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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?

#191

Post by abhishektwr »

xEnOnn wrote: post #140
abhishektwr wrote: post #128

Not starting with a big name tech corp or a high-growth VC-funded company. Big brand on CV makes big difference when recruiters are doing initial screening. A CS/MBA degree from top university helps. Do whatever you can to work with a big tech brand early in career, otherwise later you will regret.

I’ve often wondered if I should be working for a high-growth VC funded company. Does it really make much difference when I still have to go through the same leetcode and interview when switching jobs? I still get left out if I fail the leetcode from the start. Not to mention, these high-growth companies are usually more demanding and long hours are expected. Is it worth it?

For senior roles CV/brand still weights. You need to be in initial shortlist then only leetcode and interview will be any help. I now work at a big brand high growth company and get pitched 2-3 new opportunities every week, although I have been in the current role less than 9 months. Previously I have to apply and rarely a recruiter approached me.

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

#192

Post by raman325 »

I took down all cellular data traffic in Philadelphia for 2 hours.

I wrote the operating procedures for performing a backhaul upgrade in preparation for the launch of LTE. The upgrade was being performed on our primary routers which all traffic traversed. The operation had been performed several times successfully, but after the last implementation before the issue, I was informed that a couple of the lines were wrong (they had extra arguments). I did a find and replace all, shot the document off to the next team, and went about my day. The technician who was doing the upgrade called me on the afternoon of the upgrade (it was a Sunday) and asked if any of the initial steps were disruptive as he wanted to get started on the prep work ahead of the maintenance window. I said no and he proceeded. Mind you, this was also during the World Cup so I was out at a bar with my friends and not paying attention to my phone. About two hours later I looked at my phone and had multiple missed calls and voicemails from him, so I immediately ran to the MTSO. Turns out my find and replace changed some commands - the end result was that instead of adding additional VLANs to in-use interfaces, it replaced all of them with the new ones, which weren't carrying any traffic.

The fix was simple, we had failover routers and at some point after he couldn't get in touch with me the technician reached out to one of my peers who quickly told him to failover. He should have known to do that but he was also panicking. I called my boss and told him what happened and that it was my fault (and I genuinely believed it was. I wrote the bad procedure AND I approved activities outside of the maintenance window), and he told me to be at the office with the technician first thing in the morning the next day.

I couldn't sleep that night, this was early on in my career and I thought it was over. But that meeting ended up being one of the most transformative moments of my career. My boss's boss, a director, quoted the FAA's ethos of how a good system should have checks and balances, and if a mistake happens, the system is at fault, not any individual. We walked through the play by play and identified multiple opportunities to both avoid the issue that arose and to resolve the issue more quickly. We came up with an action plan as to how to make sure our "system" was more mistake proof for next time, and that was that.

That meeting has always stuck with me, and I always remind myself of that conversation whenever things at work don't go as planned. There is almost always something in the system that can be improved to account for human error, which should be expected.

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

#193

Post by rramadass »

majjam wrote: post #121
Zelphyr wrote: post #57

At my first real technology job I worked at an early web hosting company. Cutting edge stuff in 1996. We hosted full domains for $60/mo and tilde domains (e.g.; domain.tld/~myname) for $25 or $30 per month. We hosted on BSDi, a proprietary BSD and every domain customer had their own sub-directory with user and group ownership. As an aside, BSDi would happily let you run `rm -rf . ` and would walk up to root and back…

Would you mind elaborating on how you went about learning the fundamentals? I think id benefit from the same.

Try Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. - https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/

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

#194

Post by warmcat »

ncmncm wrote: post #116

My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time. I thought I had something to prove, but there was never any point to it. You don't owe anything to an employer. You can't prove anything to an employer. They have absolutely no loyalty to you, and care less than nothing about what is right or wrong, wise or foolish. So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you h…

I really love your comment. Too few people realize this.

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

#195

Post by WalterBright »

inopinatus wrote: post #172
barrkel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because maybe they’re just looking for the right environment, and maybe you’re it. Hiring is like dating, after all. This reads instead like an egregious case of the fundamental attribution error, and one that’d I’d view as quite the blunder by my management team, since the real consequence is limiting our access to the talent pool. Even aside from the FAE, this kind of attitude also systematically reinforces structu…

> Hiring is like dating, after all.

Past behavior is a pretty good predictor of future behavior. If you're dating someone whose previous 3 spouses died in mysterious kiln explosions, I'd stay away from the ceramics factory.

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

#196

Post by noisy_boy »

Non-technical - was too outspoken/somewhat abrasive and expressed opinions/ideas a bit too strongly. Of course it depends on exiting culture but in my case, it got labelled me as hot-headed and not "reliable" (even though objectively looking, some of the stuff I wrote is still being used). Perceptions form fast, are not always rational and pretty hard to break so it might be beneficial to observe more, express only when necessary and do so in an even and calm manner.

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

#197

Post by dasyatidprime »

Landing a first job while holing up with an acquaintance after escaping my birth family, and then trying to move to live by myself without realizing just how screwed-up a lot of my subconscious and worldmodel was (and some of you will have noticed that possibility already after reading “escaping my birth family”). Access to the city and not wanting to be more of a burden on my host were legit motivations, but it turns out that that much stress at once combined with the wrong kinds of weakness in handling results in going near-catatonic (at least externally) a few months in and getting fired.

Whoops! Oh, and there's that multi-year non-compete agreement… in the only thing I have experience in…

Fifteen years and several retry cycles later, someone who graduated twelve years after me now has the three solid years of full-time experience that I never got (in significant part because once you have a Résumé of Nothing, it stays that way), and just landed a job making about twice as much as I'm potentially going to be able to start making a month or two from now if I drive my context-switching ability and energy output right up to the limit.

Did I mention that getting access to healthcare to fix relevant issues was almost impossible for almost the entire time? At least I have a potential path to it now—and there's only a decade of backlog…

Don't do what I did and waste your life. You need a fucking real job. Do whatever it takes to keep it for long enough. Otherwise you lose.

(In fact I am not entirely coherent in my opinions on the matter, though—and the rule of equal and opposite advice applies…)

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

#198

Post by vfulco2 »

Believing that senior management had a legit plan for my career track. In actuality, they would have preferred the status quo as long as possible. I stayed 2 years too long in a 6 year gig; there were other manipulative issues from the boss on all his staff. You own your career progress/development 110%. Think like a mercenary and don't let anyone fool you otherwise.

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

#199

Post by goostavos »

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?

Use this One Weird Trick to keep employees: pay them money.

With the exception of my current gig, my early career was hopping non-stop. My shortest stint was literally 4 days, my average was probably about 1 year. Each time, pretty simple, you look at the paltry 2-4% increase being offered by your current employer versus the 20%+ increase from hopping literally anywhere else, and, well, you surely see why people hop ship all the time.

Your "investment" means very, very little when it's not backed by the thing that actually matters (the money).

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

#200

Post by neilv »

I was a teenage intern, and my software engineering team was crunching in the evening on a project, when there was a problem on a workstation.

The sysadmin was gone for the day, so I was asked for help.

I saw the root filesystem was full, partly due to a bunch of junk files in `/tmp/`, including some files/directories that started with `.`...

You might guess where this is going, when someone hadn't yet developed good intuition for what was safe and not. At some point in cleaning up (and not having filename completion in that shell), I cavalierly typed:

    rm -rf .*
When the command was taking too long, I got a sinking feeling, and hammered Ctrl-C, while in parallel realizing exactly why it was taking so long. (Spoiler: `.*` matches `..`, so `rm` went up the filesystem tree, to `/`, and then tried to go depth-first traversal through the entire tree.)

It gets worse. This wasn't just a workstation -- this was a Sun Workstation, in the era of "the plethora of NFS dependencies is the computer". IIRC, either `rm -rf` started following the NFS automounter symlinks, to delete files from servers that it could, or an ad hoc NFS server had been set up on that workstation for some team purpose. Either way, `rm` hit files shared by multiple people, who were already working into the evening on a project.

It was the fault of the intern, who was both inexperienced and overconfident, and my team was really nice about it. Maybe they knew I regretted it so hard that, if I survived the next few minutes, I'd still regret it many years later.

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