Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
I would describe myself having been that person in my previous role (of six years). Started as dev#2, grew to ~100 people, you grow along with the company, having seen everything, had a hand in making most of it, it&#x27;d make anyone an expert.<p>Eventually it got to the point where our engineering manager would assign maybe 10% of my sprint capacity. 40% of it; I already knew what to work on. Stuff my manager, and the manager&#x27;s manager, had no clue how to plan for. I was rarely included in product planning because &quot;we need you to focus on the work&quot;. Literally none of them seemed to care that they didn&#x27;t have visibility into what I do. Whatever; I&#x27;ll just create the tickets myself, basically manage the sprint planning for a team of one (me). That worked well. Actually pretty nice. The other 40% was just Slack. Messages all day. &quot;Ramp up meetings&quot; with new hires. &quot;Hey man can you document this thing&quot; (no one ever reads it) (three months later &#x27;hey man can we meet for two hours to talk about this thing I&#x27;m not understanding it&#x27;) &quot;Can you hop on this customer call in two hours, we need someone to talk about single sign on&quot; (sure man, I&#x27;ll recite the same script I&#x27;ve used for the last fifty meetings, and that I posted in our internal help database, that your team has somehow spent three years NOT learning)<p>Oh, I&#x27;m missing 10%. That was Overwatch. Maybe more like 30%. Because it turns out, you get to a position like this, and short of a company failure, you&#x27;re set. I once had a project go maybe 3-4 weeks past when it was planned to be done, partly because I took an impromptu week-long trip in-country with a friend, telling no one. I could have taken PTO. We had unlimited PTO. And not fake-unlimited PTO that no one ever takes; real actual unlimited PTO. But that&#x27;s a process, gotta fill out a form, tell people, and I was in my &quot;fuck process&quot; phase. Spend an hour a day in meetings from the hotel room hungover with a virtual background, respond to Slack messages as they come through. During a retrospective or something my manager commented that &quot;product really screwed up planning how long this would take&quot;. I planned it! I gave the timeline! I screwed it up! Absolutely wild.<p>&gt; 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>The best days of my role at this company were when we hired on a former senior engineer from Google, of all places. I don&#x27;t know how we got him or why he joined on, except that he really wanted to try a (no-name, small) startup. It was the first time, ever, that I felt like there&#x27;d be someone else with the knowledge and confidence to challenge me. He did. Then he left a year later. Probably for the same reasons I eventually left (if you haven&#x27;t caught on yet; the management were amazing people; and absolutely horrible managers).<p>&gt; I worry that by not being challenged I will become complacent.<p>You don&#x27;t have to become complacent on the tech. The thing I miss most about this role was; if there was some tech I wanted to play around with, I&#x27;d just do it. There was no one to question me. I&#x27;d deploy it all the way to production. I&#x27;d maintain it; grow it; mold it to whatever the business needed. You learn a lot doing that; probably more than being a cog in the Big Tech machine, though its a &quot;different&quot; but still extremely valuable kind of knowledge. A year later that tech is in job descriptions for the new hires and I&#x27;m helping them learn it.<p>But, what I found myself becoming complacent in was (you guessed it): work ethic. Everything was so easy, and the expectations were so low, that a typical day quickly became... 11 to noon, then an hour lunch, then an hour digesting that lunch, then maybe 2 to 4, then a friend just texted he&#x27;s at the brewery across the street, lets roll out.<p>&gt; What can I do to change things?<p>Leave. Everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room. Actually being the smartest person in the room: sucks. There are two ways to fix it; find a smarter person to bring into the room, or find another room. Hire, or Switch Jobs. Hiring the smartest person in the room is, probably, a predominate focus of someone, somewhere, in your company; as it is in every company, and they&#x27;ve failed. Who can blame them; hiring engineers SUCKS. So, find another room.<p>I&#x27;ve never made a better decision than leaving that role. In literally the first WEEK of onboarding at my new role, I learned five things about how they architect things, plan work, design systems, that induced the autonomic thought &quot;shit let me write that down, this is fantastic and would work great in {SystemXFromOldCompany}&quot;, before having to realize I don&#x27;t work there anymore lol (not to mention, you know, intellectual property, autonomic and such). When I put in two weeks, the old company offered to beat the offer at the new one by 10% (it was already an... 80% increase in TC). Nah, see ya.<p>That&#x27;s the thing. You may be the most capable engineer at that company. You spend long enough in isolation there and you may just start convincing yourself you&#x27;re god&#x27;s gift from heaven. This isn&#x27;t personal: you&#x27;re not, because no one is. But, you&#x27;re probably pretty good, and you&#x27;re at a plateau because there&#x27;s no diversity of thought in your environment. So, you gotta find it. Ten-x engineers are relative. The creator of homebrew couldn&#x27;t get a job at google.<p>The alternate option is to find happiness where you&#x27;re at (or, similarly; don&#x27;t go big tech, find somewhere else you can be the smartest person in the room). It doesn&#x27;t sound like that&#x27;s a good solution for you, so I present it last, but it really is a fine road. There will always be many people smarter than you, and many people not-smarter. It sucks to be the smartest person in the room; but if you can go on impromptu trips with friends, spend time with your family, explore hobbies; hard to call that a bad hand. Work&#x2F;life dissociation is actually healthy.