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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?

#211

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?

Frankly speaking you really shouldn't be hiring anyone with the expectation that they'll be in their role more than a year or two. Ideally, you're working with them to move into a position with more responsibility and then you need to backfill their position anyway. What does it matter if their next role is with you or somewhere else?

It's a lot to ask for every company to have a role available for every employee when they're ready for more responsibility, and expecting them to just hang around waiting for their chance is pretty naive, I think.

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

#212
post #85

I 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.

Same lesson different phrasing —

A CTO was in my country and wanted to see our prototype. We had meetings booked the whole day, and the CTO ran very late... could have easily waited, but decided to go to the next meeting.

Instead in 3 months we flew to the CTOs home base, and the demo fell over... it was fine in our home country, just screwy in the other.

lesson: be with the decision makers as early as you can

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

#213
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…

Counterpoint: I consistently leave jobs too early when I could have instead stuck around and made larger impacts during restructurings or just sat around and done nothing and gotten paid. Would I be better programmer? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But would I have gotten paid and had a more intact career? Certainly.

What do you mean by having an "intact career"? Did leaving too early harm your career, and if yes, how so?

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

#214
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…

Totally random story:

I was one of the beta testers for BSDI, in 1990 (long before Linux or FreeBSD). They sent me QIC-40 tapes that I used on my fancy new 386/33 with a SCSI tape system that I bought just for this purpose. The problem was, I kept getting weird data corruption - compiling anything would spit out random errors that obviously weren't in the source files.

After a few months of this, I gave up and installed OS/2 instead (from floppy!). It failed on install with a cryptic error message. I called OS/2 support, gave them the error code, and they asked "Do you have different speed memory modules installed?" Bingo, that was it. I never did install OS/2, but the install process was invaluable.

I didn't end up using BSDI much. Most of my work was on the CSC department's Pyramid timesharing system, so I just used a terminal on Windows (3.x). RIP polyslo.calpoly.edu.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well I think that’s an absurd and extreme example, so the reductio ad absurdum is self-limiting, since serial killers are, hopefully, not the common case. How about this analogy instead, being more in the realm of the applicable and commonplace: I broke up with many girlfriends, and had many short- and medium-term partners, before meeting my wife of over a decade now, who continues to knock my socks off to this day.…

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I'm fairly certain that this was one of those so-called "jokes" you may have heard of.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> whose previous 3 spouses died

Employment is not marriage.

Hiring someone who has hopped jobs 3 times is more like dating someone who has dated 3 other people before you.

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

#217
I didn’t realise how important politics were and how far some people will go to crush you if you think you are a threat.

I had a senior co-worker tell me some documentation I had written was terrible, when I asked what was wrong with it he replied “everything”.

Months later I found much the same document (as in 90% of it was copy pasted from mine) in our company wiki, under his name.

I /think/ (thankfully such a situation has n out come up since) I should have raised this with him and more senior managment immediately instead of just sighing and moving on from it.

I also echo sentiments about not leaving early enough - if the ship is on fire, be with the rats, not the captain.

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

#219
I used a data migration tool that, unknown to me, reset the counter for auto incrementing indexes. I had used those counters for serial number fields.

There are hundreds (thousands? It’s been a long time) of high end bicycle components in this world laser etched with overlapping serial numbers because of me.

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