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Comment by nexus2045 | Hacker News Reader

nexus2045

This feeling of behindness for me comes in the form of thinking that I have squandered my potential compared to someone my age who didn't mess up. I should have graduated in 2011, and could've been saving up significantly as a senior/staff/etc engineer at a BigCorp in Seattle/SF making a nice low 6 figure comp and be on my way to buying property with my SO. But instead I graduated 3 years late, worked at a string of failed startups and only began my career now making 50k USD in Canada. Yes, maybe those experiences met something, but I felt that I've been too much of a drifter, and am paying for that lack of focus and career climbing now.

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suggestion: surround yourself with people who constantly challenge you to do better. Everyone has times that they feel are "lost" but the time you need to remind yourself of is the moment that you realised you weren't doing what you wanted to be doing, or that something needed to change.

It wasn't until I started to spend time with people who I knew would ask hard questions and challenge me to keep going that I started to actually get shit done. Happy to chat if that'd help, but don't worry about time – my experience is that failed startups mean someone has a far broader level of experience than even they think they have.

And I'm one of those 27yo's who many people think have "made it" but still have the same sense of crippling "should I have done that differently" / "I squandered my youth" fear. It never goes away.

A lot of people who get seduced to work in startupville should heed this guy. The cost is not only the difference in pay for the years you are working in startups but the fact that career progression inside a bigcorp is forgone (and that itself is worth a lot)

Not really. It's harder to make your talent noticed in a big company. A software engineer's power is in producing software that is unexpectedly useful. In a big company that talent is often crushed under the weight of expected results.

I dunno. I haven't met a bigcorp yet (including government) where you couldn't join in the middle of the ladder with a sufficiently impressive resume, and working at interesting startups on tech that a bigcorp might want to use is definitely a way to do so.

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