Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
I can&#x27;t help you with the loneliness part, because I&#x27;m just a married, middle-aged techie with no friends of his own. I don&#x27;t claim to be a 10x developer either, but I tend to deliver cleaner code faster than many of my colleagues and have been roped into many of the same discussions&#x2F;meetings as you.<p>It seems to be a situation where there are a surfeit of apprentices and a plenitude of journeymen, but a relative dearth of actual masters. I could be wrong, but I&#x27;m a journeyman myself -- one who can see mastery glittering on the horizon.<p>The hard part is when people start treating you like the Smartest Person in the Room (SPITR). Keep hearing that often enough, and you&#x27;ll start to believe it. You&#x27;ll lose the growth mindset that had gotten you this far and start thinking that it was your intelligence that made you and not your effort. This will righteously fuck you over when you eventually <i>do</i> foul up, because you won&#x27;t see it coming even if somebody rubs your nose in the bug you committed because you&#x27;ll be busy thinking, &quot;I can&#x27;t have introduced such a bug to the codebase. I&#x27;m <i>smart</i>.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t tell you how to counter this. I once lost a job after being introduced to a bunch of executives as the SPITR and saying, &quot;If I&#x27;m the smartest person in the room, the rest of you are fucked.&quot; That&#x27;s what I get for misreading the room and actually thinking that maybe I <i>was</i> the smartest guy there, smart enough to get away with mocking a bunch of execs capable of spending on Sunday brunch what I pay in monthly rent without a second thought.<p>It&#x27;s the same trap that a shitload of kids get shoved into once their teachers figure out that they&#x27;re reading beyond their grade level and must therefore be GIFTED AND TALENTED. They keep hearing from the adults around them that they&#x27;re <i>so smart</i> and eventually they start to believe it. How could they not; they&#x27;re often too young to have figured out that the adults around them are only human and all have pre-paid annual passes on the Dunning-Kruger Express. And when these GIFTED AND TALENTED kids finally fail, it feels like their entire world has come to an end because they&#x27;ve leaned so hard on their &quot;intelligence&quot; that they never learned any other way of dealing with the world around them.<p>I know this from personal experience. I got labeled as &quot;gifted&quot; in the 1980s because I didn&#x27;t have the sense to hide my hyperlexia from the adults around me.<p>Getting back to your concerns: I can&#x27;t help with the loneliness. I&#x27;ve dealt with the stress by discreetly working <i>less</i>. I can see the other developers&#x27; velocity, and rather than outshining them by a substantial margin I pace myself so that my metrics are only <i>slightly</i> better than theirs. Work that takes them a solid eight-hour day only takes me two, so I quietly take the rest of the day for myself.<p>Rather than rail against the fact that I&#x27;ve become Peter Gibbons and only do eight hours of &quot;real work&quot; per week, I&#x27;m learning to take advantage of it.