Comment by austincheney

When I was 24 I was a broke college kid who couldn't get a real job and just had his first child. Then the invasion of Iraq happened and I was deployed to Kuwait. About 50 of us came over together and they basically separated the smart people from the rest of us. The smart people were given engineering or analytics positions. I was put on operations which was considered a dumb person's job.

Some context is in order. This unit was/is the 2-star command that runs communications for CENTCOM. We were supporting a network of around 270,000 users at that time due to the surge into Iraq in 2004 and the stand up of the transitional government. That is about the size of Bank of America, the entire company with all its branch locations and total employees. I was the night tech lead of operations of communications over all of it. That was my first time in management as a young staff sergeant. This was an incredible eye-opener for me, but its not a mark of success. I didn't get paid more because of the severity of my decisions or the size of the organization.

Now I'm just some software developer at a big corporate company assigned to a team that struggles to get copy/paste right. When I want to work on software that's vaguely interesting I contribute to open source.

My reflection from all of this is that people often evaluate themselves, and their perspectives of success, using faulty metrics. If you were a fresh 2 week hire on Instagram before they were gobbled up by Facebook are you suddenly a successful software genius due to a magical windfall? In my world as a front-end developer people often consider themselves experts and pat themselves on the back for stringing a few statements together like magic glue over a monster framework that they don't really need but does all the work for them. I don't really consider that a mark of success either and am often a social pariah as a result. If you really, I mean this seriously, really wanted to be rich and financially super successful then why are you spending your time writing software?

For me, personally, I measure success in the problems I solve that other people find value in, which is a large motivation for my contributions to open source. It isn't a number that comes with bragging rights or some form of vanity. Instead, its just something to do or take pride in.