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.
– 100011_100001 [1]
I don't think that the [high] number of [my] 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.
– 100011_100001 [1:1]
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.
– 100011_100001 [1:2]
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.
– 100011_100001 [1:3]
Engineering leaders are judged by how much better they make everyone else.
– ctvo [1:4]
You may hear the term force multiplier used. Say you are really a 10x engineer, how much more effective are you if you could improve the efficiency of 350 developers by 10%? Mentor, teach, help establish culture, make systemic changes to help your peers become more effective.
– ctvo [1:5]