I am practically having this conversation at work. There's a sister team with a great tool for benchmarking what they are working on, but it is not convenient for our needs, and I am told to "just do the plumbing to make it work for our needs". Reality is that there are far, far easier ways to achieve what we need than doing all that plumbing, adding more layers of abstraction on top of what is a side project of an adjacent team.

When dependencies don't deliver 100% of what you want, you should be able to work with upstream to get what you want added.

If upstream won't cooperate with you, then fork. It's still usually better to start from a battle-hardened codebase than it is from complete scratch.

The problem with being smarter than average programmer is that your insights will rarely ever be considered, even if they're correct, because they're new and controversial. That's because, from the perspective of an average programmer, a bad programmer who doesn't know what they're doing, and a programmer using techniques so advanced that they cannot be understood, are effectively indistinguishable, which means that average team will treat both geniuses and morons in the same way.

I feel like the collapse of the tech bro coincided with the masses going to programming, which changed the culture from promoting innovation and development, into simply following whatever best practices someone had already written, turning programming from a creative job into yet another repetitive office job. This is also, in my opinion, the true reason why salaries collapsed. Most business don't need creative specialists, they need code monkeys, and most people aren't creative specialists, they're code monkeys. So why would the salary worthy of a creative specialist even be talked about over here?

To summarise your first paragraph: This programming meme? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FiMbeF_XoAAYAQb.jpg

And your second paragraph sounds like sour grapes. I have no idea what "the collapse of the tech bro coincided with..." means. Most programmers are working on CRUD apps. How creative do you need to be?

There is a legitimate concern that if the smarter programmer quits the job, the remaining average programmers will not be able to maintain the code.

I think a smart solution would be to teach the average programmers the new concepts. Many of them would probably be happy to learn, and the company would benefit from having everyone know a bit more and use better solutions. But for some reason, this usually doesn't happen.

>Many of them would probably be happy to learn

No. Most people don't like being told that they're wrong, drama ensues. They say they want to learn, but in reality, they don't.

What would you answer to a proposal to learn how to make people stay engaged in there initial statement expressing a desire to learn?

"yes, I want to learn" maybe?

Sight