I've found that assembling highly in demand skills helps a lot with this. For awhile I was by far and away the best developer in my org (which is not to say tha

I've found that assembling highly in demand skills helps a lot with this. For awhile I was by far and away the best developer in my org (which is not to say that I'm a good developer, just that our org had 0 formal software engineering xp). This gave me very broad power to say no to projects or put in place prerequisites which had to be met before I would take on a project. It definitely pissed people off, but I was adding enough value to be able to take the stance "hey if you don't like it fire me".