Title: I&#x27;m a 10x developer and I hate it. If you consider yourself a &quot;top&quot; developer I would appreciate your perspective.<p>It didn&#x27;t start this way. I became a Jr Dev at 33 years old, people consistently assumed I was more experienced than I was. I&#x27;m not sure if it was my life experience or my relentless pursuit of self-improvement but I have been continuously improving my capabilities.<p>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, &quot;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&quot;. So, solid code, but kind of slow in comparison.<p>I&#x27;m now 42 years old, my code continues to have minimal amount of defects, but I complete stories fast, and I&#x27;m not working crazy hours, just the standard 8-5. Of course I&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;you probably know the answer&quot;. Being asked to weigh in specific Code Reviews outside my department. Lately if I join a meeting with people I haven&#x27;t talked to before they already know who I am. Even my manager has started introducing me by just saying &quot;This is X, you&#x27;ve probably heard of him&quot;.<p>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.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>So what&#x27;s the point of this thread? It&#x27;s not to brag, if I came across that way, I apologize. The problem I&#x27;m having is it&#x27;s lonely and stressful.<p>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.<p>It feels like I don&#x27;t have peers. I&#x27;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 &quot;thing&quot; it won&#x27;t get completed.<p>I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.<p>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&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a good thing, at the same time what I find plainly obvious is not to others.<p>The worst part is I am sensing within myself this frustration that everyone else appears to move so slowly. The thought of &quot;great, one more thing I got to fix&quot; is coming up too frequently.<p>To summarize, I&#x27;m a pretty good developer. I love writing code. However I feel alone, and I&#x27;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?
Upvote: