My biggest early career mistake was starting a career too early (18). In my case (and I’m tempted to generalize it), having good knowledge of the self prior to working is critical for long term outcomes.
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
381–390 of 505 posts
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#382Earlier 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?
You can also mention how companies encourage disloyalty by paying new starters significantly more than existing employees. I’ve seen great people working hard towards a promotion, putting in the hours, playing everything right - only to be passed over for a promotion due to management politics and a boss that was looking out more for herself than her team. Meanwhile, another employee simply just left and walked into…
To be fair: the company might not have a need for the skill level which allows for a drastic pay increase.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#383About 6 months into my first proper gig I was working on some code for emailing people in estate agencies. Typically you've got three channels, Rental, Sales and Commercial there. This was a Java Spring app and I didn't really understand all the annotation magic, and the channel field was nullable as to make it non-null you needed to write a @NotNull annotation above it. To add insult to injury I gave the field the wrong name too, it was agentChannel, not channel.
I then wrote some code like:
if (channel == AgentChannel.sales) {
emailSales()
} else {
emailRentalOrCommercial()
}
Sales is obviously the most lucrative channel with the biggest contingent of, shall I say, "pushy" people and so when this was discovered I had quite an upsetting day.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#384In the old days as you approached 30 being a pure programmer was unheard of (or at least you were going to become that "weird guy" in a corner office) and you were expected to move into management / consulting
I resisted and became that guy. I would be far richer by now if I had put on a suit and gone into consulting. It's not like I didn't have offers
Keep an eye on your pension / savings when you are younger. It gets much harder to top them up the older you get. My pension options scare me now and I can't see retirement as a realistic path
Take money seriously!
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "frequently"? I'd like to see a minimum of three years ahead of a transition, and a decent story why. Often the contract ends, the company is sold and the new policies are draconian, etc. Fine. Given the level of effort involved in bringing someone on, my outfit cannot afford to be staffed like a fast food joint.
What is an acceptable duration for someone to stay at your outfit?
Plenty of career people at this consultancy. Also transplants. I just passed 5 years.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#386My biggest mistake was to discount and ignore the importance of management as a skill. As a good technician, I moved up to being a junior officer in the Navy and completely missed the point that I was to work through the enlisted sailors, not join them. I found myself staring East all night wondering why I was struggling. Suddenly, it dawned on me.
Not quite clear what you mean; Can you elaborate please?
The difference between tactics and strategy, specific and general, mechanism and policy.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#387At 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…
What a bunch of scumbags. There a are so many things wrong with the company and its workers under the light of this story...
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is not good advice for most people. You should always leave on good terms regardless of how much you hate a job. As an employee you often don’t know the constraints or risks of a project so you can’t make a firm judgement on ethics or transparency. It’s a small world and you’ll likely run into former colleagues again or rely on them for a reference (even without your knowledge). Under game theory there is no adv…
Telling the uncomfortable truth plainly is a reward, a grace to someone. Why would give this favour to a bad employer? Don't lie but let them sort out why you (and other valuable people) left. Find a friend to vent to.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is not good advice for most people. You should always leave on good terms regardless of how much you hate a job. As an employee you often don’t know the constraints or risks of a project so you can’t make a firm judgement on ethics or transparency. It’s a small world and you’ll likely run into former colleagues again or rely on them for a reference (even without your knowledge). Under game theory there is no adv…
It's our duty to our fellow human beings to construct a world we all want to live in. That can sometimes mean pushing back on bad behavior when it occurs. The only way we get a world that respects human dignity and values honesty is by holding each other accountable for our actions.
Game theory has no ethical compass. I can't think of a worse instrument to apply to human society.
Re: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
#390I was a teenage intern, and my software engineering team was crunching in the evening on a project, when there was a problem on a workstation. The sysadmin was gone for the day, so I was asked for help. I saw the root filesystem was full, partly due to a bunch of junk files in `/tmp/`, including some files/directories that started with `.`... You might guess where this is going, when someone hadn't yet developed good…
As an aside, I've never used '-f' in 'rm'. I've lived a happy life without it. Of course I know of its existence, but it was just never necessary in any of my usecases.
What I do is run ls with the same wildcard expression and see what's listed before running the rm command.