[BrS96bVxXBLzf5B]

I could have been a talented C++ developer. Hell, I _am_ a good C++ developer. I should be, I've been doing it for a decade. Across a range of projects, from hardware to web backends to games and art.

But aside from a brief 3 years as a C developer (embedded hardware product) I've never been close to being one. Because when I was coming out of university seven years ago with a good CV and projects I could competently talk about, and I _could_ do the whiteboard segments, somehow I ... couldn't do them the way they wanted? And they, the very sparsely spread places with listings at the time, were offering no money for a new grad to somehow make their way across the country to interview, only to be offered a low salary (the C job I got was at the risk of a £180 train ticket three weeks before I would have had nowhere to live).

Now? I maintain a fleet of Wordpress sites for a digital agency for a modest £40k a year as the company's sole "someone who knows anything about Linux" person. Because my coworkers are lovely, my boss doesn't stress about anything and lets us flex our time and the clients are nice. Money is tight and definitely less than my skillset but going through the hoops of the "clever" side of the industry to be well paid and well stressed sounds daunting. There was no nurture for anyone not conforming to a very specific template which shows its face on the ranty side of Twitter.