What if you just want to write software and not be responsible for mentorship? Why do capable individual contributors always have to be roped into leadership?
At a certain point, you probably know considerably more about the work than the people working around you. You might say you develop "seniority". At that point, the balance of value between your individual contributions and the knowledge you can share with others reaches a tipping point.
If you're limiting the value you're bringing to the company to only individual contributions, you're capping the value you can bring the company and by correlation the compensation you're due.
With that said, I don't see anything wrong with stagnating at your peak IC efficiency if that's what makes you happy.
I agree with sibling which says that mentoring is not leadership. Helping out others is not the same as giving them instructions or evaluating performances for example. However I can understand that someone would like none of that.
Honestly, it's a weird remark. Pretty much all jobs on this planet have aspects you wish you don't have to do. You work for your employer and your employer needs you to train the juniors. If you don't want to do that, change for an employer who only recruit senior engineers, if you can.
Beyond that, you could go into contracting. Do the work, point to your contract whenever someone asks something else of you, move on after 3-6 months, rinse and repeat.
When pairing with juniors, I avoid directly solving problems for them as much as possible–lessons tend to stick better when you ask leading questions and let them discover solutions for themselves. Perhaps this technique would also work to filter out "lazy" questions.
Working with a mix of super competent developers at all levels has really driven home for me that everyone is better at something, and worse at something, than you are. I've learned lots of new things from developers with less experience than me. I've also worked with many devs with senior titles who were worse off than most juniors.
Ultimately it's okay to find mentoring unenjoyable, but if this describes you, please stick to teams with most/all seniors and don't agree to mentor even if pressured. Attitudes like this can really exacerbate imposter syndrome for juniors, and I've seen it damage several careers.
When I was a junior, I would have been greatly satisfied by more time and attention from seniors, as I would be today grateful for more time and attention from people in differing specialities, where I am quite junior. We do however live in the real world, where these people's time is extremely valuable, and I wouldn't dare disrespect it by asking them trivial questions. I would value 10mins of their time and the context switch they pay to help me on the order of days of my own. And if I do resort to bothering them, I do so with an attitude of utmost humility, akin to digital dogeza.
I get frustrated when folks fail to do any of this. I regard is a breach of professional etiquette that unfortunately seems all too common. I've found myself responding "Try harder" or "LMGTFY" to these sorts of inquiries, which is about as polite as I can muster.
> everyone is better at something
It seems that this would be trivially easy to prove false, and very difficult to prove true. I've certainly met developers with nothing uniquely useful to contribute, in spite of best attempts at coaching them.
> imposter syndrome
I'd like to note that I'm actually extremely forgiving of mistakes, even very expensive ones, so long as they're honest. We all make them, and it's really on me to ensure that processes are in place and enforced to prevent the most critical sorts of them. But you don't know what you don't know. It's more the "I'm a baby, please hold my hand" attitude that I'm frankly somewhat disgusted by. If that describes (hypothetical) you, then perhaps some imposter syndrome is in good order.
I wouldn’t want to work on a team with someone who has such an attitude. I’m very grateful to work in an environment where we all want to help one another. This really reminds me how good I’ve got it.
Training your replacement is how the cogs in the machine reproduce.