A personal reflection on survivorship bias in tech careers, using the WWII airplane bullet hole story as a framework. The author, who broke into tech without formal education, warns against treating their unconventional path as a replicable blueprint. Success stories represent only the planes that returned — countless others with similar approaches didn't make it. Rather than copying someone's exact path, the advice is to extract underlying repeatable principles: how they demonstrated value, what skills they built, and what systems they used — not the unrepeatable specifics of their story.
Sort: