1000% to all of this, but especially this: > I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hol

1000% to all of this, but especially this: > I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position. I've been at a few tech companies now, and what I've consistently found is that people far above me tend to respect my opinion and listen to me, while often times, people at my level or just above it resent me for having the audacity to know things, and to figure things out from first principles, and to demonstrate this ability quite publicly in incidents and the like. I think part of it is an unwillingness to be wrong, which is idiotic. I will frequently state a hypothesis, my basis and assumptions for it, and then test it. I'm sometimes wrong. This is not something to be ashamed of at all, but people seem to treat being publicly wrong as the worst imaginable outcome. So you were wrong - great, now you have more information. Continue, folding this new data into your next hypothesis.