[throwaway-blue2]

Similar to another comment - it sounds like you’ve made good money, you’ve landed tech jobs several times, and you’ve got good feedback from your peers - that is successful, you should take some time to take pride in what you have achieved so far.

I think there’s 2 things for you to think about. Firstly, comparing yourself to everyone else you will always find people who have done better in some area than you, that’s no failure on your part, that is the reality that every person exists in. It’s hard sometimes to appreciate yourself, I certainly have bouts of this.

Secondly, when you’re working in an organisation, you’re not solely responsible for making some project succeed, shipping some feature or whatever it is. If there are processes making progress very difficult, that’s not your fault. It’s easy to internally create all this pressure on yourself to meet your own standards, but sometimes you’re thrown into a situation where external factors out of your control prevent you from meeting what you yourself deem acceptable performance - that’s not on you. You can raise the issues that are blocking you, you can suggest ideas for improvements, but in a company, most of the time you cannot fix these things alone. I have found that my stress increases when I don’t understand what it is that is preventing me from performing, and when I put it all on myself to fix. Identifying the issues and absolving myself of the responsibility to fix all of them have been the best things I’ve done for my work stress levels.