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

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191–200 of 491 posts

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

#191
I gave up on formal career advancement (ie climbing the greasy pole) and followed my technical interests, trying to have fun where possible, but also with an eye to its marketability.

I ended up starting a blog (https://zwischenzugs.com/) and wrote a few books. It's all made my career far more fun and given me more control. As a by-product I'm better paid too. But that was not the aim.

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

#192
Two of them.

1) 1993: switching from computer programming to system administration in order to avoid the C++ onslaught (at the company I was working for). Managed to successfully avoid it since then (25 years). And now we have Rust: life is good.

2) 1999: going back to programming while excluding closed tech and focusing only on free and open tools. With all their faults, having complete visibility and control of the software stack has been a blessing. And now there's hope for hardware too. Life is good #2.

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

#193
To willingly decide to leave, halfway through my professional life, a career in which I had become one of very few world-class experts to pick up something entirely different and that I knew close to nothing about.

It was scary, humbling, deeply rejuvenating and ultimately immensely beneficial, both from a personal growth and from a financial standpoint.

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

#194

By far, applying to work remote for a US based company 3 years ago. I am living in Romania. I still work for them. Theoretically I should be able to retire in about 5-10 years, in my mid 40s, depending on how frugal I am with my expenses. This wouldn't have been possible working for a local software company, even though I was paid about 3 times the average national income.

it's so sad that from where i live (SEA), 3 times average gdp per capita is no where enough for retirement. insurance and healthcare system is a joke. so whenever you got health issue, be prepare to spend butt-load of money. i have no idea how gdp per capita is so low yet people have so much of money (unreported income, corruption probably) I make about 25 times the national gdp per capita yet i'm just above average…

>it's so sad that from where i live (SEA),

Well then. Move to Romania. Problem solved.

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

#195
post #176
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was back in 2009. The NYTimes interactive team had hired folks (Big Nerd Ranch) to hold an in-office Rails lesson, and my boss sent me over to learn with them. While I did have a computer engineering degree, my webdev experience was limited to making elaborate (but poorly-coded) PHP and Flash scripts. I was actually hired originally to be a web producer (mostly tasked with posting stories online and making the H…

> because I realized Ruby wasn't ideal for teaching novice programmers 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…

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

Yes and no. Consider that these are different in Ruby but the same in almost every other language:

    f(x)
    f (x)
Ever had to debug code that relied on this behaviour? Or had to explain why exactly to someone unfamiliar with yacc?

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

#196
post #21

A bit of an unethical life pro tip, but to lie. Lying allows you like no other skill to get a huge jumpstart in your career. I'm not talking about some basic white lie, but some Death Note-level type of deceptive schemes where you can then act on the deception. It also trains you for leadership, as deception is an incredibly important skill the higher you get. http://fortune.com/2016/06/02/lying-leadership-skills-exp…

This is terrible advice.

Even if you entire leave aside how immoral this advice is, it is still a terrible strategy for success: unless you are a Kasparov-level master of lies, you are going to make your life terribly complicated and this will weigh you down and make you miss a shit-ton of legit opportunities.

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

#197
Getting my bachelors degree.

I had been working as a self-taught web developer before that and went into college already knowing much of what I needed to know to do the job. However, getting a degree significantly improved my ability to get the positions I wanted at the pay I deserved. Also, I learned some important things that I had never heard of before.

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

#199

I 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.

I Googled slack channels list for things I am interested it. Like Front End, Startups, Laravel, WooCommerce etc. You would find 100s of channels. See the ones which have many members. They would have a online form to join them. Join the ones that are free. There would be some who would ask for a membership fee. I personally don't think paid ones are worth the money. https://medium.com/startup-frontier/100-slack-communities-fo...

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

#200
Read “Who moved my cheese?”, and promptly quit IBM. It was obvious they considered engineering a cost center and were determined to offshore as much head count as possible. I moved to another company where engineering was valued as the driver of innovation and the core competitive differentiator. It was like night and day.
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