431–440 of 505 posts
I was young, and super excited to have a job in software while still in school, building things. Only much later did I realize that multi-level marketing (pyramid schemes), pay day loans and companies selling bath salts to smoke, all hurt people.
I was removed enough from the problem that I didn’t see it at the time, and it all seemed so exciting, but I certainly have lots of regrets from that time.
I recall this particular intern used GUIs for everything and suspect their file manager wouldn't have displayed dot files by default.
- Not leaving jobs often (even without clear immediate reasons). - Not being aggressive about trying to get better salaries. This was mostly due to the previous point. - Not leaving shitty managers and teams ASAP (“trying” is the biggest mistake in such situations). But when I look real close then the single biggest mistake is: - Having not identified early that Software/CS simply doesn’t interest me. It’s just a ski…
Biggest mistake that impacted my career was not having a "rolodex" or keeping up contacts with people I met over dozens of projects my first decade. Biggest whopsie as a 15 year old building servers was starting a server with case covers off to check whether it boots, then dropping a screw on the exposed hard drive board. It left a neat trail of sparks and smoke as it bounced down. 200mb full drive of insurance compa…
Also in the 90's, knocked west coast offline by null routing the /24 that contained peer router addresses. Broke DNS for a few thousand domains by corrupting named.db on our primary NS before going to lunch, editing the sendmail.cf on the primary mail server in production for an ISP without revision control. I worked for the kind of people who could debug a sendmail.cf cold, so they could afford to have someone as dumb as me around, but still, I meddled in the afairs of wizards.
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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!
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, bec…
It's a meme in our company that web devs break client's emails as well. ;)
2. Not trying to make money from day 1 for something slightly non-profit because we were afraid it would drive people away. I think it would have been more honest, closer to where we wanted to get and ultimately it could have funded us to continue our work.
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I agree with this right up until the last sentence. If you feel the need to be an “impeccable toy model” I’d say leave. Sounds like a recipe for a life of misery.
It is like that. Leaving for what? Most places are similar. Same shit different people. Some times you get lucky, and you get some time where things are working for you - but teams never remain, good people move on or up. Leaving is not always the answer, keeping your head low and surviving is modus operandi for a lot of people.
Perhaps I’ve been lucky though. I’ve worked at places with potential to move internally which has kept things fresh and allowed me to grow expertise on the same larger team without losing tribal product knowledge altogether.
I’ve only switched companies once and it had more to do with curiosity than bad management.
I didn't immediately end a meeting to demo a prototype when 2 out of 3 stakeholders were no shows. I got lots of feedback from the remaining stakeholder that the other 2 strongly disagreed with.