Ask HN: What is the biggest bullet you ever dodged? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the biggest bullet you ever dodged?

21 pointstoomanyrichies4 comments

The recent "What is your biggest regret?" post had a lot of insightful responses and was quite an interesting read. In the spirit of "thinking like the bronze medalist, not the silver medalist"[1], I thought the flip-side of that question could reveal similarly interesting anecdotes.

I'll start- the biggest bullet I ever dodged was when I decided not to go to business school. At the time I was living and teaching English in Shanghai, China, and I had originally moved there because I thought that learning Chinese would look great on my grad school application.

After awhile, however, I realized that the best-case scenario of holding an MBA was that I'd go to work for a big-name company and become a middle manager who wears a suit and commutes to work everyday. That sounded like a slow death to me, so I coasted in a job I disliked for a few more years until a friend told me about coding bootcamps. I applied, was accepted, and attended a bootcamp based in Chicago, and today I'm a senior software engineer who loves the creativity inherent in the craft of coding.

I saved myself $100-200k in grad school tuition and 2 years of sitting through multi-hour lectures that I knew I'd hate, as well as a career trajectory that would have added little if any value to my life or the lives of others.

1. https://sive.rs/bronze

In May, 1999, when spam was just starting to be a thing... I got an email from a strange address, and almost deleted it. It was from a high school friend, now my wife. 8)

On 07/07/07 I was heading with our one year old daughter to visit a railroad museum in a rural area about 80 miles south of home, when I started having a bit of a back ache. I stopped and got some ibuprofen, and continued on my journey. After a few minutes, the pain spread and it got worse... I decided to stop, call my wife (a nurse) and ask what to do... that call saved my life, and possibly someone else's along with my daughters. She had me call 911 and head back towards civilization.

The ambulance met me at the off-ramp, took great care of my daughter, and got me to the hospital. It turned out that my gall bladder had declared war on my pancreas, and if I hadn't stopped and gotten treatment, it might have killed me. I am now a man with no gall.

So, opening that email changed everything.

Even the first half of the story, about almost deleting an email from a person who became your wife, is a great story on its own. When I read the 2nd half of the story as well, my jaw dropped. Thanks for sharing.

Decided not to wear the life jacket whilst kayaking in Thailand. A speedboat came around the corner, then straight at me, such that I rolled off the kayak into the water. Whilst I still was struck by the propeller, I expect that I'd be gone had I been wearing the jacket.

I was also extremely lucky that I ended up having down and got hit in the butt as, to others, there's nothing that suggests I was in such a traumatic accident.

I remembered to send the documents to apply to university for master's degree in Computer Science about one hour before the deadline. Had I not done that I'd probably end up continuing my MBA degree and I would end up with master's that is essentially worthless due to market being oversaturated in my country. If I hadn't done that I'd most likely be stuck in some bullshit job making peanuts and hating life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com