I was initially thinking about the classic nature/nurture tradeoff based on your title, but by the end of your story, I see you're speaking to something far more important: the value of failure.
The short answer is: Yes, everyone falls. And then you get to learn how to pick yourself up.
Sorry to say, but your story is more mundane than you're making it sound. Everybody falls. You got to see firsthand how a low-support environment and an overly-emotional "leader" can completely fail to capture value from a provably skilled and valuable employee. And then, right after, you got to see the value of trusting your instincts, having good relationships, being on a team where you feel psychologically safe and feel like you truly belong.
Yes, you were a little bit lucky — specifically, your luck was that you got a good job immediately, whereas plenty of people (including folks more senior than you) sometimes get hit by bad luck in the job search process. But you would've found a good job sooner or later, so I wouldn't chalk up too much to luck.
Overall, you got to do some growing up, and it will serve you incredibly well in the long run.
Consider: How differently will you approach the next engineer you mentor? How differently will you deal with stakeholders now? How differently do you feel about the importance of onboarding, of second chances, of objective performance-review processes?
Every misstep has a dozen lessons we can extract. I'm impressed by how quickly you picked yourself back up. I hope you set aside some time to reflect and extract all the valuable lessons, too.
In all honesty, I was primarily echoing OP's bit where they said, "I'm just using my gut and it's going swimmingly."
More broadly, this kind of thing often makes me think of the idea of "self-reliance" [1]. In other words, the accumulation of career experience parallels the gradual process of learning to trust yourself and your (ever more finely honed) instincts more and more.
Comments
I was initially thinking about the classic nature/nurture tradeoff based on your title, but by the end of your story, I see you're speaking to something far more important: the value of failure.
The short answer is: Yes, everyone falls. And then you get to learn how to pick yourself up.
Sorry to say, but your story is more mundane than you're making it sound. Everybody falls. You got to see firsthand how a low-support environment and an overly-emotional "leader" can completely fail to capture value from a provably skilled and valuable employee. And then, right after, you got to see the value of trusting your instincts, having good relationships, being on a team where you feel psychologically safe and feel like you truly belong.
Yes, you were a little bit lucky — specifically, your luck was that you got a good job immediately, whereas plenty of people (including folks more senior than you) sometimes get hit by bad luck in the job search process. But you would've found a good job sooner or later, so I wouldn't chalk up too much to luck.
Overall, you got to do some growing up, and it will serve you incredibly well in the long run.
Consider: How differently will you approach the next engineer you mentor? How differently will you deal with stakeholders now? How differently do you feel about the importance of onboarding, of second chances, of objective performance-review processes?
Every misstep has a dozen lessons we can extract. I'm impressed by how quickly you picked yourself back up. I hope you set aside some time to reflect and extract all the valuable lessons, too.
Thanks for these valuable insights, please can you elaborate on the "trusting your instincts" in this context?
In all honesty, I was primarily echoing OP's bit where they said, "I'm just using my gut and it's going swimmingly."
More broadly, this kind of thing often makes me think of the idea of "self-reliance" [1]. In other words, the accumulation of career experience parallels the gradual process of learning to trust yourself and your (ever more finely honed) instincts more and more.
[1]: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/aut...