Success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
One day in the bathroom at work, my friend asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”
It was early in my tech career. I had scored a job working for a small online gaming startup. This was right at the start of Web 2.0 when companies would hire practically anybody.
I was the Platonic definition of “practically anybody”. I’d dropped out of college two years earlier. I’d managed to teach myself HTML and a little JavaScript. I was working — slowly — on learning how to program.
But the company was small, short-staffed, and cheap. So they threw me into the programming room along with the actual coders.
I was awful. I could barely string together a for loop without screwing it up. I never tested anything. I had no business being there.
And my friend — a degreed computer systems engineer — knew it.
Still, it stung. I was trying my best! Who was he to tell me not to follow my dreams?! I wanted to tell him to go eff himself and storm off.
To my credit, I didn’t do that. I kept my emotions in, nodded lamely, and went back to my desk.
Then I returned home later that night and cried myself to sleep.
