I'm missing something here: you started out as a financial/management consultant, not a rails programmer right? So why on earth would you be worried about your

I'm missing something here: you started out as a financial/management consultant, not a rails programmer right? So why on earth would you be worried about your reputation and hangups from one industry when moving to a completely new one? I doubt if any programmer will know or care about your stint at Lehman Brothers (or whatever), because they won't know about the whole two-year bullshit. I kind of hope you're leaving stuff out in this story. What kind of background did you come from that you were hired straight out of school into a "famous" consulting firm? You describe yourself as being brilliant and talented and always top of class, but you don't seem to handle failure... at all. I don't mean it as an insult, but it's something you'll want to work on, because you will fail in the future, and you don't want to spent three years recovering from every misstep.