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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?

#331

Post by crucialfelix »

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 got a good client and he kept giving me more work. 15 years later it was the only thing I could list on my resume. More variety also means experiences and learning.

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

#332

Post by busterarm »

mypalmike wrote: post #327
busterarm wrote: post #291

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…

> 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. For real?

For real.

The "traders are God' attitude was so thick that nobody seemed shocked about this nor motivated to do anything about it.

This was barely 15 years ago and I was a naive PFY. I wouldn't stand for that shit today.

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

#333

Post by irrational »

sgerenser wrote: post #289
irrational wrote: post #136

Not signing up for ESPP. Doh!

The rational thing to do with ESPP is immediately sell and collect the discount from market value. So if you were fully rational, at best this would have gained you a couple extra thousand per year.

>at best

How rich do you have to be to consider a couple extra thousand a year is an "at best" situation? At best? Its the very best thing!

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

#334

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I think this has changed in the other direction for me over time. I used to always question my own opinions, accept that others might have the better idea, only to see things spectacularly fail.

Now I assume I’m right until someone proves me false.

Still willing to accept other people’s opinions when I have no clue, but evidence seems to point towards my gut feeling being a better indicator of viability than whatever method those other people use.

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

#335

Post by emptysongglass »

giantandroids wrote: post #311
m463 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, never ever quit with a list of what you did not like. You gain nothing from it.

I don't know about this one. Sometimes it's important to take a principled stand. I was at a stocks company for all of two weeks, hired by a former friend. The very first day I was told not to email the security team directly and that all my emails from then on must be approved by my team lead. Within a week, I was told to lie to the security team. I spent most of those two weeks either in meetings or as a glorified page.

I really felt abused, devalued, and a tool for the shitty ethics of the corporation. So one day I pull my team lead and the other lead into a Zoom meet and unload and quit. I get myself on LinkedIn, canvas a few available jobs and within two weeks get a new job. In the interviews I made it crystal clear that I valued transparency and that I would not be forced to lie to anyone. Turns out that's one of their cultural pillars (transparency is an entire slide in their slide deck).

I have a manager I can honestly engage with. He knows what happened at the last company and he values that I spoke up.

These principled stands are not for nothing. We have to be able to believe in our own ability to have a social impact, however small. Shutting up and inoffensively walking away just buttresses shitty people (or shitty corporations, which are just egregores that have been hijacked by shitty people).

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

#336

Post by jtwaleson »

victor9000 wrote: post #110
napsterbr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this weird feeling that I'm making the same mistake right now.

If you've been there longer than 3 years, then yes, you're making the mistake.

In many startup product companies, the specific knowledge about the product is not interchangeable with other tech companies. The tech skills and the soft skills are, but a large part is know-how about the product and the market.

It makes sense to stick around longer if you see yourself as a "knowledge worker" rather than as an interchangeable techie. It certainly makes sense from the company's perspective to keep knowledgeable people around.

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

#337

Post by madaxe_again »

Aeolun wrote: post #329
madaxe_again wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar screwup, different outcome. Was working for a brokerage as an intern, IT gopher stuff, pretty much my first office job. A month in, I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do. I scurry off and rm -rf it, think it’s taking a while, so saunter out for lunch. Turns out that that directory was an active mount point for the root of the filestore on which they kept all of their…

A monitor tree?

A desk mounted vesa armature with four LCD monitors on it in 2x2. 2002, so would have cost an absolute fortune.

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

#338

Post by noodle »

Based on the comments, this might be a slightly different POV on the topic, but not understanding the value of personal/professional networking and soft skills. Very early on in my career, I was less interested in the networking aspect, and more focused on (for lack of a better way of describing it) pure meritocracy - if I become more skilled, more opportunities will naturally become available. I eventually discovered how narrow of a view this is and sometimes wonder how life would've gone if I'd had a different mindset earlier in life.

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

#339

Post by mypalmike »

On one of my first database projects, I developed an absurdly inefficient SQL database for time series data. Oh but it had a beautiful, easily generalizable, fully normalized schema which I was so proud of... Who cares that it requires a complex join before every insertion? And that multiple tables needed to be updated to keep track of metadata for each insertion?

It went into production without any load testing, and it struggled to keep up with even a few dozen time series.

I suppose the good news was that the product it was developed for never got many users, so it just hobbled along after applying some caching hacks. And of course I learned an important lesson about considering database access patterns.

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

#340

Post by exdsq »

madaxe_again wrote: post #321
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…

I had a similar screwup, different outcome. Was working for a brokerage as an intern, IT gopher stuff, pretty much my first office job. A month in, I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do. I scurry off and rm -rf it, think it’s taking a while, so saunter out for lunch. Turns out that that directory was an active mount point for the root of the filestore on which they kept all of their…

Thats disgusting behavior
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