I behaved as though what I knew mattered more than who I knew.
Quite common I imagine. For many folks acquiring knowledge is almost a hobby, and expanding your network of contacts is a challenge.
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
91–100 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#92A 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 par…
>not be an architect unless you have the support of company leadership
Ain't that the truth. Luckily for me I was just a witness to my superior getting rekt for trying to push through their vision without the necessary social capital to do it right. The worst thing is, in that case they weren't wrong, but the lack of buy-in and effort put forth by others doomed the project to failure. That failure was subsequently used as justification for their release. After seeing that happen, I know not to push anything without the explicit support of leadership. Now if someone doesn't like the direction we're going in, well that's their fight with the executives and not my problem.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#93Not early, but: talking to the press without any media training.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#94Sent out the HBO Integration Test email this past week. Joking
I came here to say this same thing tongue-in-cheek. This made me chuckle. I immediately laughed when it happened and wished the person well who made the mistake.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#95Under HP-UX, I had a script that did an "rm -rf *" once, prior to a cd.
A SAN firmware update (forcibly installed by a technician onto our hsg80) silently prevented my filesystem from mounting, so the rm ran from the root directory.
I got everything back.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#96I got a call back from havok to interview for an internship during summer of my third year of college. I said no, because I'd just walked out of accepting a summer internship with a physics professor in my university. Never quite forgave myself for that one, I should have just bailed on the physics dept.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#97Twice 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.
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.
This kind of feeling isn't really helpful to anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
It's better to stay in the present moment: What should you be doing now, to be/stay fulfilled?
Your best successes are likely to be random, very hard to foresee and not what you expected at first, anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#98Moved to Canada instead of moving to the US.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#99I behaved as though what I knew mattered more than who I knew.
Still suffering from this and had stagnanted my career for 6 years . How do you overcome this
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sy…
If a piece of work is buggy, hard to maintain AND failed to deliver, I'm not sure if it can be described as amazing engineering.
It sounds like you might have a team of talented and enthusiastic junior/mid-career engineers who lacked the experience and vision to see the bigger picture and long term future of their work.