I've been at my current job for just over 4 years now, but when I entered the company I knew a lot more than most of the other techies around there and started showing them how they could do some of the stuff they were doing different and better. Some picked up on it, while others plainly balked at my ways, not even wanting to try them out because there ego's got in the way. This behaviour got me into the most rewarding geek job the company had for me. Rebuild an entire portal site using hardware of my choice (mostly) and i could write in any language I thought best suited for the job.

This came with complications, I had to solely write a portal site in 4 months, and I had people coming to me asking questions about 10 times day. After a month or so, I started to buckle under the pressure of both the portal deadline and wanting to answer everyones questions. So I started to say 'Sorry, but I can't help' a LOT and I put on eye-blinders to a lot of stuff going wrong in other projects because I had my own to worry about.

This 'No' and 'ignoring' attitude got me back to doing my thing and after a while all I had to worry about was producing good code. Looking back now, that was a Bad Thing (tm). Other techies were trying out new things, and some bad practices. Some of those bad things grew into bad habits.

About a year ago I started noticing some big deficiencies and I started doing again what I did when I joined the company, help and teach people, trying to get people from the bad habits into the good things. The management hadn't forgotten about me being 'competent' and viewed this development as a good thing. Currently on average I spend 12 hours a week helping/teaching people. 8 hours of optimizing / bug-fixing and 20 hours on development.

Even though I would prefer cranking out code 40 hours a week in a team with members who are my equal or ( better yet) better than me, what I currently do is more rewarding and helps me sleep at night :P, I never want to slip into the main-stream again.

To the point: Try to find your balance, if people can benefit from your knowledge let them, but don't allow to have more pressure/workload put on you than you can handle. Zaxo's and ptkdb's points were very good.

Hth,
Deliria