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First a little bit of a background. I have aways been a pretty decent developer with 5 digit reputation on stackoverflow in my real profile :D On top of that I was a successful olympic competitor in mathematics in my school/student years. Unfortunately, I ended up in the nordics which loves equality. Now to my problem:

I was a tech lead to a 6 person team and during this period I have produced more lines of code than the whole team together :D Even though I was tech lead I aways see myself as a developer. Now at one point we got a team lead and on top of that I started noticing people complaining more and more from different things around me so I kind of decided to step down as a tech lead plus there was too much hierarchy with one tech lead and one team lead for 6-7 person team. So I stepped back.

Now here comes the beautiful thing. After I stepped down i had more time to focus on development and in 2 weeks now I have 2 times more code than the whole team together has produced. Now I think it is a matter of time until the others start complaining about it. The key thing here is that this is not the first time I am in a similar situation :D

What is the correct thing to do. Should I code the way I am used to code this way producing more than everyone else together. Or am I supposed to artificially adapt myself to the team tempo in order for us to deliver as a team. Now the thing is that if we deliver as a team it will take twice the amount of time compared to if I just do my magic. So what is the correct strategy to handle this disproportion ?

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This looks like a good point in time to reflect on your skills.
Someone bragging only about their LOC and putting out a disproportionate volume of code is a liability, not an asset.

Now, this might of course all be just because you did not think to mention all the code quality and maintenance and documentation and … work that you do anyway. Though not considering those worth mentioning would also be alarming…

If you want to be that lone wolf developer then a good strategy would be to look for a job that does not involve having to ignore half a dozen people. If you want to be a better developer or even an actual lead then a good strategy is to stop and listen to the complaints people have about your work.
You might find out just how fast a team with an actual lead can deliver. :D

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  • see my comment about lines of code under the other post.
    – Pesho
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 10:45
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    @Pesho I have seen it and it does not change the message in any positive way. There shouldn’t be so much boilerplate and configuration that you can produce more LOC with it than anyone writing meaningful code together. That is a total maintenance nightmare and should be automated or managed in some other way than a single person doing that for weeks! By doing so anyway such baggage is enshrined and takes ages to reliably replace with a proper solution.
    – MisterMiyagi
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 11:31
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Should I code the way I am used to code this way producing more than everyone else together ?

Yes. You should go at the speed that you feel comfortable with.

Continue to write high quality code (with very few bugs). Don't overwork.

At the same time, it is important to spend time helping your teammates with technical issues if they ask for your help. This way you can build a better work relationship with your coworkers and the new team lead. This will help you a lot in the future.

Usually, one needs both the hard skills (technical coding skills) and the soft skills (people skills) to be successful and to move up the ladder in the workplace.

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I have produced more lines of code than the whole team together

"Lines of code" is infamously not something to brag about.

The usual way of evening out genuine differences in capability, is to allocate better developers to more difficult or subtle challenges, and to companies with better paid jobs.

I don't see any reason to artificially slow down your own work. If you're getting tasks done well ahead of the allocated time and there's no question about the quality, then simply use the time as you see fit.

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    If you're writing hundreds of lines of boilerplate code, and you have spare capacity, you should be looking at ways to automate that/abstract it away.
    – matt freake
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 11:01
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    @Pesho, but an intelligent developer - an informed one - would know the laughable history of measuring developer output by "lines of code", and the ambiguity of such a measure. You wouldn't measure an author primarily by the length of their book.
    – Steve
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 11:05
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    Nothing wrong with that. But effort does not correspond to productivity; number of lines of code written is still nearly irrelevant. Otherwise, the guy who writes horrible code and debugs his way to success would be a better programmer than you are, since he's writing more lines. Ditto the one who does not factor code out into shared (ideally reusable) routines, etc etc etc. If your company has a vague clue, nobody is counting lines of code; at most they are counting function points or some similar metric of the estimated work needed to complete the task and its importance. Forget LOC.
    – keshlam
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 16:11
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    If you are really a senior developer, you should have learned this long ago.
    – keshlam
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 16:17
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    @Pesho: "lines of ccode can be tedious configuration or deployment job. Hundreds of lines boilerplate code that everyone else is just to lazy to write." - I am genuinely not sure whether these examples are supposed to show "many lines of code are good" or "many lines of code are bad".
    – O. R. Mapper
    Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 19:35

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