I'm sorry you feel so scared. Even if the fears aren't real, they feel real, and our body responds to them as if they were real. So your fears may be irrational, but the pain is very real.<p>I think the first thing worth saying is that, in my experience, this anxiety is more common than you'd think. The common narrative is that a young man (and it's always a man, right?) has only a few short years to make it big before it becomes clear to the world they're worthless. Never mind that zero data backs this up, this is about narrative, and storytelling always trumps data.<p>So you come out of college, you've taken two breaths, got some kind of job, you're 24 and time is running out. Naturally, you begin to question everything you've done up to this point, and feel you have one last ditch to fix it...or else.<p>The thing to understand is that this is not life. This is not how life works. This is a story that is so evidently fictional, that the only thing stopping you from seeing it is sheer panic.<p>You say you're scared for your future in software engineering. I am assuming you see, right now, a future you <i>want</i> in software engineering? (Because maybe you don't actually want it, just feel it's 'the path' to somewhere?)
Because if you do want to be in software engineering, school is not the fix. Learning and doing is the fix. (I am massively formally educated in CS. And I still stand by everything I just said.)<p>Life is long - especially from where you're standing now. You've just started. You're not doomed. If you lose your job, then you'll have lost your job. You may be out of a job for a while, and then you find another job. And then you leave that one, because you got a better one. You may get an opportunity to relocate and seize that. You may meet someone and decide it's a good idea to move halfway around the world. All along, you're picking up skills and know how. If you're even just a bit methodic about building up your skills, you'll find that jus five years down the line, you already know some actually useful stuff.<p>It's just the way it goes.