Many years ago I worked at a company where I just didn't feel particularly useful or valued. I was working on a peripheral client-side Java app that was basically just used as a visual configuration for the meat of the system that was all on the back-end.

There were a bunch of more senior developers who I hugely respected and learned a lot from, including this guy who I'll refer to as $SMART_DUDE who joined at about the same time as me. He knew his stuff inside out when it came to C++ and I remember being absolutely fascinated by a talk he gave on memory management and different types of pointers one lunchtime. It's no exaggeration to say that I literally still refer to things I learned in that talk today, almost exactly twenty years later.

There were some pretty big personalities in that company and I was seriously intimidated by my line manager, who always seemed like he was pissed off with me. I spoke to him when he interviewed me, and then barely ever until my performance review came round nearly a year after I'd joined the company. I remember speaking up in a meeting once, him snapping at me, and I just shut the fuck up.

He surprised me in the performance review. We had 5 levels of bonus. I thought I was decidedly mediocre in his eyes but, out of nowhere, he gave me not the top level, but one down, which was only slightly less than the top level (we had a reasonable degree of transparency about percentages involved).

Still, I didn't think much of it and had started looking around for other roles. One of the motivators is that one or two people I really respected had or were leaving, including $SMART_DUDE, who'd handed in his notice. There was him and another guy, who I'll call, $SMART_DUDE2, who I thought - and still maintain - were just the real deal. I thought they were better than the people they worked for, way waaaaaaaay better than me, and better than everybody else in the company, although, to their credit, I think the people they worked for also though the same.

The other motivator was that, although I was earning slightly more, and on top of this the company had covered my rent for the first 12 months, I was still financially worse off than I had been where I'd lived before on the lower salary (higher cost of living in the new area).

Anyway, in the meantime I started hooking up our client with the backend using XML rather than CORBA. Not even using SOAP. I just realised there was an endpoint that we could communicate with firing XML documents back and forth according to a protocol that we agreed in a late afternoon/evening design session that would allow us to load and update whole trees of objects, rather than just individual properties (surprise, this was mind-blowingly slow), without having to make any major code changes on the back end. Really not that big a deal.

Whilst this was all going on I landed a contract. It paid something like 1.8x what I was earning after tax even with something like two months holiday factored in. It could have been more but I was so overawed by the low end of the pay band that when they asked me what I wanted I said £Y and they accepted without an argument. I was an idiot. Still, because I thought absolutely nobody would believe me, when I handed in my notice I told the company my new role would pay 1.35x my salary. I was an idiot for the second time. If I'd not been an idiot at all I could probably have got 2.2x.

It was at this point my line manager - bear in mind by this point (14 months in) I could still count the number of times we'd spoken on one hand - dropped the bombshell of, "Oh no, I mean you're really great. I think when you leave we'll feel the loss more than $SMART_DUDE. Let me see what I can do on salary." WTF?

I still maintain that $SMART_DUDE was a lot better and smarter than I was or will ever be, and I'd hire him in a flash - literally no hesitation other than to ask him if he might not get a bit bored by the work we're doing.

I still don't really get it, even now, but I suppose I delivered pretty consistently during the time I was there, didn't make a fuss (anyone who knows me now would find that very hard to believe - there's a history here that's too long and boring for HN), and solved a business problem that they had quickly and pragmatically without worrying too much about whether it was the best option from an engineering standpoint.

My advice: you don't need to be super-smart, but be just a little bit hungry, able (and stubborn enough) to deliver, and don't stand too much on engineering ceremonies.