If you want to just code, just code.

I accept you're a gifted coder, and that you're better than your peers. Good, then do exactly that.

Being good at mentoring people is only vaguely correlated with being good at code. IMHO, the main factor that will make you good at something is caring about it, and if you don't want to talk to people you'll waste your skills.

There is someone out there who would love to talk to people, worry about their development, figure out how to best use your skills and so forth. Let them do it.

> There is someone out there who would love to ... Let them do it

It seems to me, though, that OP vastly much better at that, than the others available. And that his co-workers have noticed this too.

sounds like a good time to work on a harder problem :) OP is crushing it on their product. Given the OPs description, we can also infer that the OP works somewhere that commits correlate with output well.

A few interesting questions that come to mind.

1 - Does OP feel like they are doing the same things over and over again?

2 - Does OP want to work with better/more skilled engineers?

3 - Is OP setting the technical direction? Do they want to?

Being the top coder by commits in a group of 350 is a super power, however many "Hard" software problems are resistant to code throughput as a fix. There are extremely difficult software problems that take years to produce the ~1k line solution.

For a non “Valley” perspective, your work situation sounds fine TBH. You are already the defacto dev lead (making it official could mean meetings).

Hobbies, sports, instruments, hell even a book club. Get social outside of work. Treat it the same as you’ve been treating your career (dig in and get good). You’ll find you make friends outside of work, but often at work too, as you may have hobbies in common with others at your job.

This will naturally lead to a good work balance, because you may end up wanting to clock out early to get back to your hobby. You’re in a great negotiating position to reduce your hours when that happens.

Get a job at a big company, like Google or Microsoft etc. There is always someone smarter.

OTOH, OP is invaluable to his current company. If he's being paid well and manages some balance, this could be a healthier environment than a mega corporation. If you want to balance life and work, small or medium companies are the best, specially with the clout he has.

+1

I moved from a role similar to what you're describing (spent 7 years there) into a role where I'm the least senior person on the project. And I'm having a great time.

It's always possible to find people who are so much ahead of you that you'll need to put effort into just following the conversation with them. And when you do, they're your peers and you're proud to be a 0.9x developer alongside them.

Maybe you can write software to help make others more efficient, by empowering them to do more by themselves. Give people superpowers they don’t have at other orgs. Things coming to mind:

- Code editor plugins (or web or mobile apps) tailored to your org‘s workflows

- Language changes in case your org is using an OSS lang

- Libraries for often-used functionality

- DSLs that let your org‘s PMs encode behavior themselves

- Small utility apps (web or mobile) that facilitate more effective communication

- Dev tools for your stack, eg if you don’t have hot reloading yet, that’s a huge enabler

- Test data generators

- You mentioned that you setup automation. Take it a level further and let other devs create scripts by preparing an environment (maybe an IDE) for that

Be careful with the kind of tools that increase abstraction in the code base itself. It can easily tip into a situation where it will have to be all ripped out when the OP leaves the company. Or worse, remains as a cargoculted mystery.

There are no hard and fast rules, but stuff that increases the productivity of other in a (to them) non-mystical way would be best.

It's a judgement call, some of these in the list above made me pause, but the red flags will be specific to each workplace.

The keys is to know what others will understand, and that is a super-power in itself.

Maybe consider a Staff Engineer type role at an established and well-respected firm? Still mostly IC if you can land the right role, I think, but more focused on the meta stuff that enabled the whole team like tools and automation. Would love input from others as I've not actually worked in such a role before.

This is the same attitude I see on Reddit. Just because someone is a top performer at a no name enterprise corp dev shop doesn’t translate to tech companies and no offense is intended. I spent my entire career until I was 46 two years ago at no name enterprise dev shops.

+1 to your comment.

I suspect they are feeling stressed because they're the main goto person on the product, and with enough random bobble heads running around trying to commit sacrilege on your codebase it quickly becomes a problem of control to maintain the quality you've so strongly instilled vs allowing the product to progress.

Their best path to get out of this bind I'd say is to slowly try to make themselves redundant on that product, choose a victim dev to be your successor and gradually disengage. Possibly a new product or project will be started and then they're free to get involved in that instead.

Also learn how to interview new candidates and get involved at that level, getting good (even better than you) coworkers is a great way to influence the whole company culture and make your work life much more pleasant.

To be fair, OP's speed of progress involved aptitude and diligence, even if you discard smarts. It's true that when you work five years at a code base, you probably become an authority in it because at some point it is yours too, but I've known developers who would never achieve that state.

That being said, tech megacorps are stressful environments, and OP looks like he has his plate full just accepting that he's become the de-facto lead developer. OP built his own niche market, why not dial it back a bit from eleven and learn to enjoy it?

Just move to a more intense company, or internal group, or a startup. I'm not familiar with how good you are, or your company, but I can almost guarantee there is a lot of stuff out there much more intense than the current place. And you can totally remain an IC if that's what you like.

Having been at times a manager and other times and IC, there are some great opportunities in each role, and it really depends on your organization.

If you haven't read it, "Staff Engineer" outlines some of the ways more experienced engineers continue to grow and provide value without becoming managers. I'd say the first half of it is worth a read to see if it sparks anything for you.

I will say that it gets lonelier as you go along either track. Reach out to peers if you have any. If not, try to reach out to folks outside of engineering.

It's a tricky path, and I wish you the best.

Honestly, your impact will be greater if you become a development lead.

I know this because I've watched it happen many times, not because I'm one. I've had lead developers report to me and good ones can really have a great impact. The tooling, procedures, technical debt, etc. All will be positively impacted by someone like you.

This is also a common theme in a lot of "Platform Engineering" style roles (but not all of them, because it's an overloaded term). The output of your actual code is systems to empower others, and paving the "clean path". Support and education is also a very common piece of success.

From where you're coming from, I think, your next steps would be thinking "who should work on this" vs. "I'll pick this up because I can do it quickly."

If you're not enabling your team to take over your job, you're doing it wrong. And by a comment I saw elsewhere, the tendency to control things is natural, but you should resist that - it's the only way you can scale.

If your organization doesn't have that kind of individual contributor leveling, that would be a good conversation to have. Or if your team isn't big enough, maybe its time to look for a new challenge.

There will be a learning curve and a mindset shift, but it's really the only way that you truly become a force multiplier.

Soon, your commits will go down, but your reviews will go up.

Later, your reviews will go down, but your strategy/design/planning docs/conversations will go up. Your job is designing for the 1-3yr future (or more but rare) and across the organization.

Get involved in the hiring process. You should be able to screen candidates well and if the company really is full of sub-par developers (doubt it but maybe) you will bring that up a bit. If you need tips on interviewing shoot me an email (same ID at g mail) it's easy for a good engineer once you know what to look for and how.

BTW that's not isolation you're feeling. It's responsibility, respect, and frustration. You didn't ask for the first two, you earned them.

Hey, could you please share publicly your tips on interviewing and spotting good engineer? Thank you. It would make a valuable HN post on it's own

Note that in my experience, heuristics for spotting good engineers tend not to work unless you yourself are a good engineer. You don'tnecessarily have to be the same kind of good, though that's obviously the least effort, and tends to overemphasize other points of similarity that are conflated with the "goodness".

Specialists and Generalists tend not to respect each other, for example. Folks with CS degrees and autodidacts likewise (though both can have impostor syndrome comparing themselves to the other).

There are also three personality types (or cultural types) suited to different maturity stages of the system being worked on (which also implies different processes, BTW): Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners[0][1]. Many businesses tend to collect one or two of the three types. Pioneers+Settlers is viable, as is Settlers+Town Planners. Orgs that only have Pioneers+Town Planners tend to have interesting pilot programs that never get successfully rolled out.

[0] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

[1] https://swardley.medium.com/what-culture-is-right-for-you-ba...

Don't do it.

If you do that, you may never write another line of code again (especially in a large organization.)

I like mentorship, helping people figure stuff out, giving technical advice etc. I don't like going to zoom meetings all day, which is what "leadership" in today's modern world has become.