Commented out the credit card charging part of the order processing pipeline during testing and pushed it to production.
Automatic tester? I hardly know 'er!
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
41–50 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#42In my new career as a freelance consultant / mini-agency: taking on a large fixed-price project. It’s not that the scope has changed - it hasn’t at all - it’s just that I judged it like shit.
Don’t do this, kids!
(Though many of you still will. I knew about this beforehand and still got myself into this mess. Never again!)
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#43Qualifying as a lawyer when what I enjoyed was building things.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#44Twice I have built entire full-featured applications and then not shipped them out of embarrassment(fear of failing I guess?). Both times, a few years later similar applications became very popular. Very recently one of them showed upon the front page of HN to high praise. It's a mistake I'm still making, I guess, which is to assume that it could never "be me". It can be anyone. Just ship the damn thing.
Ah, self sabotage. I know this all too well.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#45Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#46Took a first job that played to my weaknesses but was in a field I was intellectually interested in, rationalizing it was an opportunity to grow.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#47[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#49Not pushing boundaries and (respectfully) questioning authority about why things were the way they were, being afraid of making mistakes.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#50Not joining organizations with an solid engineering culture (potentially a current problem depending on the next few months).
I'm relatively new (2 years experience), but haven't really had a chance to learn how to do many things properly in many cases due to a lack of more experienced people to learn from/business priorities meaning it gets waved away.
This won't get me fired in my current job, but the lack of knowledge might get me fired in future ones.