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

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

#61

Post by mikekchar »

mxwsn wrote: post #42
hb3b wrote: post #34

Strategically burning bridges when appropriate, putting forth a will-do attitude even if it means doing things outside scoped responsibilities, and just being kind to people.

When was it appropriate for you to burn bridges and how'd you go about it? I'm going through something similar.

Not the OP, but there is a lot to be said for the concept of karma. Karma is the result of some action. You can hold on to some karma, or you can let it go. Sometimes you have a connection with a person or an organisation. That connection can have consequences that are not good for you. You are free to hang on to that connection, or let it go most of the time. Usually it's a good idea to let it go. Sometimes the other side persists in trying to keep the connection (for one reason or another). In those cases, it's probably a good idea to be perfectly clear about your desire to sever the connection. You don't have to be cruel about it, but it's usually good to be crystal clear.

This is often super difficult to do, and the Seinfeld "off like a bandaid" approach is probably best. By doing it clearly and quickly, you allow yourself to focus on what you really want and not to carry around a lot of baggage. For example, I've been approached by previous employers about working for them again and I've had to tell them politely that it's never going to happen. Usually I try to give them some constructive criticism if they are able to receive it, but I admit to having done the "It's not you, it's me" routine before. Basically, I think it's important to focus on explaining that the paths are different and that each party needs to concentrate on their own path without needing to try to drag the other along. A couple of times I've received the, "But I've changed..." thing and I just have to reply, "That's great. I know you'll be able to find great people to work with because of that. I need to focus on my own stuff."

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

#62

Post by benmanns »

peacetreefrog wrote: post #6
danso wrote: post #2

Learning Rails.

When did you learn rails? Would you recommend learning it today?

I learned Rails because it was way better than PHP. I had a colleague show it to me and was amazed at how much simpler things can be when you have your ORM, MVC, templating, configuration all set up in an opinionated framework. As for whether or not you should learn it today - maybe? I think there's still a future for Rails development. It's more of a workhorse now than the Hot New Thing.

I think if you're looking for something new, look for things that you (or others) get excited about, because they are way better then the current way. Learning Rails was because it was 10x better than the PHP spaghetti shit that I was personally coding in early 2010s.

I think this can apply to a lot of trends. For me, Golang was a much much better way to handle concurrency. Add typing, strong performance, compilation. It's also on an upward trend that I was on the leading edge of.

These days I'm learning Rust because I think the borrow checker is an interesting and much better way to handle memory than manually allocating/freeing, pointers, or slow GC. However, who knows if it will take off.

Similar things have happened with frontend. From what I understand React is much much better than coding together stuff with jQuery and random plugins.

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

#63

Post by benmanns »

scottfits wrote: post #20
peacetreefrog wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you learn rails? Would you recommend learning it today?

no, don't learn ruby on rails today. Companies still use it but I highly recommend using Django or Flask and Python as an alternative if you're starting from the ground up

Why?

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

#64

Post by Zimbleton »

peacetreefrog wrote: post #6
danso wrote: post #2

Learning Rails.

When did you learn rails? Would you recommend learning it today?

I wouldn't recommend it today. Ruby/Rails is 10x to 20x slower as a web server compared to web frameworks for languages that were designed to be concurrent like Java (Play), Erlang (Plug, Phoenix), and GoLang (Gin, Martini). Even Nodejs Express is 3x faster. Benchmarks here: https://github.com/mroth/phoenix-showdown

One of the core Rails developers José Valim created his own language Elixir built on top of Erlang and web framework Phoenix.

Ruby is a beautiful language - well written code can bring a tear to your eye like Haiku. But its not designed for concurrency so you have to bend over backwards to add caching and scale your web server a lot more than other languages.

Learning Ruby/Rails and being part of a team that followed Sandi Metz 5 Rules and TDD made me a better programmer in other languages.

Most companies are moving towards microservice architure where each service runs separately and can use whatever language makes sense for that service. We replaced our monolithic Rails web app with 20+ microservices, most of which use Golang, some Python and Node and Java. The main web server service renders one html page (about 20 lines!) that simply renders a React app that communicates with our API server (API server router then routes to the correct microservice).

We don't need Rails view templates or localisation support as most dynamic websites do this clientside. Doing lots of Javascript in Rails was always clunky and poorly supported until a year or so ago when they caught up and added modules and hot reloading support.

We have found Golang very easy to learn, ridiculously fast to compile and run tests and very robust. Google said it was designed for Programmer enjoyment and it really shows.

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

#65

Post by sdegutis »

Creating a window manager. It skyrocketed into a really fun project that thousands of people have used to boost their productivity. I've started a Patreon for anyone who has enjoyed my window managers and feeling grateful (link in profile) but it may be too late.

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

#67

Post by starchild_3001 »

Accepted a silicon valley job offer [tech hotspot, eng job] in 2004 over a research lab in Princeton, NJ [small town, paper-writing job] and another in San Diego [small town, eng job] upon the advice two elder folks I knew very little.

Switched to machine learning circa 2007-2009 from signal processing (my PhD area) after reading the first few chapters of Elements of Statistical Learning Theory. Quit my eng job. Took a job in ML after studying many nights.

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

#68

Post by paul7986 »

Doing & pursuing my startup ideas which is how I learned to design, code and market technology. Neither of my startups made me any money but the stories from them (highs and lows) I feel help(ed) me stand out in terms of getting interviews & landing jobs.

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

#69

Post by btown »

DIVx0 wrote: post #38

Taking 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…

Were you able to remain technical as your rank and responsibilities expanded? Or did you need to move into a management-only role to reach a turning point in the "influence" you mentioned?

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

#70

Post by snorkel »

hb3b wrote: post #34

Strategically burning bridges when appropriate, putting forth a will-do attitude even if it means doing things outside scoped responsibilities, and just being kind to people.

strategically burning bridges? Sometimes it’s tempting but I always tried to leave each gig on good terms, no hard feelings, no matter how good or dysfunctional the situation was, since you never know when past connections can be helpful later on. Curious to know when is it helpful to burn the bridge.
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