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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?

#291

Post by busterarm »

I worked at a really toxic job at a hedge fund where I let them burn me out in a year and then they fired me. Several mistakes were made:

1) I failed to realize the importance of face time/asses in seats time. I was spending tons of ime working late nights and weekends solving hard problems outside of trading hours where nobody could see the hard work I was putting in. Also, being the only hourly, all of my coworkers would disappear early Friday afternoon and everyone else senior in the department would ask me to do weekend work that would effectively have me working 2 days of overtime without going home. Essentially on Fridays I worked for 3 straight days without going home every weekend for 9 months.

2) I accidentally exposed an embarassing mistake made by several seniors in the department. A simple question that I asked in a meeting when I saw how two pieces of network gear were hooked up identified that if either went down we would end up with a network loop and a minor catastrophy for a very expensive trading system. Two of the network engineers in particular were really angry at me for this and would no longer speak to me afterwards. Apparently correcting the mistake took several weekends of off-hours work.

3) I let an absolute snake in the department "mentor" me when I was new. I failed to realize she was using me as an opportunity to reassign her work. When I got sick for three days with a sinus infection, she reassigned hundreds of her outstanding tickets she was delaying on to me and then started calling me out in department emails asking where I was and why I wasn't handling the tickets. Nobody bothered to look at the history before forming their opinions about me. Luckily, she's no longer in the industry and works as a baker.

4) I let the traders physically abuse me. One asshole spilt a cola on his Bloomberg keyboard and I was at his desk with a replacement within 5 minutes. Apparently I wasn't fast enough for his liking and he spent that few minutes kicking me in the ribs as hard as he could while I was under his desk hooking up the new keyboard.

5) I was addicted to World of Warcraft. Despite the long hours I spent at work, I unfortunately filled my free time with video games instead of finding a better job.

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

#292

Post by lqze »

therufa wrote: post #285

I put too much effort into work which lead to a severe burnout that rendered me incapable of being useful and productive for years. I'm one of those guys who grew up using computers, every wake minute I was thinking about computer related stuff, everything had a solution using software in my head. I lost this from one moment to the other. Luckily for me it came back after 4 years of the crash. Fun times. Have a life…

I haven't reached severe burnout but have recognised I am coming up to it, and coming from a background as similar to yours. The doing something unrelated part has to be key to a healthy work/fun/life balance.

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

#293

Post by justrudd »

kqr wrote: post #249
justrudd wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 def…

I agree with you. I generally don’t hold anything back in my 1:1, skip level 1:1, etc. But if you’ve communicated effectively, it makes no difference to rehash it to HR on the way out the door. HR, usually, doesn’t care.

And I’ve left positions where the company pivoted, and I didn’t agree with the pivot. Told the powers that be, but the pivot was done. No reason to dredge it up again.

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

#294

Post by lqze »

Sofware unrelated: I was an underqualified "sales" associate handling an incoming call for an order, when I thought it would be better for the business to call the overdue account of the client into question. I ended up saying "If you don't pay your bill, then my boss doesn't get money, then he doesn't pay me and then I can't buy groceries for dinner." - only for my sales manager sitting next to me go completely wide-eyed in disbelief as he had to wrestle the phone off me and recover the phonecall!

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

#295

Post by dlhavema »

clncy wrote: post #186
sdotsen wrote: post #20

Reinventing the wheel. So many hours wasted on creating something that already existed in the form of PHP libraries or Python libraries that are written by much smarter folks. I tell my guys now, tools such as Ansible exist, don't try to write a whole Bash program to mimic what Ansible can do.

Counter to that though, re-inventing the wheel is a great learning exercise.

As a learning exercise yes, no need to "learn" with new production code :)

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

#296

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

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?

Depends on the project. I just launched something last week I'd been working on for the previous 18 months.

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

#298

Post by fzil »

mnouquet wrote: post #256
brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the United States over Canada? I can see money being a reason, but the quality of life, I believe, is better in Canada

Canada has turned into a totalitarian hell-hole. First things turned bad in Quebec, but then all over Canada now. Quality of life wise is only good if you're enjoying the scripted theatre show, I do not, never have. At least, the US (outside of the blue states) have some leftover Rights worth fighting for.

mind elaborating what rights are being curtailed in Canada? Quebec right now has that stupid no religious attire in public offices law right now. What else?

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

#299

Post by axegon_ »

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…

Seems this is more common than I anticipated. That said, I've only done that at my first job, not so much because I felt like I owed my employer anything but because it was my first full time job as a developer so I questioned every descision.

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

#300

Post by GlennS »

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 made this mistake once in my first proper job. It took me 2.5 years to leave a place where I was really unhappy.

So, move on from bad jobs, move on from meh jobs, and be quick about it. Eventually you'll find somewhere you enjoy and you can stick around for a while.

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