Amazing little essay. I love his intellectual honesty, and his lucid view of his career path. While he claims to have no takeway, I think one obvious one is tha

Amazing little essay. I love his intellectual honesty, and his lucid view of his career path. While he claims to have no takeway, I think one obvious one is that, barring disaster, you'll eventually end up where you belong no matter what path you take. You'll leave the bad jobs (maybe later than you should) and you'll get positive reinforcement for things you do well. Every time I've had "career envy", I've tried the alternate path only to discover why I'm really where I currently belong. But I'm glad for those alternate paths, as they gave me that reinforcement I needed. Crazy also how similar our path to learning programming was. Looking back, all those hours of fiddling with BASIC in high school, or with Pascal at school really didn't teach us all that much. Like him, my internships mostly taught me meta-lessons rather than actually valuable skills. Like him, in my education I followed the path of least resistance, or rather the path of "most options left to explore since I have no clue what I want to do", and I feel I'm lucky I ended up where I did. Like him, I fell in love with math way late when I finally saw it wasn't about rote application of arbitrary techniques (abstract algebra is what opened my eyes) like we're taught in school. This sentence, buried deep in the essay, is brilliant: "a common failure mode is that you’re given work that’s a bad fit, and then maybe you don’t do a great job because the work is a bad fit. If you ask for something that’s a better fit, that’s refused (why should you be rewarded with doing something you want when you’re not doing good work, instead you should be punished by having to do more of this thing you don’t like), which causes a spiral that ends in the person leaving or getting fired."