I can only speak from my own perspective. I realized, that for me, I would always feel like someone was taking advantage of me. If it wasn't other developers, it was BAs/sales or even the management (or owner for small companies). The only way I got over it was to become a consultant. This allowed me to completely emotionally divest myself from stupid mistakes the company makes. I never have to think about how my review is horribly inaccurate, or anything else. I make my hourly wage, I do a good job, and people like it when I work for them. At the end of the day I go home and no one is calling me in the middle of the night to deal with issues. Everyone is different, so there's no telling what will make you happy, but for me, that changed my whole outlook on working and dramatically improved my emotional fitness.

This. When you get a whiff that you are good, its time to go solo.

When people accumulate some experience and wisdom, they tend to work less whilst accomplishing much more compared to less experienced [hard] workers. Are you sure this is not the case for you as well? Raw commit numbers say nothing. Take a closer look, maybe their 1 commit per week has same or more value than your 100 commits?

This x 1000. If you're pounding away implementing features no one asked for (or were only vaguely hinted at in a meeting once), or building complex 'future proof' architectures rather than implementing simple one off for the problem in front of you, or rewriting existing code because it doesn't fit your sense of 'right', then you're doing it wrong imo.

Aim for the top. Go for the very best companies (Google), learn everything you can, then build something to call your own.

In the meantime...

> I commit at least 20 times a day while my co-workers commit 2 times per week

Commit 1 time a day (5 per week), use the rest of your time to develop personal projects which will look good on your CV. You'll keep outdoing your co-workers but also make something for yourself.

I tend to think that you have a more chance to learn something in smaller companies, where it is more likely that your role is vital, compared to being a cog in the wheel of some monstrous organization.

I would probably recommend one of the big software consulting houses. Capgemini, Accenture etc.

Thanks! How working for consulting companies is better?

I think this advice is supposed to be sarcastic. Some consulting firms are known for having high stress, high pressure environments with high turnover.

Well, not sarcastic, really. It's just that if you want to work a lot, then those companies will let you. You'll get paid correspondingly.

In the context of the original question of "how do I avoid being used", I also thought your advice of joining those specific companies was sarcastic.

I'll tell you my story from being in this situation from both sides. Like the OP I consider myself able to do a lot more work in a lot less time than others. Companies I work at tend to take advantage of this. So last year I decided to look for a new job. It didn't take long before I found something and gave my resignation letter to my employer. They immediately setup a mtg with myself and the bigwigs and essentially asked me for what it would take for me to stay. Knowing the rule that you never take a counter-offer, I made the numbers extremely high. Huge raise, huge bonuses for multiple years guaranteed. To my surprise, they gave me everything I asked for.

Then I notified the company I was planning to leave for that I was planning to stay where I was working. They asked me what the offer was and I told them. Within a day they offered me even more! What an embarrassment of riches this seemed to be. So I went back to my employer at the time and said I was actually leaving. This made them really mad. But Left and went to the new job.

It turned out that the new job was completely different from what I was sold. I was leading a team of well over 30 devs (all but 2 were consultants from large consulting firms) across multiple countries around the globe with the intent of performing 24 hour development. We had meetings every 8 hours to do handoffs between the timezones. My first day was over 14 hours of work in the office. The first weekend was completely consumed by a horrible deployment. The team members were absolutely exhausted, sleeping at their desks. This was an absolute nightmare. I was essentially brought in to get rid of the consultants (to save money) and replace them with in-house staff. I was initially brought in as a lead architect/dev. So I went to my boss, who hadn't talked to me my entire first week and never even introduced me to the team, and asked him what the timeframe was for me taking over this team and he said "within a month we'll be letting go most of the consultants". I was absolutely shocked and immediately begin trying to find a new job and it took a few months of true hell to do that.

There is a lot more to this story, you can email me if you want to hear it. But my points would be, if you're talented, people will take advantage of you. And you could end up in a situation where a company will take advantage of you up to your limit. The consultants I worked with were from large well-known consulting firm and I'm sure they were paid well but their lives were hell and they had no recourse. Almost all of them smoked chronically to deal with their stress, amongst other things. If you're like me, you'll find that you certainly can be more productive but you'll end up with two choices. One, work at a normal job where most of your time is free for you to be productive at things you want to do. Or two, be your own boss and choose your own workload.