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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?

#271

Post by NikolaNovak »

Biggest mistake that impacted my career was not having a "rolodex" or keeping up contacts with people I met over dozens of projects my first decade.

Biggest whopsie as a 15 year old building servers was starting a server with case covers off to check whether it boots, then dropping a screw on the exposed hard drive board. It left a neat trail of sparks and smoke as it bounced down. 200mb full drive of insurance company data burned in front of my boss watching.

Later in career, different place different times, my colleague and best friend ran a mistyped grep on prod server that tried to suck up all of the files content redirected into a single file. AIX in my limited experience is an unbelievably robust system - but it does Not handle root disk out of space well. Or at all.

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

#272

Post by djsavvy »

alashley wrote: post #78

Taking a job as a solo "lead" developer at a startup for my first job out of school. I picked up so many bad habits and it took a while to figure out how to collaborate with others on code. If I had to take that same path again, I would get involved with an open-source project to solidify the fundamentals.

Can you talk about some of the bad habits you picked up (and maybe how you could have avoided them at the time)?

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

#273

Post by ian-g »

georgeburdell wrote: post #124

Accepting a job with QA out of school. It was 4 months before graduation, and I had been searching 2 months and my morale was low at having been rejected a few times. I was a very good student with many accolades so rejection was new. As it happened, 1 month before I graduated, a job opened up in my ideal group, one I had interned in before and gotten a strong review, but by then I had already accepted the QA positio…

This is why the right time to leave some jobs is "not yet"

My current employer is great about letting people transfer through the business, and it's a great place to build a bunch of solid unsexy skills

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

#274

Post by NikolaNovak »

sciencesama wrote: post #221
faitswulff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hahaha, so true. But now a days having a career that is more than 3 years is considered weird !

It depends hugely on job location market company and myriad other circumstances. Again, HN average experience is not necessarily worldwide average experience :).

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

#275

Post by ian-g »

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'd just like to say, sometimes moving on is within your company. If you're somewhere that's good about letting folks try out different parts of the business, it can be good to stay.

Make a career change and get a new set of folks around you without having to leave everything behind

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

#276

Post by anovikov »

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 can only second it so many times!! I can't say i made SO many mistakes in my career, but i have left my then utterly dead-end first job too late, in 2007 while things were abundantly clear about it by 2005 already and i wasted two extremely frustrating years trying to keep it afloat. Lives of everyone who stayed were ever more destroyed than mine was.

I was young, and was making more than literally every single person i knew, i bought an apartment in a year in cash. I thought it was once-in-a-lifetime job which will never happen to me again.

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

#277

Post by ridiculous_leke »

* Not communicating enough with my team lead. This impacted my ratings. There will be places where you will be stuck early in your career. It's better to openly ask for help in such cases. This works even well if you are a star performer. Pratall effect is real.

* Applied wrong Cron job string for a mailer job to renew an IT asset. Instead of mailing at a specific time, mails went every second. A Senior exec(boss's boss) called and asked me to take it down. I was mortified for a moment since this was an unapproved use of company's resources. Thankfully nothing bad happened.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

logifail wrote: post #263
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…

> 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 m…

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by wincy »

m463 wrote: post #226
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…

Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. every. time. Then, after being in the new job for a short while, I thought, "wow! I should have done this sooner!" Related, I remember a friend telling me a story. It wasn't so much about leaving, but how to leave. She was in a job that was just a mess. Finally one day during a spectacle of mismanagement, she just quit in disgust. She said it was a mista…

I was inexperienced and moved from one job to another and it was absolutely AWFUL. I feel like I got fed a load of bullshit that I believed and left within 2 months. The first place I worked was great, and the second and third place I worked were churn and burn code monkey houses that were absolutely awful. My fourth software job was (is) great, though, and better than the first one.
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