Ask HN: What was your biggest failure in 2019? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was your biggest failure in 2019?

44 pointstopicseed41 comments

Let's stop listing our incredible achievements from the year that has passed.

Instead, let's discuss our biggest failures, what we didn't do, what we launched that flopped, and so on.

Not being able to overcome the fact that a lot of people are technically better than me, after 10 years in the field.

You know how bad people feel after they go on Facebook and look at how beautiful their friends' lifestyle is, without realizing it's all fake? Well, that's how I routinely feel when I browse HN, except that the work on HN is not fake, is way too real.

I see people posting brilliant work, work that is very much related to my field and that I should be able to come up with myself, and instead I barely comprehend.

It then gets worse: I navigate to their personal blog, and find hundreds of incredibly well-crafted articles about a wide range of topics. For example, just today from a front HN link I jumped to a personal blog of an engineer who was writing impressively deep thoughts about unit testing, dependency injection, Go, Java, hardware, architecture, backend, frontend, performance, ... Very, very thoughtful posts. I would not be able to reflect so deeply on those topics, even if I am relatively familiar with them. I have no other choice than believing I am stupid, at least in comparison to such person.

It then gets worse one more time: I look them up on LinkedIn, infer their age and see that they are younger than me, and that they were holding a demanding full time job all along, while writing those incredible articles and producing that amazing work on the side.

And it's not even that I could work harder. I literally cut 90% of my recreational activities: I don't have a TV, I don't watch Netflix, Youtube, games, I completely ignore news, I don't read novels, I don't have kids to take care of, ...

Every day after work I read technical books/articles until I go to bed. The only things I do non-related to my professional development are going to the gym regularly, and spending quality time with my girlfriend a few hours on weekends. But, I would say that on a given week I routinely put 70-80 hours on my professional development (including my full time job), so I couldn't do more than this without it affecting my mental and physical health.

Excellent post. Since you took the time to write it, some advice:

When you have been in the field for many more years, you will hopefully come to see that there are an infinite variety of gradations between people's skills, interests, capabilities, weaknesses, and that all are contextual, circumstantial. Formative time in the competitive crunch of youthful academia being distilled into a number, comparing our numbers with each other, seeing higher numbers are better, calling them "smarter," etc. That creates an illusion, one nearing obsolescence. There is no "smarter." People, and the world, are three dimensional, not one. And everyone has a narrow band in which they can be a superstar, with luck generally dictating whether one gets to spend time there.

Re: one specific activity you mention- "reading technical books/articles..."- there is a BIG difference between "consuming" activities and "producing" activities. Consumption produces certain kinds of growth that can be exhibited in conversation, in context, but is not directly measurable as output. If it motivates you to work on changing your behavior, instead of reading every night, write instead. Find your voice. Build the capability for technical storytelling. If it is not presently a skill, it will at first be awful, and hard. But with practice you may find yourself with a habit that produces several pieces a week. To a first approximation, that's usually all there is about what you are seeing- someone who writes rather than reads.

Be well!

You need to get rid of the expectation of being exceptional. You can lead a good life without being in the top 1% of accomplishments and abilities, just need to rearrange your priorities.

One thing, like you said, accept yourself as your are, do not compare with people on HN, on Linkedin, wherever. There will always be people better then you, the reasons are in genes, nurture, connections, luck. There are lots of people who are less smarter than you as well - will you advise them to keep comparing themselves with yourself? Or rather work with what they have?

Ease your anxiety, find joy in self-development, do not just push yourself harder. You cannot replace your genes, focus on being better then yourself a year ago, not someone else.

Another thing, 10 years of experience - you may be around 30+. It's time to take care more about your physical and mental health, start a family, reflect. You may become more efficient if you start doing diverse activities: build connections, create, write, connect to your emotions. You may regret in future that you spent so many hours on consuming technical literature.

Critical for you is to create rather than consume - you may see it after many years of book reading. In the end, you will have a lot of knowledge in your head, but not much to show the world. You will have a lot of wide knowledge, but will lack the depth. So pick a topic, do not go deep into research - start building naive stuff, then read more, improve, write about it. Any topic you are passionate about.

Connect to people in industry who you like, ask for advice or collaboration.

I am a classical musician. my job is very much a job of delivering on a high level, because everything I do can be heard by at least 4 people (immediate colleagues) at best, and a couple of thousands (at "worst").

My talent has always been my ability to practice. I could spend more hours, more focused than most of my peers. I, frankly, have a talent for spending a lot of time in what Vygotsky would call the zone of proximal development.

Despite all that there are loads of better bassoon players. When I was 25 I had to take a step back and realize I wasnt one of those amazing players. No sane amount of practice would get me to their level (which they reached by practicing less than me!).

Whatever we read into the term "talent" I think we can all agree that it isn't fair. We all sooner or later have to chose between our own sanity and trying to push it further.

I have found that taking a step back has actually made me a better player. Getting a child and being forced to distance myself from what so long was a large part of my identity was all in all good for me. It just forced me to be a bit more fatalistic and accept that I won't become much better than I am today.

For sure, for any kind of skill, there are always going to be people who are better than you at it. It's just that I'm not sure that better is what matters anyways. It seems to me that what's fazing you is not exactly people's skill, but how they apply themselves: you're impressed by the stuff they output into the world. And the point is that you too have a unique perspective. Even if you don't believe it, I do. Because all this learning that you go through is filtered through your own experience, so you're bound to end up with viewpoints that differ to others', even if you study the exact same thing.

Which is why I'd say, stop reading and start writing. Of course it's not going to sound great at first: One, you're just starting; Two, the real work that goes into writing well is in fact editing. But stick at it (like that guy - hundreds of articles!), and sure enough, you'll find your voice.

At school, grades are the thing that pushes you further, and it's little wonder we get stuck in this pattern of comparing and benchmarking. But in the real world, a much better motivator is helping others. Somewhere out there is someone who's struggling on stuff you've long filed away as obvious. Think of the choices you've made over the years, about what works vs what doesn't. These are your thoughts, and - written down - someone else might find them extremely on point.

The articles and projects you see are nothing more that that - a manifestation of a viewpoint. Benjamin Franklin said: "There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self."

It's probably not that so many people are technically better, but that you've not quite found what your schtick is. But everyone has it, it's just about finding it.

>I jumped to a personal blog of an engineer who was writing impressively deep thoughts about unit testing, dependency injection, Go, Java, hardware, architecture, backend, frontend, performance, ... Very, very thoughtful posts. I would not be able to reflect so deeply on those topics, even if I am relatively familiar with them. I have no other choice than believing I am stupid, at least in comparison to such person.

Do you write? Yes, your first draft wouldn't be as good as their 10th or 20th draft. No-one can write like that. No book or impressive blog post you read is a first draft. Try this talk on How To Write a Great Research Paper[0] (Good for any kind of writing, not just papers) He mentions how everyone feels their own ideas are pathetic. But you start by writing down the pathetic idea. That suggests other questions, connections.. It may develop into something not so pathetic. You don't write about your thoughts - you find out what they are by writing. I've written one academic-type paper, and 95% of what's in it, I learnt by writing it, and wouldn't have learnt otherwise. Which was a surprise! Whatever I wrote, there were some questions remaining, which were easy enough to answer (your brain does it automatically for you), and that continued until I was way past where I ever thought I'd be, or even hoped to be. Studying is great, but it's other people's thoughts. By writing you develop your own.

Just get busy doing what you're doing, stop comparing yourself with others. That's no way to live; it's torturing yourself. Learn to be kind to yourself. Would you continually nag a friend about how much more brilliant everyone else is? Sounds like you also eliminated fun from your life :-( Good luck!

Be careful of how you live your life, you may end up having to live your life that way.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP-FkUaOcOM

Is it imposter syndrome? Or just being unwilling to come to terms with the fact that other people will inevitably be better than you?

Fair point, I changed the wording. Thanks.

You should try to make peace with it. It’s no way to live always being upset someone is younger and smarter than you. Keep working hard, but do it for yourself.

I am, myself, still struggling with how un-smart I am. Not stupid, but just so much to learn from people I meet (in real life, or online) yet so little spare time.

Look at it this way. Your abilities/worth/knowledge/whatever are multidimensional and can be mapped on a "Radar Chart"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart). They can also be classified as "Inherent" or "Incidental/Accidental". Thus there can be no single "smartness" index defining a person.

Thus for example, i am "un-smart" on both Web Dev and Statistics/Probability axes. The former is Incidental and easily fixed in a couple of months of work but the later is Inherent and needs a lot more time for assimilation. Thus the same word "un-smart" actually conveys two different meanings in the two different axes and one should not conflate the two.

Same here buddy. I’m 30 and self teaching myself 2nd/3rd year undergrad math courses that I never learned since I wasn’t smart enough to pass the prereqs. I suppose like you I’m also considered competent at my job, but it’s not lost on me that people younger than me mastered this material a decade ago and are publishing cutting edge research. That’s just how it goes.

This past year I’ve had the misfortune of having an immediate family member suffer from a grave illness. It made me realize feeling bad about myself was just narcissism, and I need to continue to be my best but also spend less time feeling sorry for myself.

Best of luck to you in 2020 :)

Thanks for this post it really resonates with me. I struggle with never feeling good enough. To be honest it has gotten progressively worse since transitioning to HN from other forums. Don't get me wrong the quality of content here is great, but the overall atmosphere here seems to be self-harming.

When comparing yourself with purple squirrels, you are comparing yourself with thousands of internet personas with differing ideas of what a good life is. It is hard to separate fact from fiction and excess from normalcy. The more hardcore people become, the more adoration they seem to get from the crowd. It is classic fanaticism.

The tech industry perpetuates self harming behavior: social isolation, perpetual dissatisfaction, judgmental behavior, envy and greed. It can feel like a death spiral.

For me I am looking to change my priorities in 2020. I would like to focus on what makes me happy in my professional and not what makes you happy.

Good luck to you.

You are being too hard on yourself.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/04/self-doubt/

We all suffer from "imposter syndrome" (at least the self-aware honest ones) which exacerbates the above.

>I see people posting brilliant work,

Nope; much of it is buzzword-bingo, polishing of superficialities, changing of times, jumping on the current bandwagon and echo chambers. Quite rare to see any real "brilliance".

Think of it as a normal distribution curve which used to be tall and thin now having become short and broad. More people exposed to more ideas and therefore more output to be found but real value has diminished (and whatever little, lost in all the noise which has increased exponentially).

We need to distinguish between Knowledge for Knowledge-sake vs Job-sake and adapt our expectations about ourselves accordingly.

If you make the terrible mistake of going to graduate school and then study in any serious depth something that ends up becoming “blog/HN popular”, you’ll have (in my experience) the experience of realizing how many extremely interesting blog posts are just people mashing together one-quarter understood concepts. You’ll also realize some people are surface-level boring but extremely competent, and possibly become afraid of them and their powers.

As far as I'm concerned, you're putting in the work on progressing technically.

Being publicly seen to be productive is kind of a different skill. Probably good for fame and fortune, but most people probably just do good work without much note.

One thing I've discovered over the years, is that some people who are truly excellent technically have rather significant deficits in other respects that severely limit this advantage. If you're a reasonably well-rounded person and not an ass, I'll prefer you over the rock star.

Good post. Don't be so harsh on yourself. "A journey of thousand miles begins with a small step" - Lao Tzu. Just start doing something. Do not wait for the idea that checks all the boxes of perfection. It may turnout to be perfect.

Don’t play zero sum games, like defining your worth by “being the best”.

Play games where you can advance independent of other people’s advancements (like being healthy, or able to perform some skill).

As long as I can eat, who cares?

Someone being smarter than me is their problem.

My biggest failure in 2019 was getting utterly trapped in analysis paralysis.

Throughout the year, I explored many different side project ideas but I rarely took any action on most of them.

I didn't ask people for feedback on the ideas. I didn't cold email potential customers to see what they thought. I didn't build much.

Instead, I got stuck in a "research" mindset and consumed endless information on new industries or business models, often eventually talking myself out of most of my ideas -- without having any direct data on whether or not something would have worked out.

I think a more productive approach to 2020 will be defining specific actions or experiments I can run on new ideas, rather than remaining purely in the theoretical realm.

It's moderately depressing to look back at how little I really learned. Few of my theories ever made contact with reality.

Been there. I realized doing something was better than planning most of the time in the initial stage. Most ideas or things you will come across have already been done, so trying to find something original isn't a solid strategy. If it's entirely new/original, then it will come to you naturally. You will discover it because you are the consumer facing the problem.

Otherwise, focusing on getting feedback and people to talk to you, get them to send their email (even though I personally hate the practice of collecting private info without any product and sending 'spam') is important to maintain their investment along with a simple sketchy prototype to show off. It's easier to give feedback on something that you can see or interact with than written details. Showing vision is better than explaining it even if it is completely basic. Your users will flesh out the product for you, they will tell you what features you can add, how it should work and how you can actually do it.

All of that wouldn't happen without a basic structure. Without seeing a shitty painting, I wouldn't comment on it.

I wonder how depressed marketers and other similar people feel for manipulating others and hogging their personal life with irrelevant things.....such as getting someone's dad addicted to a gambling or social platform and that resulting in negligence.

Getting let go from FAANG basically because I didn't ignore huge red flags while getting hired (thought bc it was a FAANG there wouldn't be atrocious mgmt policies etc).

The requirements for the position as the recruiter described was Go / Elixir experience, did my code screen / take home in elixir and nailed it, principle engineer reviewed my code and green-lit my application mostly bc he was also a devout elixir fan. My manager had a language barrier and seemed pushy when I did my on-site and told her I wanted to use the normal allotment of time for the take-home (they fast tracked my app which would've only given me two days for a take-home that is usually give 5 days). Learned the team wasn't doing any Go / Elixir (was "maybe going to transition at some point" and never did) and was basically just servicing a shitty monolith built in Ruby.

Lots of $$$ so I just decided to take the offer, since my prior situation was a startup that was trying to avoid paying me my full salary and boss didn't "believe" in benefits.

Team at FAANG was also socially inept enough to always send my comments up to my boss instead of team member meant to onboard me - first task was also horribly scoped and made me look like an idiot for double checking my work (small fix with HUGE implications and side-effects if done wrong, with flaky tests galore). Boss berated me for being the only person who would tell her I wasn't going to be done at the end of the day, but never caused a critical problem in prod. Basically got fucked when I admitted a mistake that I promptly fixed and re-deployed, proving their BS "nobody gets blamed for fuckups" policy was definitely bullshit.

I got paid $20k to leave as my team was let go for unrelated reasons (you can guess which FAANG) and did some work with a friend on a startup for a few months. The transition out / lack of luck searching for new jobs really kicked me in the stomach and confidence - and on top of that I'm still looking for work. But hey, hopefully 2020 goes better.

"I'm still looking for work".."was basically just servicing a shitty monolith built in Ruby"

I hope you take this a a constructive criticism. Most dev jobs are shitty monolith in <replace with a old tested server side language>. If you are unemployed, especially if you are umemployed, you need to get a bit more humble and forget about latest shiny tech. Find a company/team that is solving real problems and then go make a difference for them. Tech stack is a nice to have but don't expect it always to be the shiniest.

I wish you good luck. I was in your place couple of years ago. The only way out of this situation is to apply. As from the other post that you have had somebody has already mentioned, you probably did not have many opportunities due to holiday window. I suggest you double down and start applying and interviewing from Jan 2020. Trust me, this is just a number game. And as others have said, nobody is not 100% sure how to properly interview a candidate or find a great developer.

Dogpiling onto the well-wishing. Having recently been through a bit of interviews at various places, can't help but wonder - how does (and is it even possible) a candidate defect this toxicity or the interview stage? With the 20/20 hindsight, were there any tell-tale signs?

I have very limited experience, but the few that jump out to me emanate from a few conversations I had with employees during my on-site. For context, the role was for a "Golang / Elixir Engineer" during my onsite all anyone talked about was relatively new code written in Ruby and only mentioned Golang or Elixir in a "maybe 8 months down the road" way. Language barrier with your manager seems innocuous, but the problems I ran into were deeper and seemingly cultural. (she expected to only be told things were going right, nothing was ever her fault, asking for help is indicative of weakness or incompetence etc. - I'm trying to not sound racist but other employees had similar comments)

Also, it took me quite a bit of time to work through the mental gymnastics as to whether I was just bad at my job or if I was in a toxic environment. In hindsight it was definitely toxic - as an example senior engineers on my teams were being put in a position where they had to make decisions TPM's should be making (but still hung out when they made the wrong decisions).

So, nothing _really_ jumped out, though there were weak clues/hints. I am not a coder, so it isn't obvious to me that a mention of a technology being "8 months down the road" is unreasonable. But now it would be.

Language (and, it appears, also a culture) barrier with management is... tricky since we don't want to come off as racist/*-ist. Not sure how to evaluate it, aside from asking scenario questions if the manager. Maybe if there manager, during their interview, didn't care about finding the candidate's behavior when they reached their knowledge limits is another sign?

That sucks, I truly hope you’re in a better place now

Thank you kind stranger :)

Unfortunately, I'm still unemployed but luckily my BS detector has had a nice upgrade, I've at least sort of improved my algo skills and had some time to think about what I really value in life.

Ignoring my personal relationships because I put too much time and focus on reaching the goals for my side business. I did reach the goals I set out to do in the beginning of 2019, it gave me hope to move forward with this project and potentially work on it full time. But I often canceled weekend plans with my boyfriend, ignored things he wanted to do, because frankly the idea of being able to build my own brand is an idea I'm so excited for and I just can't wait to prove that I can reach my goal.

I learn that relationships, just like businesses or work, the more commitment you put in, the more result will show. Also, it's important to balance work and life and make expectations clear.

Like another comenter, I'd say mine was "not starting". More specifically writing. I often get ideas about articles I'd like to write but I just end up talking myself out of it.

This past Sunday morning - like countless others - I woke up with an idea comparing JavaScript ES5/ES6 to vanilla ice of various quality and decided to just post it in all its shitty glory on Twitter. It didn't go viral and I didn't gain any fame from it... but I wasn't the only one that found it funny (my biggest fear crushed) so it's a start, I guess.

Took over responsibility for some shell scripting glue. Task: migrate to new servers. "How hard can it be?" 2 months later I am still completely lost. I have random input/output files going everywhere, complete flustercuck of perl dependencies, and ftp processes I can't test lest I bork prod.

Edit: and even if I "succeed" I'm pretty sure it needs a total rewrite. I think I'm performing a cross-org table join using ftp and text files with undocumented time dependencies.

My biggest failure for 2019 is not starting. Overanalyzing ideas to the point that I forget about them and then doing that same process again on another idea. So my new year resolution is going to be 12 startup mvp's in 12 months!

Oh yes, that's a tough one. Procrastination is a lethal mind weapon.

Rewrote a non-trivial app from Vue to svelte/sapper. It was a success until we discovered that it turns out Svelte handles errors by freezing instead of letting you show an error page and/or report it to Sentry.

I have difficulty in letting go of engineering problems. My mind is always racing for a fix.. I have been in danger of burnout several times because of this. 2020 I need to learn to chill a bit more.

I would suggest that rather than just listing things that didn’t work out, people also discuss what they learned from the experience and how they would act differently if they had a chance to do it all over.

Accepting a job without doing more research on the company and the actual job but of impatience. 11 months down the drain.

Lack of movement forward.

Looks good on paper (got a promotion) but I can feel I just drifted with the current.

Flunked out of a really good sales job I wasn't qualified for, and proceeded to get fired from an Amazon warehouse because my sleep problem still eludes medicine/psychiatry/homeopathy/jungian therapy. Still unemployed, won't be able to make 15/hr again.

Still dwelling on past relationship, failing at current.

Still stuck at home.

2020 is the year, though. "This time" I'll get around to the language learning and applications.

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