I consider myself an above average developer. In the right situation, I'd even strongly suggest that I can be a 10x developer. But there are so many things I either don't know or could massively improve upon. I joined a team where I feel like the majority of developers around me are at least as good as me or better, maybe much better.
What a weirdly insulting straw man of a developer you set up. Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry.
> Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry.
What else are you supposed to say about yourself or anyone else?
I'm not talking about the best developers in general, I'm talking about "the best developer in the team". The "golden child". Do you sincerely believe they're thrilled about giving up that special status to the new hire?
Yes, people are that petty, they're not necessarily that self-aware though.
You can construct any number of hypothetical evils that might plague your team; I don't really see why you'd let that shape your perception of engineers when you hardly ever run across people like that though.
Most people are fine, and if you run into a toxicity then go take care of it like an adult and talk to your manager/HR/whatever.
I'm not talking about "my team", I'm talking about people. Status preservation is one of the most basic behaviors in higher animals. It's not "toxic" or otherwise special in any way.
If you follow the advice of the GP, you are setting up a conflict of interest. I'm not ruling out that the "best developer" in some teams is of such noble disposition that they will always hire someone better than themselves. It's not what you can expect though, so don't set yourself up for failure.
Only if your definition of "best developer" is extremely narrow, maybe, since a typical "best developer" would want someone around they could learn from, no? And why would this issue be more common among "best" developers over the, err, non-"best" developers.
*ample use of scare quotes because I found "different developers work well in different situations or best with certain people" to be more true than "there's this 'best' developer let's clone them".
If s/he is any good s/he will also be a nice human being. In any case, for that particular company it's their only good and cheap chance.
There is an alternative, use an agency. The problem with that is that companies will simply reject the proposed candidates without justification because hey, they are the customer.
