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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?

#441

Post by consultingthrow »

ferdowsi wrote: post #161

Tying my identity to the company I worked for. Tech-corporate culture incentivizes you strongly couple your sense of self with your company, which was frankly disastrous for me and for anyone else I've known to fall into the trap. I could see my company struggle and fall behind, and I desperately wanted to help turn things around (after all, this company was part of who I was). I overextended myself, made bad enginee…

Pragmatically this is why I stick to consulting now. Had my heart broken a few times and it's good to have a level of separation from the core product and company. From the client's side it's also good to have impartial eyes.

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

#443

Post by ghaff »

ergocoder wrote: post #180
ghaff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never taken a break year but I have taken full advanrage of travel opportunities. I took a few one month vacations at one company. Certainly didn't cost me millions though unless it would have been it discouraged me to make a big change regardless of changes in vacation time maybe. But I doubt it.

One month vacation is great. it's a change of scenes and paces (you cannot just sprint all year long). We all need to slow down once in a while. Traveling for a year is just tiring...

I could extrapolate to 2 or 3 months given I've done a month or so (whether pure pleasure or a mix of business and pleasure) a number of times. But even the practical issues aside, I think I'd find much more than that tiresome after a while.

I've known a few people who jumped into the digital nomad thing and by and large it didn't last too long.

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

#444

Post by drobert »

tasuki wrote: post #433
crossroadsguy wrote: post #155

- 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…

Why are you here?

What's the meaning of life?

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

#446

Post by codegeek »

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…

SO many lessons here for a lot of people.

1. Always do backups. REMOTELY. OFFSITE.

2. Check your backups regularly. Make sure you can restore from them if needed.

3. Don't ask Interns to run delete commands casually. Heck, don't run deletes casually at all.

4. See #1.

5. Don't be a dick. This was really bad for the firm but having worked at investment banks myself, people can be dicks especially in high pressure environments like that.

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

#447

Post by ganzuul »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #422
ganzuul wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extroverts can be incredibly ignorant and dangerous when they encounter introverts. They seem to operate on very simple heuristics.

What an over-generalized and incredibly strange comment.

I think it's great if something I said made you self-aware, if you think you may have been in error and are asking for clarification, but what is making you pipe up? It seems like you want to be included.

I'll reciprocate. - If I'm understanding what I am reading, at the stage of life OP seemed to be when he had his experience these would have been relevant social categories. They are highly generalized like you say, but none of us were born with perfect reckoning. This comment is not strange, because I am showing that there are others who suffered the same and we don't have to be silent about it.

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

#448

Post by HaNeThrowAway »

I once worked for a startup where the founders had a very obvious bias towards hiring people with a certain skin colour. My mistake was mentioning it to HR. I was accused of racism, demoted, and forced to take cultural sensitivity training. That was the day I learned you can't trust HR no matter how friendly they are in person.

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

#449

Post by HaNeThrowAway »

kqvamxurcagg wrote: post #374
emptysongglass wrote: post #335

Earlier 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…

You also don't know who your boss knows or who you'll run into again. Burning bridges is satisfying but I'm sure I was turned down for at least one job based on the circumstances under which I left. Even though it was all supposed to be confidential.

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

#450

Post by madaxe_again »

lokischild wrote: post #426
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…

You lost me somewhere between "I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do." and the rest of the story. Did you misunderstand? I don't see the logical conclusion

In that type of company, shit flows downhill - very alpha male chest thumping workplace, lots of cocaine floating around. The IT guy was a buddy of the owner, and was clearly ashamed of the situation but wasn’t about to stick his neck out for the PFY, and I was basically there to run trunk cabling in plenum spaces and get some real world Linux sysadmin experience. Someone’s head had to roll, and it was mine, as it was a very cheap and disposable head to lop off.
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