I’m 22 and I’ve failed

I work with people similar so my advice (take it with a grain of salt) is (if you can’t go back to get your degree or get into a bootcamp) is to just start building something. Go work at an early stage start up which is absolutely desperate for some hands. Write articles, blogs, cultivate a personal brand. And be nice to yourself: you’re still incredibly young. There’s so much time you have left to choose your destiny.

I have a different but parallel story - in college, I got a degree in fine arts. I studied philosophy. And I worked in the computer labs to keep a small skill set in tech. And it worked out just great - after college, I started working full-time in tech. At 22, I was not a hugely successful software engineer. Quite the contrary, I could not code a single line. I was doing deskside support at a hospital. This was not a failure, it was a beginning.

Because at 49, I've been a software engineer for over 20 years, done startups and large company work, mostly successfully. There have been more successful years in the software world than the number of years I had even been alive at 22.

22 is a starting point, not a missed goal. No matter where you are at 22, most of your adult life is ahead of you.

The glorification of 400k packages right after graduation, of founders becoming paper billionaires before they have their first gray hair, the lack of representation of various software dev career paths... All this (and more) is giving an unrealistic and fake vision of what we do and become as software engineers.

Many of us here like to look down on what social media does to the life of teenagers, creating insecurities and disturbing development, but we’re doing the same exact thing in our industry.

The last sentence in the post gives a glimpse of hope, but the general tone resonates with something I’ve heard too many times around me. Life is short, yes, YOLO if you want, but no, not being a top software dev at 22 is not “having failed”.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLt_yDvdeLQ&ab_channel=TEDxT...

You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way.

You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy - figure out the framework du jour, learn it, get paid to build stuff with it. You'll probably be able to keep up for about another fifteen years before you realize you have no idea what the hell this new thing is that all the 22 year olds are clamoring about that runs entirely contrary to every good habit you've ever learned. (Say, separation of code and presentation - I'm looking at you, JSX. )

But you can do a lot in fifteen years. My advice is to have something else after you age out of tech, though, which you're nowhere near doing yet. Me, I'm a writer and musician, and though neither pay as well as they used to, it's still something to do other than my part time Node coding day job.

You got this, man. Sky's the limit. Just be smart about your choices, because that time moves much faster than you would ever believe. Nobody believes that until it happens to them, but nonetheless, it's true. Make the most of these days.

And for God's sake, don't spend all of your best physical years sitting behind a laptop. There are hot singles in your area, my dude. Go find some. Life is too short and this industry does not love you the way you think it will. Find a person to do that instead.