I think good writing is more about the higher level: effectively communicating a point. Mechanical components, such as grammar, are important but don't help express ideas.
As a tangent, I think a lot of the soft influence you mention requires effective communication, not effective writing. In my experience, it's important to understand the context and information that others are working under/with, and to make sure that relevant information makes its way to people who need it.
> How much does the environment you're in contribute to performance?
As an oversimplified answer, a lot.
I think this is actually a complex question, cause there's a lot of dimensions to go in. Even in your story, it seems like your environment is influencing in many different ways. I'm gonna point out some things that stuck out to me (sorry if any of this is obvious/long-winded/not what you're looking for...).
Company A sounds mid to large sized, and it sounds like they hire a decent amount of college grads. Their size encourages them to have a reliable/smooth/consistent hiring and onboarding process. I would guess that there's a decent amount of tutorial/guide resources (e.g. code labs), as well as various system and process documentation. There's probably more support/guidance, and more senior team members have likely done their fair share of onboarding (so they're presumably better, more friendly, and more tolerant about it). As a result of all this, the learning curve probably feels a lot smoother and less steep.
Company B, as you mentioned, is likely expecting more significant contribution from the jump. A startup is probably not optimizing/focusing on training. But it's not just that--startups likely task people with larger and more vaguely defined tasks. Having prior, relevant experience to draw on is likely very helpful here, as it helps with defining and dealing with these more complex tasks. The learning curve is steeper and progressing along it feels much more unstructured and confusing. (If this is interesting, look into kind vs. wicked learning environments.)
Note that this has largely just been rough job expectations and approach to onboarding/training. There's still the whole people/social front.
It sounds like the experience with people at company B was unpleasant. To be charitable, maybe they were stressed, tired, low on patience, etc. Regardless, it seems like there was pressure to perform and not to fail. As I understand it, this kind of situation tends to make people perform worse (because they're stressed/tense/not able to focus as much on the task at hand). It's also not as conducive to learning since that requires some space to screw up.
I don't have much to go on for company C, but it sounds more collaborative/cooperative. I'm guessing that if/when you did propose a bad option for a design, your coworkers at least heard you out and justified why they thought it wouldn't work. They might also have recognized that you were making an effort to contribute and that, as a new hire, you were missing important information/context for making a decision.
So far this has mostly been one-sided: how your environment is likely to influence you. But you're still an actor here--someone's performance in an environment also depends on how they react to the environment! One person might prefer ambiguous tasks while another person prefers a clear set of instructions. Maybe one person handles stress really well while another feels like it's crushing them. Being able to recognize elements of your environment often makes it much easier to navigate, kind of like being at home vs. visiting somewhere foreign.
Anyways I've written a lot so I'll just leave it there. I hope it was interesting and not too much of a wall of text!
Yeah, I wasn't sure how I wanted to deal with duplicates so I mostly ignored them. I track letter positions directly (just a bunch of tuples), but don't actually do anything with this other than restricting candidates words.
I think if I work on this some more I'd try to factor in letter positioning when deciding what to guess. My hunch is that it won't make too much of a difference though.
In high school, my friend and I realized you could program TI-84 graphing calculators. We made really simple games (guess a number from 1-100, hangman, etc.). I didn't even realize I was programming at the time.
I was also influenced by my dad (he was a software engineer, so I wanted to try it too). First formal education was an AP computer science course in 12th grade.
I was into math/puzzles/logical stuff at that time, so a lot of the initial concepts that you have to learn were both easier for me to pick up and more interesting (compared against someone who knows what they want to build, but views the intermediate knowledge/skills as something they have to slog through).
> What is your experience with university?
MIT, CS degree. Both the degree and the brand name helped with finding work.
In practice, it's hard for me to identify explicit things I learned during school that have also been applicable and useful at work. I suspect that the most useful learnings weren't part of any syllabus (e.g. fluency with a language).
> How did you get your first paid work?
Internship, through which I received a full-time offer.
> What do you do now and what do you love/hate about your job?
Currently funemployed, but previously an engineering manager.
The fun part is when the team's work comes together and produces a result.
The not fun part is when my line of thinking doesn't line up with someone else's. It is sometimes (often?) frustrating for me to debug why our approaches differ, then figure out how to make progress from there.
As a tangent, I think a lot of the soft influence you mention requires effective communication, not effective writing. In my experience, it's important to understand the context and information that others are working under/with, and to make sure that relevant information makes its way to people who need it.