throwaway10x

Sometimes you get the most brilliant of ideas in the shower after your work day, and you just can't wait till you get back to work next day (also because you know you'll have a ton of meetings anyways).

I work very late into nights on the project I created. I hate myself sometimes for doing this because this now the company's cash cow and I get nothing more than any other engineer. I've contemplated quitting but I see no benefit to this, it's still one of the coolest projects I've worked on. It's not just legal ownership that can drive people.

Reading your comment and the parent gave me goosebumps, I might be guilty of being this type of engineer.

I created a side project that became its own very successful product, and now there are a couple of other engineers in the team and I'm the "tech lead". We have a front end and backend component, and I have another brilliant full stack taking full charge of the frontend. the other two engineers are _very_ mediocre at best. The code is complex partly because I (without formal training) wrote it all myself, but also because it's a very complex priduct, not just a CRUD. I'm Constantly stymied by the fact that on the backend, asking the mediocre engineer to do something means it will take a full Sprint instead of the two hours it'll take me. The other engineers are also not able to fully understand the PRs (because the code is still too complex to them after six months joining the project) so I feel minimal upside to wait for their code reviews (which I still do anyways). I've asked to staff with better engineers but given the complexity of the product (directly query very large datasets with very complex jobs from a clean frontend) and our small orgs inability to attract great talent, I'm not getting anyone.

I'm forced with two possibilities: 1. Ask for the mediocre engineers to be removed from the team, and continue working on the backend solo (but making it actively a job to document and make it as easy as possible for a good engineer to take over after me). This would actually boost productivity 2x from what we are now frankly.

2. I stop coding fully or slow down 5x and work primarily as just someone who asks others to code. It would probably slow us down 3-4x,but I suppose it'll match the pattern of a regular team, though to what end I don't know.

Is there any advice you can give? I'm sure I'm not seeing something obvious here that I'm doing wrong, and am fully open to honest input.