Born and raised in Canada. At 27, I sold everything I had and moved to France to find a job. 25 years, 3 cities and 5 companies later, I'm still loving it and never looked back.
Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
201–210 of 491 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#202Pretent that I suck at everything related to management and sales so that I never had to do all the boring paperwork and meetings that comes in a management / sales position and instead has been able to spend my time on technical stuff. I have never told the boss that I also have a marketing degree from university. Lol. Has worked as a charm for 20+ years now.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#203Moving from permanent to contractor.
I made the jump 5 years ago and have worked for a number of companies since, on 6-12 month contracts. The money has jumped each time, such that I’m on what I consider to be silly money now for the job I do — Ireland, not US.
The work is always interesting for at least 6 months and I learn a ton of new stuff with every contract, much of which I use when building my own products (Downtime between contracts).
Every aspect of contracting is better than being permanent: the ability to jump ship quickly without affecting my hireability, the exposure to so many different technologies and different ways of doing things, the constant freshness of new things and new people, the ideas that come with seeing how different teams create and build different software, the ease with which you can step into new contracts (often one 30 minute interview as opposed to multipel interviews tests and take home projects for perm roles), and of course the money.
In terms of learning, each contract is like spending 3 years in a permie job, and I’ve had 7 in the past 5 years.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#204I did following things that helped me grow, 1. My engineering ended in 2013. I was shit broke. I started doing online courses in 2016. Till now I have done 51 online courses in different things and just a month ago I got moved into a DevOps role (from a WordPress developer role). $0 invested in it. 2. The other best thing is growing my LinkedIn network. I grew my network from 200 people to to 15000 people (most of wh…
Would you mind sharing where you found leads on technology oriented Slack channels? I'm old school, used to hang out on IRC some 15 years ago, but went silent and passive after starting a family. However my boys have grown and I'm looking into getting back into general or topic oriented technology talks and banter, but have no idea where to start looking for like minded people.
If you are interested in a particular technology, googling for "slack for " usually works.
If more interested on cross technical concerns (leadership, regional) I have found the best thing is word of mouth (I know several Colorado slacks, but found them through people I met at meetups). Though again you could try Google.
I have also found that most non project oriented email lists I am on have a link to their slack in the email footer.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#205My best decision was to get a remote job so I never have to come to the office. So now I live on small beach in Thailand instead of living in a big European city.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#206I did following things that helped me grow, 1. My engineering ended in 2013. I was shit broke. I started doing online courses in 2016. Till now I have done 51 online courses in different things and just a month ago I got moved into a DevOps role (from a WordPress developer role). $0 invested in it. 2. The other best thing is growing my LinkedIn network. I grew my network from 200 people to to 15000 people (most of wh…
One thing I learned along the way is to be very honest to yourself and know that "you don't know what you don't know." When I was at University I always felt like I know it all. But the more you explore you learn so much that you don't know.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#207I'm actually unsure if I've ever made any particularly good career decisions aside from switching into computer science. Aside from that I have largely been reliant on the combination of being reasonably competent and the generally high demand for developers to make up for lack of good career decisions. On multiple occasions I have resigned from jobs after 2-3 years with no clear plan for the future, let alone anothe…
Delighted to hear such an accurate description of my own career. I'm not alone.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#208Taking a chance and joining a very large corporation. Previously I was all about startups or small companies and was very much against the mega-corp environment. Over several months a colleague "recruited" me to join their team and I don't regret it. I've been able to climb pretty high within this corp and it has been a wild ride. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd have any sort of influence over techn…
too many startups suffer from wannagetbiggeritis
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't the employer often ask that why you change jobs every year ? Is it fair enough that if one company offers better gig than other so I can negotiate with other to increase gig?
They surprisingly don’t, in my experience.
as long as you complete projects it should be ok.
Re: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
#210In my case, a bunch of different small decisions instead of a single big one.
They look so obvious right now...
Right now, I think that the best decision I'm taking is learning Japanese.