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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?

#101

Post by UltraSuperUser »

etamponi wrote: post #61

Thought that I could replace lower-than-average communication skills with higher-than-average technical skills. The story goes that software engineering is about knowing how to design a system a build it. The truth is: you also have to know how to _sell_ your design, how to document your decisions, how to push forward with your agenda. You won't go anywhere without a team that values you. This means that interpersona…

Like, the reply makes sense, but

>The most important part of a person is their relationships (you're not convinced? Try this exercise: describe yourself without mentioning any single relationship or its effect on you. What remains?). This is true both outside and inside your job.

Doesn't seem to check out to me. If someone is highly skilled, their list of accolades sell themselves. "built x or y application", "functioned as Q or Y for B years" etc.

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

#103

Post by UltraSuperUser »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #83
somtum wrote: post #11

Staying 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.

Financially I have to imagine it is because of the pay raises that you get from switching vs not. Companies simply do not value their employees enough.

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

#104

Post by UltraSuperUser »

austincheney wrote: post #88

A 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…

>You can reasonably determine this during job interviews if you ask the right questions in the right ways.

Surely then, listing some examples here would be relevant?

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

#106

Post by simmons »

LinuxBender wrote: post #82

Not putting the hostname or something distinct in my shell prompt, at least on my machine. sync && reboot Connection closed by remote host. Mild panic sets in... Oh, lets up-arrow and see what customer server I just rebooted. Reboot on Solaris did not do a graceful shutdown of anything, it just sig-kills everything. Veritas clustering in it's early years did not like this one bit.

Well... at least you synced! Your comment about Solaris reminds me of the time I learned the hard way that "killall" doesn't do quite the same thing on Solaris as it does on Linux.

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

#107

Post by brailsafe »

UltraSuperUser wrote: post #101
etamponi wrote: post #61

Thought that I could replace lower-than-average communication skills with higher-than-average technical skills. The story goes that software engineering is about knowing how to design a system a build it. The truth is: you also have to know how to _sell_ your design, how to document your decisions, how to push forward with your agenda. You won't go anywhere without a team that values you. This means that interpersona…

Like, the reply makes sense, but >The most important part of a person is their relationships (you're not convinced? Try this exercise: describe yourself without mentioning any single relationship or its effect on you. What remains?). This is true both outside and inside your job. Doesn't seem to check out to me. If someone is highly skilled, their list of accolades sell themselves. "built x or y application", "functi…

Who would give anyone accolades without respect for how they carry themselves or without knowing about them at all? Unless you sell yourself or have an established reputation with people who know you, it's your manager who built that application. Not that skills don't matter, but I'd say they usually only matter in context.

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

#108

Post by brailsafe »

Before I understood Git merging strategies and so on, I accidentally introduced a ton of merge conflicts one night when I was trying to wrap up a bunch of UI things. My teammates were not happy, but I chose to spend all night resolving it manually. Now I have a better sense of git lol, still terminated later on tho.

Other than that, I still don't really know how to hold a programming job for longer than 6 months, so I'm sure there's a lot of mistakes I'm making.

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

#109

Post by joshxyz »

alashley wrote: post #78

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.

Made this mistake too, good lord.

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

#110

Post by victor9000 »

napsterbr wrote: post #38
somtum wrote: post #11

Staying 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 this weird feeling that I'm making the same mistake right now.

If you've been there longer than 3 years, then yes, you're making the mistake.
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