I was 17 when I failed school for the very first time.

I was in the 11th grade and if I’d continued at that school, I’d have failed in 12th, which is a whole lot worse, apparently.

I was studying at the Oxford Senior Secondary School (CBSE), and I’d done poorly on all my subjects that year. Primarily, Biotechnology, which was promised to be the “great big thing” that decade. I scoff at that now, and I hated the subject and the teacher.

All my teachers hated me, and I suppose a large part of that had to do with being a neurodivergent kid, but I will not claim I was a “nice kid”. I was an ass, and my attitude showed.

I failed that year, and my father took me out of that school and put me in the state-board branch, the Oxford PU College, affiliated to the Karnataka State Pre-University Board. I also got into some tuitions, and did fairly better. I didn’t do too well in the 12th grade, mostly because I got cocky and thought I had it in the bag.

I, in fact, didn’t have anything in the bag.

I got into Engineering, studying a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering because my scores were so absymal in the exams that I couldn’t get Computer Science like I wanted. I was already neck-deep in computers. I was studying C and C++, I was already using Linux as a daily driver because my old Pentium 4 CPU couldn’t handle anything more than Windows XP.

I did decent at Engineering, managing to top my class from time to time. I was almost always within the top 3. I didn’t fail any subjects, but I didn’t realize life had other plans for me.

After my Engineering, I failed to get a job, repeatedly. I joined the Indian Institute of Science, where after a gruelling 6 months, I left after my professor yelled at me for being too slow. I blamed him (only internally) for not guiding me whatsoever. I remember him saying he wanted me to login to a remote computer to run some simulations. I didn’t know what he meant, and even though someone showed me the ssh command, I didn’t know what he meant.

I feel the irony from typing this in neovim, to tell you the truth.

I left IISc and spent about 5 to 6 months without job. A cousin got me a temp role at Harita Fehrer Ltd, where I joined as a Quality Engineer (Temp), and was paid in cash with all the wage workers. I was just happy to get paid.

I worked my way up, “failing” sometimes, and “succeeding” other times.

I consider moving from factory roles to a role as a content writer my biggest success. Working at Flipkart where I was being paid triple what I was paid at my first factory role, and then picking up Python to help the content team is still my biggest win.

I worked my way up, and I think that sometimes I didn’t always do my best, but I showed up, repeatedly. I wasn’t the smartest developer you could hire, but I loved the craft and strove to build user-centric tools and libraries. I was always sympathetic towards users because I have been befuddled by tools and libraries that take this world for granted. I still facepalm when I come across a github repo that has a couple thousand stars and doesn’t have an elevator pitch in the very first paragraph, or screenshots of what the UI looks like and does.

So what am I writing about here?

I joined a company (Let’s call them Company C) in 2025, and stayed there only a month. I didn’t feel like a good fit, and I left of my own accord. I don’t know what it was that made me feel everything in my gut tell me that it was a bad fit, but I wanted to ponder about my time there and talk about how I feel about failure.

Failure is a strange thing. I say this as someone who took months to learn to swim and still doesn’t consider himself comfortable in the water.

I don’t feel like my time at Company C was a success. If anything, I feel like I fell flat on my face. I remember wondering within my first two days there if I was out of my depths. That still feels a little true, mostly because I came with a ton of burnout at my previous job, but I also felt like I was watching a process fail entirely.

I wondered a lot about this during my time at the job and since leaving it. I’m not fully convinced about my thoughts, and I wanted to write this out in a post so that I could share it with some friends.

Failing at a job is different from failing in school. It’s not like there were scores to measure. At school, my teachers were clear. I failed. It took me years of thought to wonder why they never questioned if they, too, failed at teaching me. At this job, I didn’t fail. I wasn’t a fit, and the interview process failed. If anything, I didn’t bother to question if this was a company I wanted to be at, and they didn’t question if I was someone they wanted to be at their company.

There are still flaws to this thought process. I don’t feel bad after quitting within a month. I am in no rush to go back to a job, and I want to take some time to rejuvenate and address my burnout.

I know that some of my friends won’t understand this approach, so I’m not going to explain myself to them. This is mostly a record to myself so that I remember what I felt when I quit Company C.

I quit because I didn’t enjoy a culture of zero empathy for your colleagues and users. This is a hard problem to solve and comes from hiring “hotshot developers”. I used to be one myself, but I’ve since realized that I don’t want to be one. I didn’t enjoy the culture of working till 0400 every night, and the unsaid expectation that if you weren’t churning out AI-powered code, you were not productive. I have always thought the lines of code are a poor metric to optimize against, but I really don’t want to compete in an environment where it feels like my team is against me, not with me.

And, I’ve written this before, but I’ll repost this on my new blog just so that it’s more accessible, I wish people would build units and not teams. It’s sad that Company C wasn’t focussed on that. They had a hot product that they could realistically reach for the moon with, but they are faltering to get up to speed just because they’re not functioning together. They’re trying to 1Up each other, and this shows in their code.

I feel disappointed if nothing else, that I couldn’t sniff that out. I left after seeing that the company didn’t offer me at least two of three things. I only got money, no semblance of good people or work. I didn’t belong, and neither did they.