Hey, just wanted to mention that your path is pretty similar to mine. No college, jumped into gamedev to get out of high school, ended up burning out hard and doing nothing for a solid year after that job. I was playing Heroes of Newerth (a dota clone) all day every day. The game was super buggy, which annoyed me – I knew I could fix the bugs if I was given access to the code. Long story short, managed to get a job there and fixed all the bugs.

My point is, there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. One would not expect that playing dota all day for a year would lead to the next phase of your programming career. But it did, and (acknowledging luck) I firmly believe it was because of that brain reset you mentioned. So I wanted to underscore your words with an example.

Bu your last paragraph is why I’m writing to you. My professional output wasn’t too impressive either. My first manager said “If you were a Carmack, I think we’d know it by now”; I forget how it came up, but I remember how disheartening it felt to hear.

Fast forward to present day, and I’ve done a bunch of stuff I’m proud of (including collaborating with Carmack for a few weeks on AI). The reason I got here was because of the other rehung you said: you love programming, and so did I. (Also Prozac was pretty important, in hindsight.)

So please don’t stress about whether you’re impressive or whether you measure up. You impressed me. You’re good enough to do whatever you want to do. And you’ll find your path if you keep looking.

Ditto for whoever’s reading this wondering if they’ll ever recover from burnout. You will. Don’t worry. It ends.