Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

It turns out that my colleague had an appetite for money beyond his paycheck as a starting engineer, and was talking to certain third-parties that sold peripherals and such out of Silicon Valley; not massive money by today's standards, but not nothing either. My colleague it turns out was somehow providing inside information to whomever. I was not interested in all this sort of stealing and whatnot, but I showed my 'rebel' flag as a cultural thing at that young age and was viewed with suspicion by the security people for sure.

So the Senior Engineers of the department figured out that there was a serious leak one day, and my clean-cut colleague and I both had access to it. The engineering management literally stormed my office, but I happened to be out. I was called to the main office later and it was serious. I denied involvement (TRUE) but they could see I was not telling them everything. My clean cut colleague .. no idea, but I think he worked there for more than a decade after that, with raises. I was put on a secret black list and didnt last much longer.

I never told on my colleague, and he has a house in Marin now. I am certainly unhappy telling this story. Reflecting on it - that story is probably part of why I chose this nick on YNews.

Sometimes it impressed people that I 'got things done', but that isn't as great of a gain as the inverse is damaging. People could become frustrated about delays if I didn't manage to power through it in time, or they'd be confused and/or concerned that I never thought to communicate events with them.

Part of this, at the fundamental layers of this failure, was a desire for everything to always be alright. I didn't want people to think I was struggling, or to think I encountered issues due to my own faults. That in itself is poor communication, both with myself and other people. I really didn't want to think I was failing, let alone that others thought I was.

Ironically, people tend to like it when you communicate your problems or struggles so they know where you're at and what to expect.

After 15 years I've encouraged countless coworkers to follow this advice – I have a great eye for it now – but of course I still struggle with it.

Communication is a big part of working smart. Don't sacrifice communication and work harder as a result.

In tech it can be hard. It's easy to think everyone else knows what the hell they're doing. The truth is, most of us are winging it at least half the time. Like running simulations until something works, then examining it to be sure it works for the reasons we think it does. That's bizarre. It's fine if you struggle, (almost) everyone gets it.

I changed careers and did a 4-month “boot camp”. All the real learning was after that, the hard way.

My first job, I was left to work on a government project by myself. Everyday was mild panic. My only interaction with my boss was a weekly email saying what percentage of the project was complete. No one ever looked at my work, or cared to look. So I bumped it up a few percentage points every week. I declined a permanent position after the contract was over to spare the embarrassment of the state of the project I was building.

After that, I got hired by a consulting company. Over and over again, my total lack of experience was causing issues with clients, and I was in a daily state of stress and anxiety for 2 years until I was let go.

Finally, I got a job building enterprise software, with a well-defined lifecycle, and got my career on track. Eventually I became team lead. Now I work on the Standards and Framework team, building foundational components, libraries and templates for the other teams.

You will make mistakes. They are valuable to you.

Years passed, experience and nuance decayed the strength of my opinions, and it was fascinating to realize -- even where I was perfectly right, I was mostly only right accidentally, my arguments were just a story to fit the narrative, never really fully internalized.