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Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

#35

Becoming 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…

Man this epitomises the modern day slave for me. What a dismal life to look forward to.

Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

#36
post #22

Becoming 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…

I agree with this right up until the last sentence. If you feel the need to be an “impeccable toy model” I’d say leave. Sounds like a recipe for a life of misery.

It is like that. Leaving for what? Most places are similar. Same shit different people. Some times you get lucky, and you get some time where things are working for you - but teams never remain, good people move on or up.

Leaving is not always the answer, keeping your head low and surviving is modus operandi for a lot of people.

Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

#37

Taking a year break in 2014. I lost potential to earn a few millions from continuity of my career. I also discovered I like coding and don't really enjoy traveling. Traveling is romanticized too much in our culture.

How can mere continuity be worth millions of dollars? Or did you skip a particularly lucrative opportunity?

You're right about travelling. Unless you're travelling with a reason or at least knowing people at your destination, it's usually fairly unfulfilling.

Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

#39

Taking a year break in 2014. I lost potential to earn millions from continuity of my career. It was the early days of many startups I also discovered I like coding and don't really enjoy traveling. Traveling is romanticized too much in our culture.

The fact that you learned those things about yourself are valuable as well.

Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

#40

Becoming 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…

> 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

I have experienced this from the management perspective and it resonates strongly with experiences I have had. Some of the hardest employees to manage are those that are both talented and heavily invested, but unable to accept what their role actually is. When you have someone like that doing things that aren't in alignment with the technical vision - whether its right or wrong - they rapidly diverge towards having negative value.

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