When I was in school I remember reading an article titled "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years"[0], and at the time I found it pretty funny. I was learning to write Java at a rate I'd never picked up anything else before, how could it possibly take 10 years to call yourself a programmer?
Nowadays, I've just about hit that 10 year mark and I feel like I have nothing to show for it. Some nights I lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering if I've wasted my time learning something as vapid and meaningless as computer science. Time on this earth is so unbelievably valuable, throwing away even a minute of it makes you the envy of the dead. It's been a decade and I still feel funny calling myself a programmer.
What people compensate you for is wasted time. All those nights you decided to fiddle with NGINX instead of drinking with friends, the times you pushed away a loved one or a partner just to polish a commit before you pushed it, the years you wasted talking with people who will never see eye-to-eye with you but demand an argument nevertheless; as I get older and time starts slipping through my fingers like sand, I don't know if any amount of money could fill that void. The only thing I'm left with is a sort of unfulfilled sadness that makes me wish I spent more time with people, or cultivating my social garden, as it were. Instead I find myself past the point of no return on this track though, damned to walk the same path everyone before me did, and then some.
Not everyone can be an SWE because most people have self-respect.