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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?

#411

Post by [deleted] »

Kiro wrote: post #397
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…

Why was it a mistake? What happened?

[deleted]

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

#412

Post by hdhjebebeb »

barrkel wrote: post #159
eyelidlessness wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).

I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two. With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?

Conversely, I've worked at places where the people who had been there for 5-10 years were just coasting, the product was stagnant, and constantly hiring new people was the only way to get out of a rut. They were paying these people for maintenance and to hold on to institutional knowledge, but everybody was so comfortable that very little got done.

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

#413

Post by faitswulff »

mailshanx wrote: post #213
faitswulff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by having an "intact career"? Did leaving too early harm your career, and if yes, how so?

GP here, responding directly. I've been told by a ycombinator company that they want to see 2+ years at an engineering heavy company. I also just regret not making more conventional career choices that you don't have to struggle to explain during interviews. Far easier if you have an unbroken line of employment. But alas.

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

#414

Post by quietbritishjim »

quanticle wrote: post #310
pedrosorio wrote: post #236

Earlier 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?

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 k…

That doesn't answer the question at all. You were asked "how do I know you won't leave in a short time frame?" and you answered the completely different question "what benefit (to you) have you got from having lots of jobs?". If anything, it suggests you view leaving companies after a short time as a positive thing you'd want to do again.

By the way, I don't agree that if a company would like employees that tend to stick around then that indicates some sort if weird cult-like behaviour. It's more like a recognition that productivity naturally is lower in the months after someone joins than after they've been there for a year or two. Choosing people that are able to stick at a job for a few years is just a sensible business decision. Admittedly it does have social benefits too i.e. there's a better work environment for everyone if you get to know other people over a period of time (in spite of some HN commenters' views that we're all robots that shouldn't care about interactions with coworkers). But, in my view, even that is reasonable justification.

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

#415

Post by rpastuszak »

neillyons wrote: post #378
nostradamnit wrote: post #357

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!

Haha, oh my god.

> 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!

ha, I can almost see the situation as if I'd happened in my old office. Now imagine doing that with a Typescript SPA bundled using web pack :)

I'm not criticising SPAs or the modern web stack in whatever flavour you choose (there are pros and cons to abstractions), but I still do miss the ability to just browse the page code, the web being more open in that regard.

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

#416

Post by hdhjebebeb »

smitty1e wrote: post #385
beckingz wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consulting is a little unique in my experience - if there's a steady stream of work, you never really stick with the same client full time for the full 5 years. It's a lot easier to keep your skills fresh and move around to find interesting challenges

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

#417

Post by xiljin »

Back around 2000, I was writing software patches for a large telecom company. These patches had to be applied to live, inservice telephone switches and equipment that were powering public phone services - restarts and downtimes were not an option. Needless to say, careful consideration had to be given with regard to how a patch was developed and applied.

I don't recall the specifics, but one fateful patch had a very large compound boolean expression that included an invalid condition. For whatever reason, that expression didn't or couldn't receive 100% test coverage.

When applied, this patch took down the entire phone service (including emergency 911) for the island of Newfoundland Canada and all its residents (maybe 300-500k people).

The immediate fix was simply a new patch that reverted the bad patch. Unfortunately, it took several hours from the point we learned of the issue to writing, delivering and applying the fix.

I've heard that Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being very friendly, so I like to believe that all has been forgiven and forgotten and that I may one day visit the island in peace.

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

#418

Post by farmdawgnation »

void_mint wrote: post #26

Twice I have built entire full-featured applications and then not shipped them out of embarrassment(fear of failing I guess?). Both times, a few years later similar applications became very popular. Very recently one of them showed upon the front page of HN to high praise. It's a mistake I'm still making, I guess, which is to assume that it could never "be me". It can be anyone. Just ship the damn thing.

Ha, I've had this experience recently. I was working on a private pototype of automated dependency updates in GitHub repos before it was a thing that was widely available. Ended up abandoning it. Of course, a few years later....

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

#419

Post by SamWhited »

The biggest one I remember is telling everyone that I was logging off for the day, typing "sudo poweroff" and then wondering why my laptop hadn't shut down… turns out I was ssh-ed into our main production server which was not redundant and the whole system went down.

Thankfully my boss was understanding. I intercepted the on-call notice and took care of it before filing a report about how it happened which was probably helpful. I had pushed back previously against passwordless sudo as well and been overridden, so maybe they took that into account too. Still, I thought I was going to be fired for the mistake either way and am very thankful they didn't.

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