Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

ie the developer turn usmc pilot. another example is the police officer i met the other day who was previously a developer at ibm for TEN years.

not to be too dark, but seems like we get a limited amount of time here on earth being conscious, so spice it up!

my bias here is that i'm currently craving something different; something totally outside of my current tech gig (recruiter, hello, DMs open ;) and have to courage to jump into the unknown...if only i could figure out how the finances and budget might work.

I was 15 years old back then. I had just learned how to code and my hunger for programming was insatiable. I didn't think much, browsed through relevant classifieds and sent out a couple of honest e-mails stating that I really want to have a job, but I have no real life experience.

A company replied within a few days and they were interested. It was a very small company, consisting of a CTO and CEO. We agreed on 200$ for a portal type of website(it was a thing back then), with user sign-ups, public and private posts, comments and a few more things.

This company was hired by a rather large media company, to develop a dedicated website for them. I knew who was behind it and I was hoping that I would get recognized by the media company.

I dreamed about writing lines of code in my sleep, daydreamed through school and spent all time I could on coding the whole thing.

I think I was done in three months or so, and then came the day I asked to be paid. I had put daily changes on their FTP server, as we agreed, so I had literally no leverage. And they stopped responding. I tried reaching out to them in numerous ways, such as using my mom's cell to call the CEO, but he hung up immediately after realizing it was me who called.

As I realized that I had been scammed, since we did not have any form of written contract and had agreed that I would be paid in cash when the whole thing was done. Therefore I went on the media group's website, found the contact section and somehow managed to stumble upon the personal cellphone of the CEO of the media company. And I called him. I was an emotional teenager, but I spoke the truth. I did not have any demands other than to be heard. After a 10 minute long discussion where I explained that I was ripped off and worked for free for months, the CEO invited me over. I still remember the awe everyone was in, when they realized that a kid had just called them and walked through their front door in a few hours.

That phone call has been the best career decision I have ever made. The media company terminated their contract with the agency that had ripped me off because of terms violation - they were prohibited from outsourcing any development to any third parties, without a written permission given by the customer a.k.a media company.

And so I landed my first job! The people working for this media company were so genuine, mature and supportive, that I did not lose my love for what I did and had been in web development ever since.

It pays off to be brave and righteous in the end.

Care to elaborate? I work with both of them lately, consider me a novice programmer since I rarely write anything complex, but which part of ruby is not ideal for teaching?

I find the ruby syntax much more self-explanatory than python.

An example: recently, I had to use private methods in a python project. I went for the _method() convention, but priv methods don't exist in py.

Any source on that one? I'd love to share this with my friends