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Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
261–270 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#262Working 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.
Hardware Security?
I currently work in hardware security, but my job at the NSA was mundane and barely involved anything secret.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#263My 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…
> My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time
This.
My OH's currently moving jobs and we have been discussing how overdue this move is. Somehow once you make the decision to leave it brings all the blur of past injustices/lunacy* into proper focus.
The last time I left somewhere, after a fairly long relationship, they went into insolvency proceedings within a year**
* For my OH's move: her old lot couldn't even get the announcement of her departure right - it was announced by accident by a senior manager on a conference call, two weeks before she'd even seen, never mind signed the new contract, or given notice ...
** not my fault, honest
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#264Working in tiny companies rather than large one. Now large ones will say to me - you've messed around loads why should we take you?
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#265Stayed too long at my first job.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#266I 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…
I've had to clean up after some incidents like that. There was one where an accidental recursive delete was running for several hours traversing a bunch of mounts. root was mapped to nobody so it could only delete from world-writable directories but that was bad enough. It was on Netapp filers so it wasn't too hard to restore from snapshots but it took us a while to find the culprit. There was a lot of traffic from many machines so it wasn't trivial to figure out where the REMOVE calls in question were coming from.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#267I decided to study electrical engineering instead of computer science because I was dead certain there was no money to every be made writing software.... in the 1980s! I chose the wrong school because they accepted me, and my high school counselor thought I had zero chance. I couldn't afford it, and dropped out. I would have gone much farther studying computer science at Purdue Calumet, and could have had it all paid…
Making gears, like literally assembly line work? Or do you mean modeling/designing them in solidworks or similar?
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#268I would say not prepping enough for technical interviews. I did a lot of prep (hundreds of hours) but it wasn’t enough. I needed more because I was always being compared to senior engineers with 10+ years of XP who had been through the gauntlet a lot. Very few companies were ever explicating hiring for a junior or “mid” level role when I was looking. (Less than 3 years xp) In the end, I realized I need to be doing in…
That's terrible. What is anyone gaining from all that interview prep?
$400K+ compensation.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#269My 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.
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Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#270I would say not prepping enough for technical interviews. I did a lot of prep (hundreds of hours) but it wasn’t enough. I needed more because I was always being compared to senior engineers with 10+ years of XP who had been through the gauntlet a lot. Very few companies were ever explicating hiring for a junior or “mid” level role when I was looking. (Less than 3 years xp) In the end, I realized I need to be doing in…
That's terrible. What is anyone gaining from all that interview prep?
Yeah I don’t really get it. I’ve interviewed and got offers (but also lots of rejections) at many companies including FAANGs. Never prepped more than a couple days. I think I’d go crazy with the schedule you set out.