Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

Very true, but the company culture also needs to be right in order for this to really take hold. There's also the fact that the work and schedule will likely be more demanding. This can be a positive if you enjoy the work, but a big problem if you dislike unpredictable hours. When the company's primary revenue source is software, you will have to work extended hours at some point or another to solve critical business issues.

I'm a hater of the sentence "use the right tool for the job". Nowadays, any language can do pretty much anything you want to do with it (except if the language has recently been created and is still in the early stages, e.g.: Elm?).

So then IMO these days what you have to do to choose your programming language is not ask what you're going to do, but know what you want to avoid.

So I use this rule of thumb:

    Do I want to avoid paying licenses (or resorting to piracy if I'm in the early days of a startup and I don't want to spend money), then I choose a language and a set of tools which have open source implementations (compiler and class libraries) (i.e.: C++11 vs MS Managed C++)
    Do I want to avoid chasing memory leaks for the rest of my life? Yes, therefore I use a language which has garbage collection (i.e. Java vs C).
    Do I want to avoid painful evolution of my project, especially when it's getting larger (wrt easy refactoring and maintainability)? Then I use a statically typed language instead of a dynamically typed one (i.e. TypeScript vs JavaScript).
    Do I want to avoid recent headaches I've had with other software projects in which concurrency was very hard (read: race conditions), then I choose a functional language (to achieve immutability, avoid side-effects, etc.) (i.e: F# vs C#).

But, did you guess it? The questions above are the most important ones you should ask yourself when choosing the next language to use/learn, in my opinion. And, did you guess it? This is why my current favorite programming language is F#: because you can avoid most of the pitfalls that you find in other programming languages in the industry, and you still can do pretty much anything with it.

0) Money. the big money is in projects that need help. E.g. CEO during your interview: "The last lead programmer flipped me off and our accounting system in small talk is broken." That's hard. But that is where money is.

2) errors happen. Do tdd - so you can go to that concert.

2) Be the go to guy. If someone needs something you better be able to help. Brushing someone off creates office enemies and will remove any hopes of promotion.

3) any idiot can write code. I can with one hand tell you the names of people that can take over a system with 500k of mangled code.

4) think win/win. If you are doing a project - work hard -win for the company, but also put it docker so you learn something too.

5) launch side projects. You should release something large every year.

no pain, no gain.