Thanks for sharing. Yeah, this is the second half of the story that I deliberately excluded. My story mirrors much of your own, actually. Once I felt my skills were up to par, I sought companionship with like minded folks. Not because I wanted to learn from them necessarily, but just because I wanted to be around people like myself (whom I couldn't seem to find locally for the life of me, despite attending a university with one of the most prestigious cs programs in the world). So I packed up my life in the dreary midwest and now work for a startup in sunny Los Angeles with great people. Just barely avoided the burnout phase and couldn't be happier.