Ask HN: I'm confused by my success given how horrible a student I was in college

My goal was to be happy and I've also been wildly successful. I code a few hours a day on fun projects.

The first semester of college I was on a National Merit scholarship. After that, I like to say I was on the Dean's "other list". :-) I was kicked out of college (electrical engineering) - twice.

I'm smart but not super smart. I do think my brain works differently that most. It comes up with the non-obvious answers first. Example: I was in the hospital and the nurse said: "I'm going to change your [wound] dressing." I immediately answered with the first thing that popped into my head: "Lets go with the raspberry vinaigrette this time."

Does anyone else struggle with the guilt of their poor academic past shadowing their current success and improvement? If so, what do you think changed in your perspective / approach to self study?

I don't feel guilty at all. I got where I am a different way and I never thought about college after I graduated.

Because college isn't the real world. That's the simplest explanation.

I was thinking this today. In college/school, you can score an A+. It is even possible to do it for everything. Accomplishment is so easy to measure.

In the real world, there is no A+. Not even being Bezos, founding Stripe, or playing center forward for Real Madrid. The A+ concept doesn't exist.

This has always resonated with me and it's a big reason I think people who are "good" at school stay in academia. It's a consistent and reliably good measure of "I'm good at this thing" however damaging to society it is for those people to never do more than climb ladders...

Why do you feel guilty? You need to explore that feeling if you want to rid yourself of it, and you should rid yourself of it. You can't change the past.

I do identify with that feeling, however. I was never a great student.

Before university I had poor grades and only took standard level courses. I frequently didn't even complete assignments. I spent most of my time being a computer nerd. I was accepted into a great university solely due to my "impressive" extracurricular experience: running computer nerd clubs at school, programming for fun, tech internships.

In university I had little trouble doing well in CS courses. In the beginning, they were easy to pass without even trying. In the later years, the CS courses were hard, but I enjoyed them. They actually gave us a considerable amount of freedom to direct our own study.

My non-CS courses were a different matter - I nearly failed two my first semester. It was harder to coast at uni, so it forced me to become a decent student. I graduated with a 3.5, which was much better than I ever could have imagined.

But really, the important takeaway is that I hate school in general and I always will. I have known this innately since I was a child, forced to sit in a chair indoors when I wanted to be outside in the woods. I love learning, but I don't like being told what I should learn, and what I should do, and especially what hoops somebody else wants me to jump through. I don't care if I am failing/succeeding to measure up to anything but my own criteria. That is my true personality, and I think I am fine to be that way, so I don't feel guilty, or harbor regrets about my past school performance. It took me some years to accept myself in this way, and I hope you will be able to as well eventually.

Thanks for sharing your story and thoughts. For me, a lot of it is wishing I didn't have to "catch up" with certain mathematical or statistical concepts I now run into with side projects and find super interesting.

I'll definitely heed your advice and work on getting past my prior failures.

Undergrad GPA lower than yours. Also wildly successful.

There is a strong correlation between academic rigor and success, but there will always be outliers like us.

Natural talent, social skills, blind luck, network, etc. are all important factors in determining success.

No reason to feel guilty, but also realize people could read this post as a humble-brag.

“I worked a lot less hard than you, but I’m more successful” is not a statement a lot of people will take well.

Thanks for your comment, I feel like I should've edited the post to include that I don't mean in anyway to brag. College in a lot of ways was a very painful and turbulent time for me.

Granted, I'm still horrible at FAANG style coding interviews and had a period of 4-months being out of work after leaving Amazon. Not looking for pity, just adding context :)

Sup, same boat. Terrible at college and "successful".

The worst feeling was hanging with peers that you felt they were way beyond your skills and seeing how everything was "natural" to them.

Yesterday it was the fifth anniversary of my college graduation. One of my frequent dreams is that I didn't graduate because I failed a course. Strange, since college was not even that demanding for me; one of my best friends was brilliant and he let me piggyback the hardest projects.

The main difference I see between people like us and other highly accomplished academic developers is that we deliver (since we are highly pragmatic) and we are enjoyable to work with (our guilt overcompensates with empathy).

Yet, I had studied 10x more in the last 5 years (post-graduation) than in college. My mind matured significantly, and luckily it had developed a sense of natural curiosity for computer science, programming, design, finance, etc.

> The worst feeling was hanging with peers that you felt they were way beyond your skills and seeing how everything was "natural" to them.

This is what is most painful for me. In high school I was hailed by my friends as "highly adept at science" and we got into all kinds of crazy - albeit somewhat educational mischief. For context, this group of friends came together after we all competed and placed in the first division of the Intel ISEF engineering competition. I was one of the only people in the group who didn't go to Stanford, MIT, get a full ride to U Chicago or go on to become a neuro-surgeon (I'm completely serious, one of these friends completed pre-med in two years and med school in 4).

Maybe my friends were astronomically more intelligent than me and I've picked a bad point of comparison. But the most painful thing to watch in college was others seemingly effortlessly pick up complex math and CS intuition while I struggled and even with help, at times failed miserably.

Though, to your point. Surprisingly with a few years post-college under my belt - my mind has sharpened and become more focused and driven than I ever could have imagined being in college. If anything, something I understand now is that it's futile to try to anticipate what I'll be doing or what kind of person I'll be farther into the future than 2-3 years at most.

Thanks again for sharing.

Well, I guess there are a variety of reasons for that. I mean, maybe you just didn't... gel with those particular courses or professors responsible for teaching your computer science at that particular university.

That wouldn't necessarily mean you were bad at the subject. Just that you didn't learn well in that particular environment.

Alternatively, if you've got ADD and find it hard to maintain focus, maybe you just didn't care to work as hard in college as you then did in the internships and roles you took on afterwards. We've all had companies and organisations where we've been good/bad culture fits (like Amazon as mentioned in your post). Perhaps your college/classes were a poor fit as well.

Alternatively, it could simply be an age or maturity thing. I'm sure many people here would do much better at school or university if they returned today, simply because they'd take it a bit more seriously and have more years of experience under their belt.

Your career performance is not only depending on you, but also on the overall job market demand. For example, absolutely brilliant physics PhD are struggling to get jobs in their fields, while mediocre developers are making six figures out of college. So, it's likely that you're just average, but lucked into an very hot job market. Congratulate yourself on a smart career choice :)

Thanks for your thoughts on the matter. To be clear, on a good day I consider myself average with a wildly varied set of interests. Oddly, knowing elixir (as much hate as it gets here on HN) has landed me one or two positions alone.

Conversely, I know people who were wildly “successful” in college/university and struggle to find financial success. Heck, I was one of them for nearly a decade post-university.

In hindsight, what do you think lead you astray? Curious if you took an academic route, associating more education with greater skill or just focused on the "wrong" thing?

I had to get the first job I could, had no time for internships nor networking, and had no role models or guidance on how to succeed financially. Lack of a support system made any kind of time investment very hard financially as bills and hungry mouths don’t like to wait. Had I less financial responsibilities, I could have taken a lower paying but higher potential job.

The longer version: had a kid at 15. Lived in the middle of nowhere (which I love[d]) and finding ways to earn money was hard. Grew up poor. I graduated high school towards the top academically and got a full tuition scholarship to a university. My girlfriend and shortly thereafter wife (we got married shortly after high school and moved into our own place in town) had to graduate high school a year late. She did most of the supporting of our young family waitressing while I did some student work at the university. One gig was working PHP with a buddy making about minimum wage at night. Eventually got a BS in business admin with a minor in CS. Worked in insurance first because it hired immediately. I had looked into tech, but at the time, pay was not very good and required moving to a population center. Turned out with insurance, I could not earn enough fast enough (it takes time to build a book of business) so I started at a potentially higher paying role in financial services and washed out. Did odd construction work as I got a teaching credential. The pay still sucked. We were not even scraping by: every month we even further negative in our bank account. The only things that helped were the occasional website or utility I built for someone and the hope that after several years of teaching that our base salary would finally exceed our meager living. Got cut from my district during the layoffs. Toss in a couple more kids along the way. I put out two resumes: one for teaching and one for programming based on the work I did as a student and the few websites and utilities I made. A recruiter reached out and I got some tech interviews. Landed a sweet start up gig at nearly 2x what I was making as a teacher. This was the first time ever that we could start really saving, but the majority was going to paying off debts. The commute was about 40 minutes, the same as when I taught. Then the office moved further. Then again. Then again. The commute was 2.5 hours one way at that point. Then I went fully remote. Nearly a decade later and Im still with that same company. I out-earn what I ever could have as a teacher, principal, or super intendant. I’ve grown with the company from a couple dozen folks through hundreds of hires, an eventual IPO, through acquisition of a couple smaller companies and through being acquired. I am now a principal engineer and team lead for our part of a multi-thousand person, global company. I’ve enjoyed nearly everyday of work since being hired and wouldn’t have it any other way.

A rough start. But opportunity met preparation and we were lucky.