Staying in the first company of my professional career for too long. I would have learnt more and earned more if I moved companies regularly early on.
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
11–20 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#13Not keeping up with professional connections as I made them from the start. Even a "happy birthday" card would've been enough, but here we are.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#14Didn't start my own business sooner.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#15Becoming too emotionally invested and involved in the welfare of the company where I worked for seven years. This had the opposite affect with my boss and management because I was making delusional organizational and engineering decisions with no authority to do so. Even though I thought my intentions were aligned with the future of the company, nothing could have been further from the truth.
My advice is keep things professional and even ruthless long into your career at a given company. Clock in and clock out and always take challenges impersonally. Be the impeccable toy model your boss wants you to be and nothing more.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#16I learnt and worked on how to earn money, but didn't learn and work on how to grow the money I earned.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#17Not going to to a software engineering heavy organization. Instead I went to a place where we had to justify using Java 8 instead of Java 7.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#181) not spending enough time developing professional network.
2) Becoming too comfy with the position and not pushing the bar as hard as I could could.
3) Staying too long with the company.
4) thinking too well of how the rest of the business perceives my position.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#19Spending time on non-technical tasks
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#20Reinventing the wheel. So many hours wasted on creating something that already existed in the form of PHP libraries or Python libraries that are written by much smarter folks. I tell my guys now, tools such as Ansible exist, don't try to write a whole Bash program to mimic what Ansible can do.