You see someone you admire wear them, so you want them because they become a part of an aesthetic / community that you admire and want to associate with. Then from there you might get drawn in to rarer, more expensive versions to signal a higher standing in that community.
We all do it. We’ve all bought in to something because someone we admire has it / does it, without evaluating from first principles.
Well the good news is the most obvious problem you don’t need a degree to solve: self-judgement. You did not perform to a standard you were happy with, ambitious people rarely do, but don’t beat yourself up about it. If your internal narrative readily uses terms like “pathetic” then any time you underperform you’ll feel very bad, and you’ll wonder if failure is another datapoint describing some fundamental flaw. It’s not. Thinking in this way makes you far less robust. To make progress and be happy you have to be happy and proud of yourself now, of the things you’ve already done.
You’re clearly a very impressive person. You took a negative path, turned it around and got a great job. They don’t hand those out. Everyone feels overwhelmed by challenging roles - I’d recommend doing more work to understand if your feeling of being out of your depth is shared or typical among your colleagues before deciding that you need to back out and seek more education. You have a chip on your shoulder about not succeeding in your CS program and so your narrative will easily point to that for your feelings of overwhelm, but it’s much more likely that you’re just in a challenging job, and if you could get the job with the degree you got, then if you keep working and learning in 12 months you’re going to be feeling a lot better and very accomplished.
You should be impressed with yourself. I am. Don’t back down.
I used to work in executive training and have worked with many CEOs of large orgs - to get to the top, for the most part, you have to be incredibly empathetic.
You also have to be incredibly outcome-oriented. You need to prioritize a range of objectives against a mountain of constraints. Sometimes that means deprioritizing parts of a product or company mission to further the longterm success of the business, using the information you have. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. Sometimes that also means deprioritizing people. This is why every leader will always be able to be portrayed as a sociopath.
The actual sociopaths are one or two levels beneath - those that are jockeying for good standing by pushing themselves up and others down. They rarely make it to the top and if they do, aren’t there for long.
In my experience, those who do not see this tend to hold different levels of either empathy or outcome-orientation.
We all do it. We’ve all bought in to something because someone we admire has it / does it, without evaluating from first principles.