[bjourne]

Man! It's like you were the manager at my previous job. I'll confess, most days I did spend my time reading hn, stackoverflow and working on more interesting projects than my assigned bug list. I usually came to work late and also took long lunches.

But you know what, at the weekly group meetings, my team leader could clearly see that my bug list always was empty while my team "mates" lists were overflowing. I told the department manager I had a lot of unused capacity. Not once, but several times. It didn't lead nowhere. When I fixed unreported bugs or did the "refactor the whole program while fixing my 3 assigned bugs" plan I was heavily criticised for that. All my suggestions for how the systems could be improved or what features could be implemented was shot down because they weren't in line with the department managers great plan for how things should be done. It just lead to long dick-size measuring arguments.

So exactly what should I have done? Sit with VS open, tap keys and simulate working all day long? Helping my colleagues with their problems was out of the question. As they, just like your department and this guy, talked behind my back and despised me because I only had to work 1/10th as hard as they did.

Eventually I quit because the situation became unhandleable. I got verbally warned for showing up late and people stopped even saying hello to me altogether. I was sick very often because it was better than reading hn all day which actually is fucking boring. My new job is like a breath of fresh air because the old one was really driving me crazy.

Truthfully, I can understand how it can suck to be average and have to work with someone much more skilled than you. I would also feel threatened if I knew about a colleague that could replicate what I do in a month in a few days. However, that's what HR departments, project managers and team leaders are there for. It's their job to make it work and if they can't and istead lose their truly great engineer, they suck.

[jtheory]

This sounds like not quite the same situation.

Much of the description (yours and the GP) is POV, though. I don't know you; maybe your suggestions for improvements were interesting engineering problems but horrible business decisions (and you didn't realize it); maybe your "several" requests for more tasks were actually 3 in 5 years, and were mostly actually scornful complaints about the low quality of your colleagues, though that's not quite how you remember them. POV.

There are more concrete checks, though -- can you list some of the things you did specifically to annoy/frustrate your colleagues or bosses, or even partly with that in mind?

E.g., did you ever implement a complicated algorithm with all variable names being girls' names? Did you ever intentionally fix this at the last possible second just because you enjoyed how uncomfortable it made the others? Etc..

Edit: My hope is that you won't come up with anything that silly, of course. I'm not actually trying to paint you in a bad light, just show how it's possible the situations could be quite different or quite similar.

Side note, though -- some situations really are untenable, some cultures simply don't reasonably allow improvement, but honestly most of the time I see one dev who's much more capable than their colleagues who is seriously resented that's because they are failing as a mentor... often because they simply don't think it's worthwhile ("I'm great, those people suck, and that can never change"). It takes some effort put into skillful social interaction, but most people want to improve their skills if given the chance in the right way. There will be some who just want to do exactly what they're doing -- and let you handle the hard problems -- and if you handle that relationship correctly they will appreciate you as well... but most resentment comes from people who want to keep advancing at a reasonable pace, and get some credit for doing good/interesting work, but instead they have the asshole super-dev who either says "oh, that's too hard for you, I'll do it" or "you think can do it, really?! well, go ahead, but don't come crying to me if you screw it up".