[deleted]
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
81–90 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#82Not putting the hostname or something distinct in my shell prompt, at least on my machine.
sync && reboot
Connection closed by remote host.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#83Staying 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.
I have been at the same company for 25 years, and so have many of my co-workers, who have grown up with me, and I always wonder if that has been a mistake.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#84Commented out the credit card charging part of the order processing pipeline during testing and pushed it to production.
Ah, almost like a colleague's story. He entered the payment provider's test backend credentials and pushed to production. A few months later, the high-end-ish fashion company whose shop was outsourced to us said a customer of theirs called to ask them when they were going to bill her credit card for a purchase made weeks earlier...
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#85I didn't immediately end a meeting to demo a prototype when 2 out of 3 stakeholders were no shows.
I got lots of feedback from the remaining stakeholder that the other 2 strongly disagreed with.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#86Twice 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.
Overcoming this 'mistake' is very hard. I have faced it many times. As long as I am an engineer on something it is never good-enough for me.
I am now trying a different approach that seems to work - the essence is that after some time to give up ownership of the code. I am involved in day-to-day dev decisions, but play more of the role of the Product-Manager - talk to potential customers for pilots, and define tight scopes so that the pilots and subsequent launches are successful.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#87I don't know if it's huge, but I should have put more in crypto and perhaps should have joined a company pre-IPO. I think at the IPO price I would have netted a net worth of $1m+ from option exercise for just about 2 years of work. Of course, now they've halved in value post lockup so I don't feel too bad.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#88A belief that as a JavaScript developer competence and a thorough understanding of the standards are a valued commodity. This is absolutely wrong. The name of the game is tools. Most people are scared to death of writing applications in JavaScript and absolutely hate the DOM and many other standard APIs, so… tools. If dicking around with tools and frameworks isn’t your thing look for somewhere incredibly niche to park your career.
I learned early to not be an architect unless you have the support of company leadership. If you do your job too well you are disruptive, people get sad, and then you are on your way out once the crying gets loud. If you aren’t doing that then you aren’t effective and the position should be eliminated. You can reasonably determine this during job interviews if you ask the right questions in the right ways.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#89Staying 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.
I have been at the same company for 25 years, and so have many of my co-workers, who have grown up with me, and I always wonder if that has been a mistake.
Whoa, that's pretty cool. Mind sharing the company or at least the industry?
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#90I don't know if it's huge, but I should have put more in crypto and perhaps should have joined a company pre-IPO. I think at the IPO price I would have netted a net worth of $1m+ from option exercise for just about 2 years of work. Of course, now they've halved in value post lockup so I don't feel too bad.
I remember being 16 or 17 and pondering if I should buy 1 bitcoin. Back then they were worth about $50/BTC.