I've been failing to grow. I feel stagnant at my current job and yearn for greener pastures. Bad habits prevent me from being productive in my spare time. Very little action is being taken to improve my situation and I feel like a slave to the habits I've cultivated.
Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
61–70 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#62My life mostly.
I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some sort of skill where I might be able to get around not having a degree like some sort of CS skills, I basically make a little less each year due to inflation and increase in insurance costs not being higher than the tiny merit based increase my employer gives, I've never had a relationship as an adult, I'm repeatedly denied jobs because of lack of degree and/or my bankruptcy and/or the fact my job doesn't really transfer to anything else and I've been doing it for 13 years, I can't afford to even contribute enough to my 401k to get the full employer match.
Even someone, with considerable means that told me thier success is purely due to luck (and obviously through chances they've been given by mentors), told me that they are sorry/find it unfortunate that a degree is treated as a de facto dues card... yet the past 2 companies they've ran, require degrees for their entry level work and when I flat out asked for any job that could give me new experience, asked to take a chance on me, I got an "I'm real busy right now, but I'd love to work together some day".
I could try and get a degree, but I don't test well and while I'm quite intelligent school was always difficult for me. So taking out tens of thousands of dollars of loans and spending my free time doing something I'll almost certainly hate and/or be frustrated by, just to bury myself in debt for the second time in my life and graduate around 40 to compete against 20-22 year old people for entry level jobs in a new field with my fancy piece of financed paper... doesn't sound very smart, does it?
In literally hundreds of appplications in the past 3 years I've had 3 interviews, 2 of them declined and the 3rd I declined when they told me the starting pay was a 5$ and change less than I make an hour now and less than 4$ above minimum wage. Doing roughly what I already do, just for freight on ships instead of planes.
Yup.
Basically my life is a complete failure. If I dropped dead today my mother, that lives with me, would notice and honestly that's probably it. I'm a wholly replaceable cog in a machine.
(obligatory disclaimer: not suicidal, just honest and mostly defeated).
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#63I wrote a video synthesizer based on the idea behind cha/ves, but used an Arduino to generate the oscillator waves that control the VGA pins. I used an Arduino Uno that was laying around. It ended up spending most of the time just reading the MIDI data. It could do about 10 "pixels" per screen refresh. It was neat to see how slow the code I wrote was though, if I accidentally added a modulo or divide operation I would get half as many pixels onto the screen. Too bad the Arduino standard library uses % for serial buffer checking, random, and other features.. it made some cool glitches but was just too slow. Moving on to a raspberry pi and working through the book of shaders now.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#64I've been trying to customize emacs into a useful editor for weeks now.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#65I had a lot of failures since my company switched to Azure AKS... losing clusters, losing API server=crashing operators and so much more...
Lesson in : don't go with AKS !
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#66I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9 months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation to do the work involved in building the community.
This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of time on doing something only loosely related at best. So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you a…
> This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game.
I've done exactly this. It was a really good game engine - sprites, animation, LUA scripting, and everything. But once I had it running the original inspiration for the game was gone.
I learned a lot in the process so I don't count it as wasted time.
More recently,I built a my own static site generator like everyone else and their dogs. I guess I really never finished it but it is feature complete enough to do exactly what I need even if nobody else is ever going to use it. Like the gp's forum software, that is a kind of success.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#67I'm a pre-final year undergrad failing to get a research internship in Computer Vision/Deep Learning/Information Retrieval abroad(I'm from India) because of poor grades(GPA 6/10). I have won Kaggle Medal, various deep learning/machine learning Hackathons, got a job(Data Scientist) offer by the end of sophomore year and a few interview calls in the last 5 months all from great start-ups. They all didn't knew I was a s…
this is more of a humble brag than a failure
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#68Most recent: trying to convince my superior to throw away our old Java monoliths (still running on Java5/6) and start from scratch with other technology than Java, in a cloud-native manner. Still, my superior is a super Java-fan and has summoned fears about changing everything, because people who worked on those monoliths are long gone from company.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#69Most recent: trying to convince my superior to throw away our old Java monoliths (still running on Java5/6) and start from scratch with other technology than Java, in a cloud-native manner. Still, my superior is a super Java-fan and has summoned fears about changing everything, because people who worked on those monoliths are long gone from company.
emotional thinking > practical thinking
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#70Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at 10/11. Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate.…
> After 1.5 months the teamleader threw me out.
Cant help poor management a month and a half is not enough to get any idea of a persons abilities or help them fit in.
> but I struggled to refactor the mess of TypeScript-AWS-Lambda-Cloud-Crap in a meaningful way.
Any one would be on tilt after the team leader situation, don't worry about it, if it doesn't work out here, there are other places to work, it's just a job.