My biggest mistake is that I was working in security but left it for a different path. I could have been a hero!
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
301–310 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one. What's the answer?
Usually say it with more tact, but it is along the lines of - “Yes. I’m a professional new guy. I’ve seen and worked on a lot of different types of technology, and I come up to speed quickly. I’m not afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions when I can’t find what I’m looking for.” Something along those lines. I lean into it. But as I said, it doesn’t come up too often in the PNW.
How about “I leave subpar companies quickly and stay in great companies like Amazon for many years”?
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#303Not keeping up with professional connections as I made them from the start. Even a "happy birthday" card would've been enough, but here we are.
Happy birthday? That seems unnecessary really you don't need to send cards to all your connections. Just reach out if you want to reconnect don't overthink it - I feel it's pretty normal to drift in and out of connection/friendship even.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#304Earlier 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…
> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one. What's the answer?
"You're gonna have a good year"
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#305I 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…
So working after work? Ehh sounds pretty exhausting.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
- The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom is a mockery of a Bill of Rights. The first article makes it worthless as it essentially states the Law supersedes the Charter. In the US, it's the opposite; the Bill of Rights supersedes Congress' rule.
- Canada has literally no enshrined property rights (fuck, even People's Republic of China has private property rights in its Constitution). This was a special request of the socialist eastern provinces when the "Constitution" was put in place in the 1980's under Trudeau senior rule.
- Canada is the only country in the world where the Law grants special status to people by blood, cf. the Indian Act, which was used as a model for the apartheid laws in South Africa.
- Socialized health-care is essentially a joke.
- Taxes are higher.
In a general way, Canadian hate the Americans while desiring their lifestyle (same as what's happening in Quebec versus the Anglos; Quebekers hates English folks without realizing how their own culture is based on "Englishism" (often just badly translated in a patois french); in Europe (I come from there), they hates the Americans, but are submitting to American culture unable to develop a strong culture of their own, all being nothing but basic petty resentment).
Finally, everything otherwise plentiful south of the border is harder to find / more expensive (CAD is called the Canadian Pesos for a reason, because it ain't worth shit).
Of course, I didn't know any of that 15 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#307I used to forget my note to self TODO messages and accidentally sent “oh fuck fUuCcccccck you stupid idiot fix this you suck at your job…. Blah blah blah “ In a deploy that made it to production, the actual copy was much more offensive
In comments or user visible?
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#308Working for a company that exploits [mostly] kids/teens' attention while being aware of the long term negative psychological effects of such.
We all hate it, but it pays the bills. It's ultimately better to be in this position as a thoughtful person aware of the consequences of your work, since they would just replace you with someone less conscionable otherwise.
I don’t buy it, that’s just more useless virtue-signaling.
It feels like every other week on Twitter I read a thread from someone announcing their leave from FB for ethical reasons, conveniently ignoring the years they spent there happy with their paycheck.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#309I learnt and worked on how to earn money, but didn't learn and work on how to grow the money I earned.
What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
The effect of compound interest. Second time your money doubles and you've quadrupled your original investment. Requires patience and self-discipline though!
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#310Earlier 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…
> “You’re going to give me a year and then be gone. Why should I hire you?”. Never had a good answer when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s, I have a pretty good one. What's the answer?
As someone who has a number of short stints on his resume, I usually go with, "There's a big difference between ten years of experience, and one year of experience repeated ten times. I have experience with a wide variety of frameworks and architectures. I've done real work in both front-end and back-end codebases. I've worked in Windows environments and Linux environments. I've even done some DBA work. I can bring knowledge of a wide variety of best practices to bear on any problem that I'll encounter at this current role."
The other thing I've found is that the companies that make a really big deal about "job hopping" and "employee loyalty" aren't really ones that you want to work for anyway. They're paranoid about employee loyalty for a reason, and rather than look at their own management to see why employees are leaving after short stints at that firm, they blame the employees, usually with some absurd generalizations about "millenials" or "gen z".