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Comment on I’m 22 and I’ve failed

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This is not a failure. This is just someone seeing a small slice of their life and having some disappointment.

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.

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