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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?

#71

Post by zmmmmm »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #67
zmmmmm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I also had experience leading both talented and heavily invested teams. Differently from your experience, we were able to get the team hyper productive and accomplished a lot of good things together. A couple lessons I learned: - Micromanaging and "make them accept their role" is how you make them unproductive. Smart/talented people can tell if the manager doesn't care. They know if they are being forced to be a cog…

> in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy

That's a really interesting observation. If this thread was about the opposite - what mistakes did you make later in your career - one of my responses would be the above - because its exactly what I did and it turned out badly. I recognized talented people, seeing in them earlier versions of myself, and I gave them lots of autonomy. And they took it, and I got back amazing works of art that created all kinds of discordance with our longer term architecture and vision. I regret now that I didn't intervene more strongly at that point. Instead, those people have left and I now have years of technical debt to fix. Meanwhile the less talented but more aligned folk are chugging away and creating more value longer term. It's tortoise and the hare.

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

#73

Post by bobmichael »

void_mint wrote: post #64
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t feel too bad. My grandfather had the opportunity to buy some land in Atlanta in the late 60’s/early 70’s and turned it down because it was shanty town and the guy offering him the opportunity was a known crook. Shortly after that it became CNN Center.

The only part I feel bad about is not really "learning" from these mistakes. I don't worry too hard about things I cannot change, so those two opportunities came and went. The part that bothers me is the fact that I haven't been swinging harder at ideas that I've thought about pursuing. There's _some amount of evidence_ that the ideas I'm having in this particularly industry are valuable and others would want. After…

If you really want to learn from the mistake, it sounds like you need to ask for a personal leave for a few months and really take a bet on one of your ideas. There's not much to lose, in the worst case you learn from how it went and can decide whether you may want to raise the stakes and quit.

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

#74

Post by thanhhaimai »

zmmmmm wrote: post #71
thanhhaimai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also had experience leading both talented and heavily invested teams. Differently from your experience, we were able to get the team hyper productive and accomplished a lot of good things together. A couple lessons I learned: - Micromanaging and "make them accept their role" is how you make them unproductive. Smart/talented people can tell if the manager doesn't care. They know if they are being forced to be a cog…

> in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy That's a really interesting observation. If this thread was about the opposite - what mistakes did you make later in your career - one of my responses would be the above - because its exactly what I did and it turned out badly. I recognized talented people, seeing…

That's where we differ on the cause.

> "And they took it, and I got back amazing works of art that created all kinds of discordance with our longer term architecture and vision"

I interpreted this part as you attributing the cause to the talented folks creating the discordance in your team.

For me, it's the reverse. That shows insufficient technical leadership from the top. It's the job of the Tech Lead to convince and ensure good architecture. If the Tech Lead get "amazing works" that are "all kinds of discordance", it's the failure of the Tech Lead. People don't believe in the architecture/design. They see flaws. As I mentioned above, it's the signal that you may have a weak TL. I would focus on improving that aspect first.

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

#76

Post by zmmmmm »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #74
zmmmmm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy That's a really interesting observation. If this thread was about the opposite - what mistakes did you make later in your career - one of my responses would be the above - because its exactly what I did and it turned out badly. I recognized talented people, seeing…

That's where we differ on the cause. > "And they took it, and I got back amazing works of art that created all kinds of discordance with our longer term architecture and vision" I interpreted this part as you attributing the cause to the talented folks creating the discordance in your team. For me, it's the reverse. That shows insufficient technical leadership from the top. It's the job of the Tech Lead to convince a…

I think you're probably right and that's definitely part of the issue.

However your assumption that people can all be convinced to agree on the technical architecture is part of the problem here. There are so many areas of software engineering where "reasonable experts" can disagree. Static vs dynamic typing, functional vs object oriented, loose coupled messaging based flows vs tightly coupled APIs etc. Successful systems can be built in all these ways as long as one is chosen and there is some consistency. But it is hard to be successful if they are built in all different ways at the same time.

So inherent in this picture is that you will have people with irreconcilable differences about how things should work at a fairly deep level.

Acknowledging your point however - part of what I say my mistake was in not "intervening" was to do more of this advocacy proactively, and flush out earlier on - can these individuals be convinced or is the difference irreconcilable.

An example, if it helps, is in one instance one of the team was tasked to implement a particular feature, and they found that the implementation was too slow when written in Python. So without consulting they selected a different language that is not in use or understood by anybody on the team at all, and then developed this whole critical subsystem in this language. Meanwhile there were many alternatives within the team's chosen tech stack that could capably solve this problem with adequate performance (even Python if properly utilized). The solution was an amazing work of art (although quite buggy as it turned out). But it was a disaster for the project and actually sank the delivery of it.

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

#78

Post by alashley »

Taking a job as a solo "lead" developer at a startup for my first job out of school.

I picked up so many bad habits and it took a while to figure out how to collaborate with others on code. If I had to take that same path again, I would get involved with an open-source project to solidify the fundamentals.

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

#80

Post by analog31 »

In the early 80s, assuming that programming was easy, and that there would soon be a surplus of programmers. My mom was teaching programming at a nearby community college, and her students were getting programming jobs after one year of instruction.

Still, I don't regret my career, and I get to do a lot of programming.

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