying "This is X, you've probably heard of him".

Someone run a query to see the number of git commits by user for the application group I am in, about 350 developers. A script I wrote that performs various automation tasks was number 1, I was number 2. This surprised me, and it was an event that brought some of my thoughts and feelings into focus, thus this lengthy post.

I don't think that the number of git commits actually proves anything, other than I commit, code review, and merge code frequently. I wanted a better metric to quantify my feelings of alienation. I looked at Jira stories and story points. In my direct team of 10 people, myself included, I have completed 71% of all story points in 2022, the other 9 are responsible for the other 29%. That jives with my number of git commits compared to others as well.

So what's the point of this thread? It's not to brag, if I came across that way, I apologize. The problem I'm having is it's lonely and stressful.

This feeling of loneliness got quantified when the commit number came up. The problem is people just accept whatever I say. I used to get challenged in some of my decisions, which I always appreciated since I could create better solutions. Nowadays people just accept whatever I say as the best way.

It feels like I don't have peers. I'm solely dragging my entire team and everyone else around me with me for the ride. This leads to stress, it feels that if I am not working on the "thing" it won't get completed.

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

I catch myself becoming more controlling because at this point about 80% of the code base is my code for the applications my team is responsible for. I don't think that's a good thing, at the same time what I find plainly obvious is not to others.

The worst part is I am sensing within myself this frustration that everyone else appears to move so slowly. The thought of "great, one more thing I got to fix" is coming up too frequently.

To summarize, I'm a pretty good developer. I love writing code. However I feel alone, and I'm afraid I will become conceited of my own abilities. If you can empathize with this I would appreciate your perspective. Am I the only person feeling this way? What can I do to change things?