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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?

#161

Post by ferdowsi »

Tying my identity to the company I worked for. Tech-corporate culture incentivizes you strongly couple your sense of self with your company, which was frankly disastrous for me and for anyone else I've known to fall into the trap.

I could see my company struggle and fall behind, and I desperately wanted to help turn things around (after all, this company was part of who I was). I overextended myself, made bad engineering and interpersonal decisions, and burned out. Worse, I stayed at the company for far too long, thinking that I could really make a difference in the trajectory.

Reading the article about "keeping your identity small" helped me greatly in not making the same mistakes.

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

#162

Post by cellularmitosis »

lemarchr wrote: post #141
sssilver wrote: post #119

Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts. At the time, it felt so right. I had all the perfect, rational arguments. Years passed, experience and nuance decayed the strength of my opinions, and it was fascinating to realize -- even where I was perfectly right, I was mostly only right accidentally, my arguments were just a story to fit the narrative, never…

This is frequently still beneficial for the organisation, even when you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and is almost a necessary stepping stone towards achieving true understanding. It's hard to identify nuance until you discover some strongly held belief doesn't apply as well you once thought. But I suppose if you could go back and do it differently, you would, so I can appreciate why you consider this to be a m…

One important distinction is between holding strong opinions personally vs being in a position of authority and forcing those (strongly held, weakly justified) opinions on the rest of the team. That’s a quick way to erode morale.

Flip side of the coin: having strong opinions but being open to discussion and reconsidering your position in the face of new evidence is a great way to earn respect.

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

#163

Post by joshxyz »

_fat_santa wrote: post #90
rejectedandsad wrote: post #87

I 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.

Oh yea talk about it even being $28 back then, crashing to $15, was also a teen that time, same damn regrets lol

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

#164

Post by eyelidlessness »

smitty1e wrote: post #154
eyelidlessness wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).

What is "frequently"? I'd like to see a minimum of three years ahead of a transition, and a decent story why. Often the contract ends, the company is sold and the new policies are draconian, etc. Fine. Given the level of effort involved in bringing someone on, my outfit cannot afford to be staffed like a fast food joint.

From memory: last I heard the average is 18 months. I don’t know if that was accurate then or still is, nor how much it varies regionally or by any other criteria (I can look it up later but had a quick moment to reply and HN moves fast and might fill in the gap before I can take more time to look).

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

#165

Post by Hydraulix989 »

rsynnott wrote: post #135
victor9000 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a strange attitude; if you change jobs every three years, then how much are you going to get done, really? If everyone took this approach, then would any large project ever get finished?

Why wouldn't six months be more than enough time to ship a project?

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

#167

Post by jcims »

Disdain for sales. My first exposure to a sales team was as an engineer that had to deliver on whatever requirements sales dreamed up. Several years of head-shaking bullshit and I decided that the entire vocation was worthless. Took me ten years to figure out the better approach is to build bridges there, not burn them down.

Co-founding a company without really understanding my personal exposure. Had a small consultancy that had some early success, I was personally billing and leading projects, hiring folks and managing them. CEO just stopped actually cutting checks to IRS for a few years in a row. This snowballed into a major issue that I was personally liable for. Unfucking that took 5-6 years of my life. Yes yes yes I'm sure some of you out there would have been auditing financials every quarter...I didn't. Maybe that's the second half of the mistake.

Getting comfortable. After the above, I was running the show and just got comfortable. No real growth but a good salary for myself and a few other folks. Turns our there are parts of running a company that I'm just not wired for and never got good at. Decided I should let someone else do that and shut the company down (long explanation as to why selling it wasn't a good option). Worked at a FAANG for a bit then took another job. Doubled my TC in about three years and think I should have probably done this a long time ago.

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

#168

Post by eyelidlessness »

barrkel wrote: post #159
eyelidlessness wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).

I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two. With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?

Well, I think other people hire them because there’s high demand for talent and that kind of churn is expected.

If you’re not having difficulty hiring while rejecting those candidates, that suggests you’re probably attracting people like me who stick around longer (for better or worse all around) or something about your offer is appealing to talent who have a knack for finding good long term opportunities.

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

#169

Post by santa_boy »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #147
santa_boy wrote: post #145

My biggest mistake for most of my youth was that I valued technical complexity over business utility. As a result, I kept moving from one trendy thing to the next one in technology, skills and domains. Very late did I realize that putting simple php scripting to good and right use is enough to make the same money as trendy job and skill hopping. (on average ... i.e. ignoring outliers)

Can you tell me more about simple php scripting? I enjoyed php when I was new to the industry a while back, but do you mean that someone can be good at php and just work contractually and actually get by still? That’s pretty incredible and tempting tbh.

Sorry ... the message I was trying to convey was to focus on business value from any technical skill and figure out a smart way to monetize it. The technical medium isn't particularly relevant.

A small script can (has) paid $1K in an hr due to the business value. This is an outlier and isn't repeatable due to the limitations of the approach. So, skill selling isn't particularly scalable ... value selling is scalable.

However, there are more experienced hackers on this forum who have done such stuff way more meaningfully and at scale. That can be a topic for an Ask HN and will likely gather lots of insights if it gets momentum.

PS: Pls don't mistake this as a get rich quick idea. The message is to figure out and deliver business value (functionality, time, organization, entertainment) ... what have you ... and figure out a way to deliver it through a technical medium (be it HTML/CSS, Node, PHP, Rust, Scala, Python, R ... or whatever). PHP can do it too!

There are many things to learn and become good at. Technical prowess in isolation is surely not one of them.

Hope this helps.

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

#170

Post by s1artibartfast »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #142
logicchop wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but just a note: it doesn't do your career any good to hop a lot. I won't hire someone that looks flaky. If you find yourself at a bad job, sure, move on. But work on sussing out the good from the bad so you don't put yourself in a bad situation repeatedly.

Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).

In my experience, it is hard to tell the difference between someone who killed it at a job for 1 year and moved on from someone who couldn't hack it and moved on. Promotion at a company signifies that they were well received and able to adapt and meet milestones. Same job title in and out reads to me to believe that they couldn't hack it and were no goes development opportunity.

IMHO, a promotion before you leave confer s legitamacy to your tenure.

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