What's your biggest regret as developer/programmer?

Leaving medium corp for big corp. I didn't give medium corp a real chance and I felt like I was on an island by my own. I should have reached out more. When big corp came along with more money I left. It was a mistake and I really regretted it for a while. Luckily, I landed somewhere I like (for less money).

In general, I wish I would have started earlier. I was afraid to learn to program because I felt I was bad at math. I think my teen self would have loved programming just as must I do today. It probably would have helped me do better in school. A lot of math concepts I didn't understand became easier as I studied programming.

I don't really regret any technology choices I have made developing something but I now regret investing so much time into a few things that never really took off (a game or two and an app or two). At the time I told myself that I was doing it for my own sake (I was) and that any traction would be a bonus. In retrospect, I should have put more time into understanding if I was really building something other people wanted.

You know what though? Setbacks are irrelevant. Unless you are actively trying to screw things up you probably acted on the information and best intentions available at the time. No sense beating yourself up over past mistakes.

For me pretty much the same answer as I would give for being a failed startup founder

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262382

As far as dev specific I wish I had

- focused on building and contributing to awesome teams. I hate that I got so caught up in the celebrity of a few individual luminaries in our industry. In reality I needed to focus on recruiting other awesome people who filled in my gaps instead of thinking I was so smart and trying to do everything myself.

- Built a professional public profile via a place like twitter earlier also my blog and website

I've had my twitter (and my blog somewhat) open up so many opportunities for me its crazy. All just from saying decently intelligent common sense stuff on there. Don't toil in the shadows give people a chance to see who you are

- not learning data structures and algorithms well early. Its all the best software teams interview for. I knew web well (circa 2010/2011) and no one cared. So I had to go back. Also now all that web stuff I knew so well is all but useless because its obsolete. But the dsalgo stuff doesn't change as quickly

Getting into programming. I was much happier working as a DHL driver and coding on weekends. I just didn't know it.

I wished I spent more time with friends. Early days I wanted to learn and make the next big thing, and spent a lot of my time after work reading up on design patterns, stacks, etc. Even launched a product, but it failed.

Looking back, I saw a lot of my friends went on trips to Europe, Asia, Africa, and across America. They had a lot of fun and made memories. I have none of that, and less.

Now that we're all reaching middle age, maybe I have more money, but I can tell you it's not worth it. And it's not like I can make up time and go on more trips now, we're all in a different life stage.

Don't miss the boat being young, trying to be a 10x ninja hacker is worthless, especially with how the industry treats its minority workers.

Not getting involved in more client-facing roles. Use to work for a software services and consultancy company when I had opprtunities to work directly with some clients. Unfortunately switched job to work for a bigger company and since then had little opportunity working directly with customers. I think every engineer should have experience working directly with clients(if the client is non-technical with some business problem to solve then it is even better). It helps a lot. Sitting behind a desk all day long writing code is not good for overall development. Being a cog in a machine kills overall development.

Six years ago, I took a job making gears, instead of jumping back into programming, when my long time sysadmin job got outsourced. The last major programming I did was in Turbo Pascal and Delphi for Windows, in the early 1990s. So, I know how to code, but not in anything current... I regret that.

I also regret not embracing networked applications, and multi-threaded programming back in Windows 3.1 days.

[Reconsideration / Update] My biggest regret is not actually building the idea's I've had bouncing around in my head for decades. Even a little bit of work, once a week, on each of them, and they would have been done before Y2K.

I've started doing it... the hard part is not talking about it before you've got a minimum viable product to show a friend, so you don't have to hand-wave.. but can just show something rough that works.

Things I'm proud of Once I figured out how to dual boot Unix/MS-DOS... because I was told it was impossible. I wrote Forth/2, in assembler, for OS/2, because I was told it wasn't possible to write for OS/2 in assembler. I wrote code that did cooperative multitasking inside of a Turbo Pascal program, in MS-DOS... and used the heck out of it. I built a machine that levitated light bulb filaments while they were annealed, using the Lorenz force, that got used in Production.

I learned programming from 12 to 18 then left it until 26. I wish I had never left it and the reason for doing so was because I didn't want to stare at a computer screen for the rest of my life. I went to college... loved it... studied psychology... attempted to get a job in multiple areas, found out some of them were not for me, only to realize that I would need to utilize that skill I had taught myself at 12... and welp, I'm good at what I do... and I stare at a computer screen all day for work and have done so for the past decade. Sometimes... you just can't escape your fate. In choosing this career path, I also had to give up pursuing a woman I was in love with.

Not realizing sooner that networking with others and creating easy-to-consume content (blog/tweets/conference presentations) that will help other programmers and raise my own visibility was vastly more important that learning new and niche programming languages for career development.

Not understanding that the manager career track in my geographic region was usually paid at least 25%-50% more than software engineers.

Not a huge regret, but I should have job-hopped much more frequently - I have worked at only 4 companies in those 20 years and one of those for a decade+.

Institutional knowledge doesn't build resumes.

I regret not working for a tech company and working with obscure tech (neoxam and filenet). If I had worked at an actual tech firm and specialized in anything else, I would be much better off today.

Starting projects and then abandoning them.

1. Started a niche dating site in early 2000s. Got traction but too many rude assholes. Got tired of dealing with it and shutdown it.

2. Started better looking Craig's list in late 2000s. Got no traction but should have left it online.

3. Started a fitness gadget blog reviewing fitness gadgets. Got some traffic but not technical enough and kind of boring. So stopped. Now i see dcrainmaker and wish i didn't stop.

Countless more ideas that never left my localhost.

Not going for max profit (salary) from early on. Most of the stuff I ever wrote is not in production anymore and replaced. Most are CRUD apps with no impact whatsoever.

As I got older and started a family what is important changed a lot. I wanna make as much as I can and get as much free time as I can, I don't care much about what I do as long as I can grow and learn as a developer and have a good work-life balance.

Programming isn't just about computers. It's even more about people. As a programmer, I regret the several times I've blown it with co-workers. (Gotten angry, yelled at them, etc.)

Not reading enough yc materials early on lol. Much of what matters as dev is hitting your business goals and meeting your users' needs, yc materials covered a lot of that.

Not realizing how bad I was at it earlier.