I’m self-taught but I feel the same way after a decade of working for various startups. What’s disheartening is that all the code I wrote over the years is like

I’m self-taught but I feel the same way after a decade of working for various startups. What’s disheartening is that all the code I wrote over the years is likely no longer running or cordoned off in some “legacy” codebase, slated for eventual removal. All those agonizing decisions that I had to make over performance, code style, and library choices were ultimately for nothing (other than a paycheck). I suppose many professional jobs are like this though.