Honestly, I was always happy to have good developers. The better you are, the bigger pain in the but you can be, as far as I am concerned as long as the code you are delivering is excellent. I am perfectly happy to work around your quirks, within reason of course.
And, of course you will be a jerk when you are seeing things others just can't and they can't understand you. After a while you lose patience.
What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff.
So two essential qualities in my view are: being really good, have excellent foundations and being open to learning and coaching if you don't have those.
That's where mentorship comes into play - mentoring the rest of the team has greater effects than trying to plow through code over the long haul. The reason is that it creates a silo that the one high producer gets saddled with, and it creates a bottleneck that ultimately probably will even result in the high producer becoming unhappy due to being distracted with all of the maintenance burden from his/her code.
I used to be more of the former type who would try to power through everything & still display flashes of it whenever I do have to code, but after being a lead engineer for almost a year, I understand more deeply the value of knowledge transfer and making everyone more productive. Having a team that is genuinely happy to work together has an effect of creating more for the company than the sum of their parts because the team is more honest with each other from being comfortable/not having to fear reprisal, which results in better (& planned) team architecture, mistakes being caught as early as possible, and overall decreased stress.
> What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff.
All good developers were less-good junior developers once. What I value most is the good, patient developer that turns all the developers around him into good developers over time. They're far more valuable than someone with a high production rate but who drives others away.
That all sound good but in practice rarely is the case. Good developers and every kind of smart people, scientists, are eccentrics, because they just know more then you and it is hard to explain everything every time.
> Good developers and every kind of smart people, scientists, are eccentrics
Not always, and "eccentric" doesn't mean "unable to be helpful or kind".
> because they just know more then you and it is hard to explain everything every time
Yes, it's hard. It's a different skill than programming or general intelligence. And it's a harder skill to find or to train. As a rarer skill, it's thus more valuable, and more useful to select for. And as an engineer, developing a rarer skill makes you more valuable, which will improve your career prospects (in both pay and position).
Source: I've been on both sides of numerous performance review processes, and seen what people value at many levels of a technical job ladder.
I think it is important to match coworkers by their caliber. You're right, if you have one really amazing developer and a bunch of mediocre developers that one really good developer could become bitter.
Seems like the case here, if someone is leaving hundreds of opinion-based criticisms of someone else's work that's a pretty clear indication of dissatisfaction.
>And, of course you will be a jerk when you are seeing things others just can't and they can't understand you. After a while you lose patience.
What if they don't see those things because they're not being communicated well?
>What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff.
But it isn't necessary that those 3-4 polite junior devs are your opportunity cost. The good developer may well be alienating n good developers, testers, DBAs, Ops analysts, or BAs.
Why does everyone insist on comparing the jerk to junior developers? Why does everyone insist that, in order to avoid jerks, you can't hire talent? There are plenty of good, talented people who are not jerks.
And, of course you will be a jerk when you are seeing things others just can't and they can't understand you. After a while you lose patience.
What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff.
So two essential qualities in my view are: being really good, have excellent foundations and being open to learning and coaching if you don't have those.