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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?

#351

Post by shoto_io »

_huayra_ wrote: post #347

Perhaps it's not a huge mistake, but I definitely did not think through the pros and cons of getting a PhD. There have certainly been some benefits (e.g. being able to move from my home country to one I prefer), but the amount of forgone earnings and time working on problems all by myself (where I don't get the advantage of mentorship so much; profs really have checked out on coding since before y2k in the most part)…

Same here. I met some great, great people and had a great time intellectually. But I never needed anything I learned there in my career and basically "lost" 5 years compared to peers.

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

#353

Post by raffraffraff »

faitswulff wrote: post #209
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…

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.

As long as you hung around long enough to figure out how to work with difficult people, and learn how your design decisions and code actually run in production (ie: you got to fix your own bugs) then you probably didn't miss much. I worked with one person who had an impressive string of senior roles at big companies, but my personal experience was that they implemented a dumpster fire using the latest hot new thing, and quit after it blew up production a few times.

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

#354

Post by 533474 »

mikewarot wrote: post #204

I 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…

long haul covid-19?

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

#355

Post by lukaszkups »

I was working on a small webdev company. One day I had to update DNS records from X to Y because of Z (don't remember exact reasons) - turned out that my change broke setup for company e-mails (not ours, our clients) and they were offline for like half of the day until someone figured out what exactly happened.

Later it become a meme in that company, that every webdev need to break client's e-mails at least once, because it happened to other devs 2 or 3 times :)

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

#356

Post by robin93 »

My biggest mistakes were: - I loved studying CS. I was in a class with 5 other students and we had close interactions with the professor. After I took the exam, the professor asked me to become his assistant (not PhD but student). I turned down the offer because I would have needed to quit another shitty student job. In my case, this would have been an important experience for getting a PhD position though. - Taking one of the first offers after graduation and sticking with it for too long.

Maybe this advice is helpful to someone. Let's divide people into those who don't realize that they don't understand something and those who realize that they don't understand something. And into those who ask questions and those who like hearing themself talking/explaining.

Out of the four the combination of 'don't realize that they don't understand' and 'likes hearing themself talking/explaining' is horrible. Run away as fast as you can! You cannot do anything. If you ignore it: then, it leads to a bad project outcome. If you try to fix them: your relationship will deteriorate which again leads to a bad outcome and more.

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

#357

Post by nostradamnit »

In '98 I uploaded an index.html for a subsection of the corporate site to the root, squashing the corporate home page in the process. We didn't have any source control or backups. I had a colleague who had the page open, and I was able to copy the code from his browser. Learned a lot that day!

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

#358

Post by toyg »

Aeolun wrote: post #325
justrudd wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, that’s cool, but you haven’t actually adressed the problem, which is that I’ll spend 3 months training you, only to have you quit after 9 more. That’s not really a good investment

His point is that it will only take a month to get him up to speed, not 3.

But I agree that a better answer would probably be something along the lines of "I have so much experience that I deliver in a year what the average guy would give you in 5; and if you're good to me, I might well stick around as much as I did at X", or something along those lines.

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

#359

Post by lazyweb »

LinuxBender wrote: post #82

Not putting the hostname or something distinct in my shell prompt, at least on my machine. sync && reboot Connection closed by remote host. Mild panic sets in... Oh, lets up-arrow and see what customer server I just rebooted. Reboot on Solaris did not do a graceful shutdown of anything, it just sig-kills everything. Veritas clustering in it's early years did not like this one bit.

Yup, that's why every single linux system I ever work on has molly-guard installed. Don't know about Solaris back in the day though.

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

#360

Post by emptysongglass »

beachy wrote: post #181

I was at IBM, fixing a critical mainframe that had brought the entire check clearance system for the country down. An angry customer was breathing down my neck, making idiotic suggestions. I was rattled. He wanted me to try swapping out some component. I said no, I was 100% sure that was not the problem. I was laser focused on fixing this problem. Turned out I was wrong. Customer complained to my management and I got…

> As sidenote, this is one of the 25 points of advice in John Perry Barlows "adult principles" which I discovered late in life. It is the only written work I have on my wall, with items 1, 3 and 10 marked with highlight pen by my wife as areas for personal development for me.

I want a little more context because if my wife highlighted areas for my personal development that was hanging on our wall, I would feel controlled, diminished, and disrespected.

By the same token, I would never force her to eternally view highlighted areas of personal development I had judged she lacked. It privileges your view as holy, when you are in fact just another person with a perspective, not absolute legitimacy.

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