You're at the wrong company. I've worked at a startup, at Twitter, and at Google and each time there was notable "raising of the bar" in the talent I was around. I know there's a lot of Google hate on HN, and it's such a big company it is true not every team is mind blowing, but... I've been there 5 years and I still have serious imposter syndrome and am constantly amazed by my colleagues. I get to work with some crazy smart and productive people. The suggestion isn't "go work for Google" (but maybe you should) but find a group of people that push you and amaze you and make you want to improve. They definitely are out there.
I think it's totally this. In my experience there is variance in how effective the top percentile of developers are at their work, but not nearly as great as the variance at the bottom. There are MANY teams out there where even the best developer on the team could hardly answer any question on leetcode, and some where everyone on the team could rip through every question like a bag of chips. People who call themselves 10X developers have generally not spent much time on the latter kind of team.
Agreed. If there is a lack of engineering culture, it's easy to feel like you're the only one pushing the envelope, and feel like you're the most productive. I've definitely experienced that, working for large enterprise and/or financial companies.
