Comment by golergka

ACE of 6. Only child, divorced parents. Family of engineers and scientists, third generation programmer, started with QBasic at 7 in 95. Won some math and programming competitions, changed schools two times, ended up in the best math high school of the country. Played cello, didn't know how to talk to people and have friends until high school. Went to uni for bioinformatics.

Dropped out, went to gamedev, in general spent a lot of 20s in random search. Found a startup at 22 and got funding, it was first failure out of many. Moved countries, married, divorced, went to therapy, moved countries again and again. Played in a band, played as a DJ, tried a lot of things. Sold all of my mined Bitcoin in 2012.

Now I'm a senior developer, and for the last few years I've been working for american startups remotely outside of the US. It pays fairly well, I love my work and colleagues, and I genuinely think that my work is meaningful and improves other people's lives, even if in a small way.

But at the same time, I'm a semi-forced immigrant (can't really call myself a refugee) with questionable legal status, no significant savings, and questionable career prospects. I don't have legal right to work in the US, which is the only job market that matters. I work as contractor for now, but I'm very anxious about availability of US job market for remote-remote developers such as myself, and about what happens to my career as I get into 40s and 50s. I don't feel safe either, and I despite the fact that I'm comfortable, I feel that I could have achieved more.

I beat myself up about a lot of things. I imagine that if I just kept studying math and CS, I would have won a lot of programming competitions, get really good at fundamental CS, got into Google 10-12 years ago (while it was still the place to be at), probably quickly moved to the US, worked on fundamental hard problems, and in general had a much better career than I have now. I'm still a great programmer and have a better job and compensation than about 90% developers of the world (give or take), of course. Or I could have gone into ML. I toyed with different genetic algorithms back around 2010, and with neural networks too — even before AlexNet. I got very serious about ML around 2014, did the first Coursera course, and if I kept at it, I once again could only imagine where it would have got me in these 10 years.

It is very seducing to look at other people's achievements and think that you could have done the same, if only you made the right choices. But then I think about all of the experiences I had instead. I've met so many people and explored so many different things that life has to offer. I've learned A LOT of things that previous "nerd" would have thought impossible. I learned confidence in confrontation, public speaking and romance, and very lucky in the latter. I've learned a lot about business, art, music, journalism, history and a million of other fields. I've grown as a person, I found people that I like and trust. After years of therapy, I had to admit a lot of baggage that I had to take care of — and did it. And I don't think that these people that I envy had to deal with baggage like that.

It's hard to accept things that you're not, and things that you will never become, and it's easy to take for granted the things you have. I'm an anxious person. I always think of the worst and find a way to feel guilty about every failure, possible or imaginary. But now that I know and accept these flaws in my own thinking, every day I make a conscious effort to correct my attitude the other way. And day after day, it slowly gets better.