I have had the tremendous chance of working with incredible programmers through the ages. I will not name them all, but suffice to say that:
- Rami taught me what IDispatch, IUnknown and multiple inheritance were all about;
- Jakob taught me how to find my way in half a million lines of C++ code;
- Damián taught me how to speed up SQL transactions from VBScript;
- Finally, the most important: I learnt from Adam that I was not as bad a developer as I thought I was; and that was a boost to my confidence that stayed to this day.
The names above are not ficticious. They will recognise themselves, hopefully.
I also had the tremendous chance of working with state-of-the-art assholes, who also taught me a lot. I will not name them; they are not worth our time.
What is important is learning to separate the wheat from the chaff; recognise, at every moment of your path through this industry, who is there to help you and who is there to fuck your career up.