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

It's never too late to start building stuff! Don't give up!

Staying in one place for far too long.

You learn and earn more by jumping ship after a year or two.

What if you're happy where you are, you're perfectly satisfied with your salary (above median income right after leaving school and increased ~35% since then), and there is basically 1 alternative company nearby (where you'd have a lot more travel) and the rest is either a leap (hoping that you'll like a different kind of work) or more than doubles your commute time (to >1h one-way)?

I heard this advice before and at 4 years I'm quite due for a change in the statistical sense, and I've been offered more money already but... I feel like I'm already rich with no expensive hobbies and the money just flowing into long-term ETFs for retirement. Am I just in an exceptional situation or does the advice still apply to me and should I leave within the next 1-2 years?

At my first real technology job I worked at an early web hosting company. Cutting edge stuff in 1996. We hosted full domains for $60/mo and tilde domains (e.g.; domain.tld/~myname) for $25 or $30 per month.

We hosted on BSDi, a proprietary BSD and every domain customer had their own sub-directory with user and group ownership.

As an aside, BSDi would happily let you run `rm -rf .` and would walk up to root and back down through every sub-directory deleting everything on its way.

One day, probably a month or two into working at what was my dream job, I accidentally ran `chown -r zelphyr .` in the parent directory where we had all our domain customers instead of my personal domain directory. (I can’t remember why I was doing that.)

Instant panic. I just knew I was going to be fired. I sheepishly went to my boss, Todd, and told him what happened. He grinned and exclaimed, “Cool! A challenge!” and had me sit next to him while we wrote a Perl script to look at the paths in /etc/passwd and chown that directory back to its original user.

I’m eternally grateful to Todd for being such a great boss.

Edit to add: in reality, my biggest mistake early on was not learning fundamentals. How binary and processors work, how machine language works and how higher level languages compile down to machine language. I would be a much better programmer had I done so sooner.

Not following thru, on so many things.

Perseverance is everything.