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Hot take: success is almost always accompanied by a healthy dose of survivor bias. For each of these success stories, there are a lot of good people who did the exact same thing, but it didn't pan out because of timing, location, or other similar factors.

It's very fashionable for successful people to tell the story how they "failed" or got "rejected" but with enough persistence they found success. There is something to be learned from that but you never hear the stories of people who do the exactly the same thing but never succeed and keep getting rejected. There is a lot of survivorship bias in this.

How I Failed and Am Still Failing to This Very Day

> I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories.

It helps that, it's pretty silly to claim that someone like Kyle Simpson "doesn't know Javascript" (when the title of his series is literally "You Don't Know JS").

I don't think it hurts his brand any to be open about his rejections.

success is pretty tangential to being good at coding, at any large company. As long as you're good enough to get by.