Ask HN: If you could start your career all over again, what would you change?
Regarding your professional career, what is the single decision you regret the most making?
Also wished I'd taken a bigger interest in somewhat core things sooner, e.g. static-typed functional languages and distributed systems. Basically seeking out challenges rather than performing well in my comfort zone. Still exploring less technical, soft areas with unknown outcome as yet.
If you have a bad feeling about a job shortly after you start, trust your gut and go.
It is so deeply confusing, to the point where I think this person might have a personality disorder, and I am wondering if I should quit.
He is very influential and established in the organization, so leaving would be my only recourse. I can see how staying in this situation a long time could semi-permanently damage my view of leadership and trust...
But I can tell you that yes, I would quit. I should have quit years before I did, and although it has worked out OK for me the last couple years, in many ways I deeply regret the years I spent living in that kind of scenario. The short-term hit you take by leaving a job is worth the trouble when you find a place to work that truly is a positive and healthy environment.
Later in college, I won back to back chess tournament and with just a few days of practice. That's when I realized I might had a chance have I taken chess seriously since my early days in school.
1. Bet on myself sooner. Start a business SOONER.
2. Learn how to sell.
3. Study more material that'd help with improving programming skills, rather than business acumen.
4. Skip college.
5. Just START, rather than waiting for the perfect storm.
#4. I was a Business Management major. I learned far more about business by being in business for myself. College tuition for MANY majors is a complete waste of your money.
Business is much like programming. There are many things you can learn from a smaller body of knowledge. The biggest gains are going to be made by DOING.
#3. There are a handful of books you can read for much cheaper than what it would cost you to pay for an undergraduage degree in Business Management. You can learn from those books what you'd pay tens of thousands of dollars for in tuition.
The BEST learning comes from practice, though.
For me, with programming... I'd ask all the typical questions. What's the best first language? what tools should I use? what frameworks should I learn? they are a distraction from what you really should be doing... practice. Don't wait to start. Don't wait for the perfect language/tool/framework/editor.
JUST START.
Pick something vanilla (no frameworks until later). Read about it. Write code badly. Write more code badly. Ask questions of other coders in $LANGUAGE. Put stuff up on GitHub for review. Get feedback. If you don't stop, you WILL get better.
DO. DO. DO. DO. DO. Reading is only the beginning.
How do you yourself find what to sell, and educate yourself in that domain specific knowledge on that particular business?
After that experience, I declared my major to something non STEM and never took another CS course again, and ended up working for the first 4-5 years of my career in non engineering roles.
However I still ended up being pulled into coding as a passion all those years later, in which I self taught the CS coursework I needed online by taking Computer Science MOOCs and reading textbooks, etc, and now work as a software engineer.
I can't help feeling like if I was a little less brash when a freshman in college, I probably would have loved the CS major and my career could have been very different. I can't complain about where my life/career has ended up though, so perhaps it was all for the best.
However, now once again I find myself really wanting to give it another go and feel ready to take on the advanced coursework, but tuition is expensive. Do you have any advice to a rising college senior who is about to wrap up a seemingly textbook business major but feels impassioned by coding?
If I knew that the age until which you are covered by your parent's health plan was going to be extended to 26, I would not have focused on getting a stable, nice benefits job. I would probably have tried making it as a writer, and unless I had some big break I would have probably considered grad school (which I was planning on for my first couple years after college until I found I preferred working on real world projects to research more or less).
Not 100% sure how that would have worked out. I probably would not have gotten married until I had a stable position somewhere, so I'd be starting my family much later (if at all, if my writing career took off I might be more focused on that), almost certainly wouldn't have ended up with my wife, since the circumstances that brought us together would be very different, odd to think about...
Probably would be more ambitious but with less happiness than I am now, but it's very hard to say. So I don't regret the path I went down, but it's strange to think that so much of my life was based on an assumption (that I needed to secure employer-based heathcare ASAP) that ended up being wrong.
Didn't realize until I burned out what a loss of time and energy it was putting so much effort into trying to do a 'good job' for someone who lacked empathy and was just not suited for management. It took me years to unravel the damage from that experience. I went into new jobs with what I would describe as PTSD learned from that first job. It was a professional trauma, and I didn't realize how disordered that startup and management team was until I worked at other places. I learned a lot from it. But it set me back a few years.
That brings me to my next point. The exciting, glamorous startups with high profile executives and investors are often just a huge mess under all the flashy PR and social media personalities. I don't regret learning that the hard way, just wish I wasn't so naive and allured by brand names at the start of my career.
That said, I couldn’t have known that entry level jobs were going to be so incredibly difficult to get after college. Almost everyone and their mother thought I’d have no trouble cause he’s so smart, has job experience, went to good school, etc. But most of them were extremely privileged and never had issues finding jobs /or/ had completely irrelevant experience.
I’d highly suggest talking to peers who are just a year or two ahead of you. They might shine light. Sadly, I had none to go by. I was entirely alone and had no relatable peers.
I'm going into my fourth year now and just feel like I'm stagnating and not being challenged in my lab anymore. I've been thinking about the quote "If you're the smartest guy in the room then you're in the wrong room" lately. At this point both of my PIs and my lab manager have openly told me that I'm the strongest member of the lab. I know it's not just me anymore and I feel like I want to get out and move on to someplace where I can grow, but also don't want to waste the four years that I have invested towards a PhD.
What was your experience?
Yes, sort of ... I was planning an academic career and had a 4 year contract teaching and researching at uni while doing my PhD, but failed to get the PhD in that time (because of lack of motivation / other interests and projects). Never really got the hang of focusing on churning out papers, enjoyed teaching and short-lived research more. Didn't get along too well with the (much older) colleagues at the dept. either.
After that, I freelanced for a year, during that time I got a great job offer at an EA company for game development but decided not to move to the US for it. A few months later I got talked into accepting VC for one of my hobby projects, so the company was founded. The 4 years I "wasted" were at least somewhat formative and I would have regretted not getting a taste of academia. In the end, entrepreneurship was a good fit for my personality, the joy of doing exactly what I wanted and getting very positive feedback, validation and compensation just from making my work available to the public was the best reward.
At hindsight, trying more things and getting more industry experience as an employee would have been useful, but I can't complain.
I had people literally just tell me at career fairs, “you’re not qualified,” because my degree didn’t have the word “computer” in it. It took most of my self control not to educate them on who built the first electronic computers.
EDIT: To the downvoters: please explain how graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt is beneficial in the long run.
You need 12 years of experience to be considered equal to a fresh grad of a 4 year degree in the eyes of immigration law.
I dropped out to start my first startup and while that was a great experience and catapulted me career-wise immigration is still a continual stumbling block.
Also the UK doesn't completely cripple you with student debt. CS degrees are also valuable, can pretty much get into any other field with this piece of paper.
Many people that I've kept in contact with who followed the CS track were more than able to pay off their student loans because most people I know went to state schools like I did. It would be unreasonable to say that there are no failure stories as there are plenty of those, but with the salaries in the industry even for juniors who find themselves working for slightly above average companies (envision $55-65k fresh out of college in the US and they still get to live at home), the loan would have absolutely been worth it.
It wasn't until both my wife and I were working full time that we started to accumulate wealth.
No commitments? Start a business early. Some commitments? A regular paycheck and saving as much as humanly possible makes it easier to take risks later.
Different people are different. Personally, I find I am 5% as productive if I am working while utterly confused and running on 4 hours of sleep. It sucks to look back on my effort and see I made as much progress as Luigi Cadorna did on this 10th time trying to cross the Isonzo river.