Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your failure story?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#31

Post by deanmoriarty »

souprock wrote: post #30
deanmoriarty wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your post. I am currently at a startup and have been here a few years. I came to really hate the environment, mostly because the people this company can hire are not what I would personally consider talented (due to a mix of non-exponential company growth and lower compensations than FAANG companies). The result of hiring low quality professionals is that the engineering standards are so low that it really…

FAANG companies are not where you go to find high engineering standards. You need to look for a job featuring one of these: DO-178C DAL A (if you mess up, aircraft crash) EAL5, EAL6, EAL7 (if you mess up, national secrets leak) MISRA C (if you mess up, cars crash and a giant recall is required) IEC 62304 Class C (if you mess up, medical devices kill people) NUREG/CR-6463 (if you mess up, you get a nuclear disaster) I…

Yeah, I definitely didn't mean high engineering standards then. The places you are listing wouldn't work for me because of the little financial incentives they provide. As far as I know FAANG are the only places where a reasonably decent software engineer can make ~$400-500k/y (at least those were my offers), and by living frugally the way I do that means massive savings even in a high cost of living location, which puts me closer and closer to my financial freedom goals they day I decide to be done and move to a low cost area.

So, I guess working with "very capable people" and a very good paycheck is enough for me :-)

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#32

Post by souprock »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #31
souprock wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG companies are not where you go to find high engineering standards. You need to look for a job featuring one of these: DO-178C DAL A (if you mess up, aircraft crash) EAL5, EAL6, EAL7 (if you mess up, national secrets leak) MISRA C (if you mess up, cars crash and a giant recall is required) IEC 62304 Class C (if you mess up, medical devices kill people) NUREG/CR-6463 (if you mess up, you get a nuclear disaster) I…

Yeah, I definitely didn't mean high engineering standards then. The places you are listing wouldn't work for me because of the little financial incentives they provide. As far as I know FAANG are the only places where a reasonably decent software engineer can make ~$400-500k/y (at least those were my offers), and by living frugally the way I do that means massive savings even in a high cost of living location, which…

Do you have a well-defined goal in terms of dollars and years? If not, you might always want a bit more money, and thus never quit. You'd miss out on the chance to raise a family. It's safest to get that done before age 30. No matter how much money you get, you can't buy back your younger years after they are gone.

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#33

Post by deanmoriarty »

souprock wrote: post #32
deanmoriarty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I definitely didn't mean high engineering standards then. The places you are listing wouldn't work for me because of the little financial incentives they provide. As far as I know FAANG are the only places where a reasonably decent software engineer can make ~$400-500k/y (at least those were my offers), and by living frugally the way I do that means massive savings even in a high cost of living location, which…

Do you have a well-defined goal in terms of dollars and years? If not, you might always want a bit more money, and thus never quit. You'd miss out on the chance to raise a family. It's safest to get that done before age 30. No matter how much money you get, you can't buy back your younger years after they are gone.

Yes, if I can continue with my current savings rate, I should be done by my mid-late 30s (very early 30s now), with my passive investments fully covering my cost of living at least in Mediterranean Europe (where I'm originally from) or South East Asia (where my partner is from), both amazing places to live :-)

Both my partner and I are not looking to have kids (we've thought about it for many years before reaching the conclusion) and we already have extended families with tons of kids, so from that point of view we feel there's nothing we're missing, it's a non-priority.

For everything else, I'm not exactly wasting my life right now, I'm enjoying it even in a very high cost of living area: if you can deal with housing (and not having kids admittedly helps a lot since you can live in way smaller and cheaper places close to work), things are not that much more expensive than anywhere else, so I get a lot of experiences with good arbitrage :-)

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#35

Post by muzani »

kirubakaran wrote: post #15
muzani wrote: post #13

0. Graduated from a top CS uni. Starting salaries were lower than KFC assistant manager. Started looking outside tech to for enough income to sustain being a programmer. 1. Put down $6000 on a coffee kiosk. Made real good money every day. But partners were all dishonest and manipulative. 2. Built an app for a guy. He paid well. Built another app for him. Contract sucked, one clause meant we couldn't get paid even tho…

That's really cool. I'd love to read each of those in more detail, if you have the time.

Yeah I suppose I should blog it. Never occurred that people would be interested in reading about failures.

A lot of the early stuff was me trying to help my wife with her business. Food made good cash flow but poor profit margins, and because of that the risk was quite high. We flipped to a more traditional role where she helps support my tech ventures now. Tech is high risk, but also much higher margins and thus less risky.

My freelancing career is actually going quite well despite all the setbacks here. The big thing was realizing that payment on a project basis is really bad.

Also it occurred to me when reading this that this is why people go to Silicon Valley. Every country has plenty of cheating, but it's worse in a bad economy, especially when you can get away with it. Dynamics of Silicon Valley make it harder to cheat/deceive someone and run away, so people can focus fully on building their businesses. The other half of failures is due to incompetent management, which is also something that happens much less in SV.

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#36

Post by muzani »

allwynpfr wrote: post #24
muzani wrote: post #13

0. Graduated from a top CS uni. Starting salaries were lower than KFC assistant manager. Started looking outside tech to for enough income to sustain being a programmer. 1. Put down $6000 on a coffee kiosk. Made real good money every day. But partners were all dishonest and manipulative. 2. Built an app for a guy. He paid well. Built another app for him. Contract sucked, one clause meant we couldn't get paid even tho…

Duuudeeeeee this was like watching a movie! You should totally turn this into a blog, perhaps even a book I bet you learnt lots along the way, you're literally the poster boy/girl for try, fall down, stand up, try Thanks for this :)

Yeah I can see how some people would get discouraged. But I grew up playing roguelikes. It was normal to try something, fail, then try again, understanding why one approach didnt work. It's actually fun to start something after a previous failure, because you'll be excited to try the path not taken.

If anything the mistakes I do regret is trying to settle for a comfy corporate job after selling my company. The failures were out of my control, and there was little learned from it.

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#38

Post by Aleroniponi »

ekns wrote: post #6

Failure 1: I'd planned to do a PhD eventually, but I ended up more or less self-sabotaging my degree grade by being depressed and not doing anything about it (2:2 in the UK system vs. the nominal 2:1 ostensibly required for MSc/PhD applications to most places) Failure 2: For the longest time, I never managed to make a good routine for myself. To learn, build things, exercise, meditate, etc. Good habits seem to be a p…

I am in a similar predicament currently, and just want to let you know that there are others whom share your pain(s). I am 23 in 10 days, and haven't been in education since my community college days about 4 years ago. I have felt like a worthless pile of rubbish since then, however it is all related to depression, anxiety, ADHD, and an unsupportive family.

Personally, I find that small, but actionable changes to your routines and habits make the biggest difference. Please hang in there man!

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#39

Post by otohp »

Me - a graduate student in a university. Looking around on all servers on the network and found a program called "crack". it was designed to reverse-engineer passwords given a unix passwd file. I thought, what the heck, let me see if I can get some gems. SO I used yppasswd to download all password hashes, and ran crack on it. Needless to say, sysadmin found out in a couple of days, and suspended my account for 2 weeks :(

Re: Ask HN: What is your failure story?

#40

Post by justinclift »

tracer4201 wrote: post #20

Not a complete failure story, but I joined a FANG company as an entry level engineer. In about three and a half years, I’ve gone through two promotions. My most recent team where I got promoted to senior engineer is demoralizing to me and gives me anxiety even thinking about work. I’m feeling a mixture of burnout and just a general disinterest in my teams domain area. My current team has also grown in ways I didn’t e…

Is there any chance having a chat to your husband along the lines of "Things at work really suck, I'd like to change by either really getting pregnant or changing job sooner rather than later. How're things with you?" is a good idea?
Post reply on HN