Ask HN: What are the best decisions you’ve made?
Excluding choice of partner and having children, what are some the best decisions you've made?
2. Trying everything possible to make the company a success. Learning a lot in the process.
3. Realizing 2 years later, the business wasn't going to work. Shutting it down while I had some money left in the bank and finding a full time job. Ironically, the new company valued the combination of professional and founder experience highly, and I ended up with a 40% bump from my pre-founder income
4. Then prioritizing paying off nearly $70k in credit card debt (business related) over the next couple of years. Again, learning a lot in the process.
5. Consciously communicating and making decisions with the wife throughout the journey. Now it seems like if we could survive that experience financially, we can survive anything.
I learnt more about risk, negotiation, personal finances, communication and above all my own biases & limitations in these 4 years than in my 15 years of career prior to that. Wouldn't trade for anything.
1) quitting a job to ride a bicycle up the east coast 2) spending 6 months in New Zealand and Australia 3) buying my first house 4) buying my second house across the street from a park oh I have it, Falling in love with programming, my career.
I realized it's hard to take care of others when we cant even take care of ourselves. The mental clarity and the stamina wasnt just there.
1. Moving from Aus to US to be in the hub of where software is made.
2. Marrying my wife (again hard to know opp cost since I’ve only been married once. But life is deffo better than being single)
3. Switching jobs every couple of years to work on something interesting and impactful.
4. Healthy habits such as healthy eating, exercise, read books, call friends, save and invest, travel international once an year.
I guess the biggest decision is to invest in habit building (habits compound over time)
I realized at some point that my life wasn’t going in a direction where I felt fulfilled, and couldn’t seem to make the changes I needed to get it there. Therapy allowed me to see how I held myself back and the things I didn’t know I was carrying with me from my youth. I’m happier, more focused, have a better understanding of myself and where I’m going, and I think I’m kinder to others as well. I cannot recommend therapy highly enough.
I've recently been looking for a psych that's slightly more career performance oriented. Or how should I put this, willing to meld psychology (talk therapy) with a layer of strategy / risk reward applied as well. I've always been bad at gauging a fit in this way.
This taught me to not be afraid to make significant changes, even when the outcome is not so certain.
This means accepting loss and hurt.
Definetely a very hard thing to do if the bad people are familiy.
Might be impossible if the bad person is your spouse and you have kids. Might mean that your kids are retaliated on.
but the most difficult thing is to be sure that they are the bad people and not you yourself. If you don't struggle with this then you might be the problem - Not them.
- Live a very frugal and minimalistic lifestyle. I live on about 4% of my gross income (crazy! See previous point) and I love it. I eat healthy, exercise a lot, have a wonderful partner, plenty of discretionary time because we don’t have to care for material belongings.
I am also firmly in the camp of not wanting kids, and firmly believe it is the right decision for me: I’ll let you know in a few decades if it was a good call or not :-)
Recently helping my own company switch to 4-day workweeks[0] although the jury is still out on this one.
[0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/how-we-switched-to-4-day-we...
This made it that even though my lifestyle is so much different than my family's and that of most of society, we still get along on a deeper level.
Deciding to have the hard conversations. Some ten minute conversations have had the highest 'return on investment'.
Deciding to always aim at the meta-thing right after I have the thing. One specific example is asking a question on the #python IRC channel years ago about a library and receiving an answer from someone who's never used it, immediately thanking them and asking how they did to find the answer. That process was much more valuable to me, because I could use it on other things [they did a git grep on the repo].
Deciding to use money as an instrument for myself and others. I mostly buy time and experiences. I did it when I was in highschool and continue to do so now.
Ars longa, vita brevis.
The "I found the answer when I was writing the question".
But seriously learning software development was my best decision. I spent most of my working life in food service (read: broke) and then 6 years as a massage therapist at a high end practice. I taught myself Ruby and JavaScript in between clients and on breaks.
It was already a good decision pre-pandemic, but if I was still a waiter or an MT, we would have been just so horribly fucked. I would have basically had months of no work or income, which would force me to go back to work during the pandemic. I'm so grateful that I don't do that kind of work anymore. I literally don't know how we would have gotten by.
There are so many bad clients out there which will actively hurt you to press the most benefit out of you until you drop. dead.
you can only hurt me once. the second strike is only possible because i did not quit the first time. So it is my fault.
It's taken me more than a year to un-learn and cleanse my head of all the stupid games I had to play at that bullshit company.
Finally, quitting drinking. I never really drank that much, but at this point I don't really crave alcohol at all.
One benefit of being full remote is that these kind of social problems are way less annoying this year.
"Red badges" were routinely made fun of and hazed. A pretty high percentage would end up getting hired full-time and the hazing would stop, so it wasn't exactly "personal", but it was definitely kind of weird.
(I have no clue what a red badge indicates at Amazon, though.)
2) Leaving engineering to become a firefighter paramedic at age 36
3) Getting a master's degree in computer science
4) working a crap ton of over time and 2nd job to pay down mortgage
5) leaving firefighter paramedic after 14 years to work as a software developer fulltime.
Making the jump:
I had been working in a call center for 4 years and had not had any growth whatsoever. I was broke, lost, and felt trapped at my job. I would look at job posting but didn’t have any of the skills mentioned and thought I would have to go to college to get a decent position. I didn’t have the money to go back to school so I tried something else. I e-mailed 30-40 tech companies, asking if they had any internships to get my foot in the door. Two companies replied back. First company was a desktop support position and the second company was a marketing internship. That second company was a coding bootcamp. I took the unpaid internship at the bootcamp. I realized I didn’t enjoy marketing right away but stuck with it cause it was better than a call center. During my time there, I became friends with some of the engineering instructors and that’s when I was introduced to programming. They told me what to focus on, study, and build. So when I wasn’t at work or the internship, I was reading and building.
Focus:
I had been Deejaying for 18 years and so I always felt that I had to stick with music cause it was a big part of my life. However, I knew it would interfere with my current goal. I couldn’t do both. I’m kind of an all in or hell no type of person, which isn’t always great but that’s what it is. So I packed up my turntables and decided to go all in on programming. This was essential for me.
Holding myself back:
After 4 months of studying, I got hired as a contractor at a small agency. That’s when I realized that I was trapped at the call center job because of myself. It was a powerful realization that opened up my mind from there on. I thought I had to have a certificate or piece of paper to have decent career. I do want to go to school for CS for fun!
Problem solving:
Building software showed me how to problem solve. I didn’t have a framework or direction that I would go to before I started this profession. Being able to break problems into smaller pieces and identify how those pieces relate to each other was game changing. I was a late bloomer with all this but better late than never
Money:
Money changed a lot of things. I would be lying if that wasn’t a big part of all this. My mom, sister, and I would live in homeless shelters and motel rooms, paid by churches growing up. We never went hungry or anything but things still sucked. So when I got my first paycheck as a programmer, I couldn’t even describe the feeling. I didn't have to worry about bills or rent anymore.
This became long but I wanted to give an honest answer as to how it changed my life.
2) getting outside help with dating
3) quitting Twitter (50 hours a month back)