Well, here’s the thing about that: if I measure myself against the expectations that are being put on me, I’m orders of magnitude short. Compared to the expectations put on everybody who carries the title “programmer”, I’m not even qualified to be in the same room as one. But who’s setting those expectations? Not other programmers. Certainly not anybody who could walk over, roll up their sleeves and say, “See? Here’s how easy it is. Just do it like that next time.” No, these expectations come from “project management professionals” who cringe at the thought of typing a formula in to Excel. These expectations come from people who attended a two-week seminar on managing programmer “resources” and whose sole contribution to the practice of developing software is asking “are you done yet? Why not? Are you the one who’s stupid, or is it somebody else who’s stupid?”
> half the developers I have worked with are more capable than me
Really, though, how do you measure that? If you have the self-awareness and humility to consider that it’s possible that somebody might be better than you, you also have the introspective capability to improve - which makes you better than a lot of the people out there.