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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?

#241

Post by stordoff »

_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.

Similarly, selling the 60-70BTC I mined at around $2-3 each (early 2011), after I (CS student) and a couple of economics students came to the conclusion it was never going to last. Really wish I'd kept even one just as a punt.

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

#242

Post by iKevinShah »

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…

> Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts.

Oh my god this is so true for me too. I had really strong opinions on so many things that if I put aside my ignorant opinions about them, I / my life / career would have been better. Strong opinions I had included I don't need to use OOP in PHP (had to until too late), Bitcoin is worthless who would ever invest in it (had to until too late / costly), NoSQL is just useless, what's so wrong with PostgreSQL (had to swallow my words until I used Redis), so many more. The current opinion I am holding is "who needs Kubernetes" when individual VMs do the trick and slowly but steadily I feel these words will be regretted too.

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

#243

Post by solresol »

Working on a ServiceGuard cluster of HP-UX boxes for a major retailer, I put the IP address onto the wrong computer, and stopped all warehousing operations (for the country) the day before a long weekend. Might have been a million dollars worth of losses incurred...

My brother short-circuited $25k worth of test equiment (at a time when salaries were around $30k/yr) on his first day at work at one job.

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

#244

Post by kqr »

TX0098812 wrote: post #203
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…

This is largely true but I know there are employers who do care and who are loyal to their employees. It's all a matter of people and who you are dealing with.

That's my experience too. As a junior, however, I couldn't tell good employers from bad so I tended to pick bad ones (they vastly outnumber the good ones, after all) and then stay with them for far too long.

I mean, I value continuity and a healthy long-term relationship with a reciprocating organisation more than most, but the first few years I spent at a crap shop for crap pay and with only fear of my superiors motivating me? I think I could have gotten the same experience but better in a few other places I've been since.

(On the other hand, maybe that first experience is what made me so picky in selection of employers after that?)

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

#245

Post by zub »

I worked at a consulting place for ten years that was packed with a bunch of wise veterans who were mentors for me. They also paid poorly and had no benefits. A pivotal place for me in my career but I should have left a half decade earlier.

And I wanted to work there so badly that I jumped on their first offer. The classic.

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

#246

Post by exspook »

propogandist wrote: post #232
exspook wrote: post #220

Working at the NSA. I am no longer able to travel to mainland China out of concern for my safety. I work closely with hardware and the inability to visit Chinese factories is becoming a career limitation.

what made you leave?

I married a foreign national and was promptly walked out.

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

#247

Post by derwiki »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #165
rsynnott wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It can take time to build political capital to be trusted to lead/ship a project.

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

#248

Post by bo0tzz »

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.

While you should definitely check the links from other commenters, and targeted resources like that are great, what has worked wonders for me is to just apply a general curiosity. Any time you get a chance to dive into a fundamental topic, do so. Start at wikipedia pages, and before you know it you'll have your bases covered.

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

#249

Post by kqr »

justrudd wrote: post #228
mailshanx wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on the company you’re interviewing with and (IME) region you’re looking for work. In my 26 years since graduating university, I’ve had 13 jobs. So an average of 1.8 years per job. My longest was 6 years at Amazon (ironically enough considering they have such a high turnover) and my shortest was 3 weeks (I knew during the interview it wasn’t a good fit, but I was young and they threw a stupid amount of money a…

> (never tell HR during your exit interview what you really think of them).

I'll offer a corollary: have already said everything you think before you quit. That way, there is nothing else to say during the exit interview anyway.

There are two reasons for saying what you think while you're still employed:

1. How will anything improve unless you voice your concerns? (Not saying they will when you do, just that they definitely won't when you don't.)

2. You are paid to think and then communicate your thoughts. If they only wanted your body, they could have bought a robot -- no, they're paying money for your brain too. Give it to them.

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

#250

Post by drewcoo »

Buttons840 wrote: post #216
WalterBright wrote: post #195

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.

> 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.

And considering that, someone who has only held long stints at previous jobs probably gets a red flag for not being desirable enough to more companies or just plain lack of curiosity.
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