My Failure Resume | Hacker News Reader

My Failure Resume

dare.fail

259 pointsjimhi123 comments

At first I was like, yeah, another one of those "follow my life as an indie dev" promos, then I scrolled down to your list of job "failures", and it was incredibly interesting to see just HOW MUCH some people get done in life.

If you tend to be somewhat critical of self-promos, I'd still recommend you take a moment and at least scroll down on that page and see for yourself. Very impressive. Just goes to show that you can indeed turn the dial well up to 11.

I don't want to diminish anyone's accomplishments, as I think they are impressive too. However, it is worth noting that some of these projects are relatively simple and don't require a significant time investment. Additionally, some of the projects never launched and are counted as "fail".

I appreciate you not diminishing my failures. Never launched still means I tried to build and failed for various reasons.

You mean your accomplishments of failing? ;)

Jim, I should have created this. I've failed a lot. Also, your domain name makes a lot of sense for me. :P

If you do end up creating - send to me

Agreed. All that work and website loads up fast and is very clear and concise. I did enjoy 'lessons learned' section. Frankly, the entire thing is almost inspirational.

I was also confused but those are jobs he applied for but wasn't hired.

Ones I got interviews for and didn't get

It should say that in the blog post.

It reads like a ridiculously long list of jobs you took and failed at.

I can't even get 10% of the number of interviews. I feel like you have little justification to say "In fact, almost everything I have tried to do has failed". Clearly you've been very successful in general. Much more so than people like me.

I mean the interviews are like 1 out 400 applications.

In 2016, you had 45 failed interviews. At a 400-1 ratio, you're saying you put out 18000 job applications that year? That's staggering. Even at 20-1, that would be 1000-ish applications.

Still, seems like you move up. I'm over a decade in and still a shitty midlevel.

My dad never got promoted in 40 years of work. When I got my first promotion (to team lead) I had been working as a dev for over 15 years and I kinda felt like I had let him down

(Assuming you're a software engineer) You are being paid to write code, don't forget that, it's a dream to many people.

It's a nightmare to some

What are you doing to move up?

I don't think I am anything special nor was I a super go-getter and I've moved up fine in the same time span (came in as an ~associate, moved up to senior in ~2 years, got principal in 1.5 years, sat around high-level senior / defacto tech lead for a few years until I finally got a break with an actual lead title).

You are either in too big of a pond (ie: you should work in a smaller place to have a bigger impact) or you are too focused on your own work to appear as someone worth bringing up.

I am not a boomer but if you are a software engineer who is wanting to move up past associate and especially senior, you need to be looking out for others, mentoring, writing documentation on why certain decisions were made; something more than just nose in the code.

The adage of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" is kinda true. You don't even have to kill yourself for it either. I did the 10+ hour days for a year as a junior then I realized no one I wanted to care cared nor saw it as a point of pride.

I'm not doing shit now. I gave up a few years ago. I was an acting senior dev for a year and a tech lead for another. I had great reviews and was performing beyond my role. I was involved in stretch assignments/groups too. I even had a tech lead from another team I was working with send an email to my manager praising my help. Then that project was outsourced and I helped bring the sourcing team to speed.

I went to another area of the company and volunteered to be a security champion (above my level at the time) which turns out I was the only one for 6 teams across 2 departments. I had awesome reviews from the people I worked with on this. I volunteered for other assignments too and "won" (asshole manager would give teo people a task that one person could do to see who would step up). I was a regular attendee and contributor at the tech lead and manager meetings (like a design/architecture/SoS for the app). When I was leaving that team one of the tech leads asked what role I was taking on a different team. I told them it was a midlevel dev. They then asked why I was taking a demotion - they thought I was a senior dev the whole time. Maybe just to be polite, but a few others echoed the same sentiment at hearing that.

The security and tech lead years were a lot more than being in the code. In fact, I was focused on a lot of PM related stuff during the tech lead year and feel my lack of coding actually hurt me in the future because I was no longer coding on a daily basis but doing stuff like coordinating, troubleshooting, etc. So then I wasn't as fast at actual coding.

It's pretty evident that Mr Steinberg is extremely conscientious

Even more impressive. Inspired me to get more fails under my belt.

"CTO at Loyalsnap (02/23/2017): The CEO rejected me then used the code I wrote in the interview in production. When I pointed this out and said an estimate of the hours I worked on that if he wanted to use it, he told me I would have to sue him to get it. 20 minutes later he venmo’d me the amount and said don’t sue him."

Happens more often then you think. Get 200 approaches on something that team can't get right. Use one.. usually in the backend. Or get inspired and use parts. Ghost person who wrote the code.

I can't wrap my head around why companies do this. If you find a competent programmer whose work is good enough to use, wouldn't your team be better off if you hire them full-time? That seems more efficient than interviewing 200 people every time you need some code written.

If the culture is that rotten that this behavior is accepted (as it requires multiple people in the hiring process to be complicit) I doubt anyone would want to stay for very long if they were hired.

Desperate strategy to steal developer code done by people that is as immoral as ignorant on how tech isn't reusable or modularly scalable like they imagine and how obviously bad it will all invariably end but they are "just giving it a try"?

Pessimistic point: there a lof of competent programmers out there. So, why not to choose someone that you liked or someone who ready to work long hours, under stress, for minimum salary?

Logic has nothing to do with it. These companies shit on candidates on general principle.

they are hiring them as a contractor __for free__ , but just not telling them they are writing their production code prototypes for free while interviewing.

It's like that Silicon Valley episode where Richard explains middle-out on the whiteboard and they just steal his code.

Came here to post this. Your engineering team is a fail, your problem is a joke, and your hiring process is overfitting. Maybe you could post stackoverflow questions...and then wrong answers...and get better results from people correcting you?

When it comes to entrepreneurship the act of creating serves someone else, when you are an artist the act of creating itself has value.

So if you consider yourself an artist this is fine. If you consider yourself an entrepeneur, I will offer the following advice:

You take way too little time to build something.

Spend a year per site/idea, not a month.

Take Lazy Reminders. It might be a challenge to be profitable with this idea, but to get to a 1000 users in a few months should be easy. Could be useful in many ways, but now it looks more like a back of the envelope idea that's never been finished, way to soon to move on. Make it something a non-developer would use, the bar is a bit higher for consumers then coporates. You are competing with Google, Apple & Facebook UX-wise. You can go 50% less but not more. Corporates are more forgiving, they are used to shitty software (SAP thank you ;)) Also. Integrate with users existing workflows, at least one: slack / whatsapp etc.

Only after 1-2 years you get a proper understanding of your users and you really start to create usefull things they actually need.

Anyway nothing wrong with creating, but if you are measuring success based upon usage standard, you should spend more time on one project.

I think it's a focus thing. Way too many holes to plug at current rates.

I'm sure the Lessons so Far list really does work, but it seems like mental illness to me. Trying to be entertaining to get followers, tailoring your work so that it gets attention, talking to the right people on social media and being sure to take their side or promote them. It's sickening.

This is why every YouTube thumbnail has a face with bugged out eyes and huge fonts. This is why all news is sensationalism now. It's all about grabbing attention and getting revenue over making or doing something worthwhile.

I thought like you until about a year ago. Marketing is a skill much like software development and people much less deserving than you are making far more money than you and actively saying things that making our world worse. I don't think you should dismiss getting better at it.

That said, I don't disagree it's a mental illness.

> actively saying things that making our world worse. I don't think you should dismiss getting better at it.

Well now that doesn't sound quite right, either, does it? Get better at saying things that make our world worse?

I feel like both you and @todfox here, I hate what it is but I also know that it's absolutely necessary. It seems to be a lesson I keep relearning. But the ickiness of attention-seeking and going for the lowest common denominator really makes it hard for me to keep it up.

> But the ickiness of attention-seeking and going for the lowest common denominator really makes it hard for me to keep it up.

Attention-seeking, fine, but lowest common denominator is a self-defeating assumption. If my thing was making very elaborate high quality chairs, I don't have to make a bunch of crappy generic chairs to bring attention to the elaborate ones. The fear of failure in your niche may drive this though. But by doing so you're just growing the overall demographic you serve which brings in more people, giving you the impression of finally succeeding..but you may not get more sales of the product you actually care about in the first place: the elaborate chair.

My point is: go for the "denominator" you feel you want to address, and be enthusiastically attention-seeking there. Pretending to care about other demographics, building product for them and supporting all that extra infrastructure is soul-crushing

I agree with you, but any time I've attempted it I just feel sick to my stomach.

I 99% agree, and I would 100% agree, if it wasn't for one thing:

I need money to survive.

Every one of those things you cited, when you remove the levels of indirection, is oriented towards making money.

So, yeah. If I didn't have to make money I also wouldn't do those things. But I have to, so I do.

Damn you've done and tried a lot of stuff!

What I've learned from that resume is that you can fail 100 times, but all you need to be "set" is one ZipX that gives you the cash freedom to chase other dreams.

It's also a lot of luck and being at the right place at the right time. It seems like the company that became ZipX was acquired for 50M but before that it only generated about 200k in revenue. If the timing wasn't right (with the onset of COVID) or no one knew about his company then he wouldn't have that success.

It really demonstrates the importance of continuing to work even after failures and pivoting often because you never know when or which idea will take off.

That item being several orders of magnitude above all the others is an interesting context, for sure. Regarding the "being set", it would be helpful to have a date on that item in particular. The Forbes "30 under 30" is from 2021, but I haven't been able to trace the age of the company on first try...

I co-founded Trusu in 2018. We were acquired in 2020 and that revenue came within the first year of that. I ended up providing over 100 million Facemasks around the world and South East Asia. Technically my company was 1 full time person and 1 full time contractor at the time of that revenue but obviously had a ton of help from the company that acquired us and spun out the company.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

Never stop trying!

Amazing! I think failures are just as important as successes when learning what works.

Unfortunately, many business books just take the top X people by net worth and analyze what they did, but that is not enough.

Stated in Bayes' theorem terms: to compute P(success | actions) you also need P(actions) and P(success), not just P(actions | success) which are the success stories.

P(actions) and P(success) require knowledge from failures as well, not just successful actions.

Thanks for the courage of sharing your failures!

If you are in NYC - https://museumoffailure.com/ Opens tomorrow.

I am and will totally see this thanks

Very cool - will check this out

Thanks for this!

"They ghosted me"

This is unfortunately modern culture, and most seem unconcerned how rude they are to strangers. Very foolish policy unless you already have over a Billion market cap, and can attract a steady stream of junior staff more willing to take flippant abuse.

Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.

This also means respecting the content medium, and knowing when to bail. =)

This feels like a good reminder of the obsessiveness (and narcissism?) it takes to actually create something successful.

Kudos to him for putting it all out there

I would like at least one person to see this and think "Man, a lot of those ideas are actually pretty dumb and he couldn't even pass a tech interview, I could do this better and faster."

It’s a warning how you can waste your life when you don’t appreciate it and instead are constantly yearning to be in some other reality. The end result is you are still mediocre and are closer to death with understandings that won’t help you.

On the one hand, a bit heart breaking.

On the other hand, I wish more people shared their failures-- otherwise all we see is survivorship bias and people selling get rich courses "I made a million dollars doing this ONE TRICK and you can too! Only 9 payments of $999.99"

I only have 4-5 failures (compared to his dozens), but then I only started 4-5 projects :)

I love this! Especially in a professional culture that embellishes, misrepresents, and outright lies about failures and hardships in order to try to appear more attractive, successful, and employable. LinkedIn these days is just one big stream of toxic positivity and Stockholm syndrome. It's great to see people that are willing to be honest and humble.

Granted, you have to be careful to not have a victim mentality or be too self-deprecating to the point that people thing you're actually humble-bragging or fishing for pity/compliments, but this site seems hilarious. Great work.

Looking at the "Failure Resume" at the bottom; it seems massive to me! But then I notice that there are as many as 13 entries for a single day (e.g. 7/5/2018). What exactly is meant by "failed" here? Did you interview at 13 companies on the same day (unlikely), or receive 13 rejection letters on the same day, or submit 13 applications in a day that received no response?

If I was being critical, I would say this looks like resume padding. I would suggest you avoid spreading yourself too thin and focus on failing harder at fewer things ;-)

Are you the Opentrons guy?

And yes, this is the time for my favorite quote of all time:

Ever tried, ever failed, no matter!

Try again, fail again... fail better.

- Samuel Beckett

(punctuation by me, probably)

Stan Wawrinka(tennis player) has this tattooed on his forearm! Love the quote

Not me but that guy is the smartest person I have ever met

"In fact, almost everything I have tried to do has failed"

My life in a nutshell. Although I'll contend that the author comparatively has no right to say it. It seems like they have moved up the ladder and into higher paying roles. I have not.

Great, now I can feel inferior comparing my work to other people's failures in addition to their successes.

I do this: https://tdhopper.com/rejected

I don't understand this - have you been (unsuccessfully) looking for a job since 2013?

If you've had jobs in between these applications, why are you applying for so many new jobs every year?

In the reflections link at the bottom they have the following:

> I've been unbelievably fortunate to be continuously employed since college, but I'm not sure how to tell you to repeat that.

So they've had jobs while they've applied elsewhere. Also according to their resume (link at the top) they've had 7 jobs since 2014, or about one job shift every year and some change.

That's cool I'll share that if you are cool with it

This is much more helpful than reading about success stories. Thanks for sharing.

One of the items on this website contains very personal information about an another person you dealt with.

I don't want to assume this is violation of privacy. Perhaps you're on terms with them and they're public about it.

But are they? Because if they're not, I believe you should remove it.

(I'm speaking vaguely, because I don't want to repeat that bit of information here and make it more immortal).

If somebody tried to screw you then backed out of it and you have proof, seems fair game to post it online, complete with the scammer's real name and affiliation. It might not be tactically prudent since that person might sue you in retaliation, by you are squarely within your rights to do it if you want, no "violation of privacy" here.

I am not referring to the case where the CEO used his work. That is fair game for naming and shaming.

The information reflects on what are normally considered private details that are not limited to business interactions.

You're speaking vaguely enough that it's not clear what you're referring to. I didn't see any very personal information.

> Product Engineer at Experiment (06/16/2018): They weren’t hiring but said I could dig dinosaurs if I moved to Seattle!

I don't have any idea what this means, but if you're going to the Seattle area hoping for exposed non-marine rock from the Mesozoic you're going to be pretty disappointed outside the San Juans.

I like the message of this website. The individual failures aren't the point. The failure is too much ambition and not enough appreciation. It seems like the OP was running from something and they are warning us from wasting our lives chasing mediocrity.

I love the spirit!

Practically speaking, having a backlog of vast amounts of similar data to you, the true way to get out of the loop is to try something different. To do the things that wouldn't fit as a data point in that list format.

Perhaps the next product launch is this awesome little stats dashboard you have.

Make it a personal goal dashboard for concurrent website visitors for one's own projects and follower count. Just as you have it. It's kinda like Venmo, except for one's own sites/projects/goals.

Personally think this is awesome onto itself. Just that current goal bar is a great feature. Subscribe to the goal. Once it's reached, subscribers get a note. "see you can do great things, Alice just completed her follower goal! Send a note and show some love :)"

Hey Jimhi! Thanks for sharing this, I liked it a lot :D Good luck with your acting! Have you thought about creating a movie yourself and directing? Since I spend so much time coding/building as you do, whenever I have some free time I try to do some music and been doing the music videos https://punkbit.com/audio/desmentira-a-project-inspired-by-m... planning to do a movie at some point!

Good luck mate!!

This is cool as heck - Yes I did which led to me realizing I have no money for cameras and sound and lighting which led to the interactive comics website.

Sorry missed your comment! You can rent cameras or also look for videographers around your region for a fun project. You'd be surprised how many people like to participate by simply offering to pay for the food and drinks. If you work as self-employed or through your own limited company, you can put the camera equipment as expenses. For the sound is a bit more tricky as you need someone to capture the sound, mix it correctly, etc.

> I had to stop when my cofounder and roommate started to believe he was Jesus and I was Judas. He got committed to an insane asylum for a bit and is better now.

Full story on this one please.

Really great list, congrats on the success with ZipX. Great examples of Nelson Mandela's quote "I never lose. I either win or learn." in practice.

The metrics being up top made me pre-disposed to ignore this, but I kept scrolling anyway. After seeing all your failures, I actually think this is a great resume to show that you likely understand quite a lot about finding product-market fit, which is usually the most difficult piece of launching something new. I think this is a great idea to share, and I am considering perhaps doing something similar in the future.

So much awesome fail, sir, I salute you!

“You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

What drives you? Is it money, general problem-solving?

I must be wired differently because I cannot understand how someone can try so many things in so many different industries without being driven by a mission beyond financial wealth. I have friends who are like this and I don’t get it.

If you couldn't tell, I literally couldn't get a job...

That tells me more about our industry (and the low life, shitty developers who interview you) than you.

BTW, thanks for posting and opening up.

I really have to commend this person for just being so energetic with just DOING stuff, no matter the failure. I suppose you get used to it, making it easy to be "biased toward action". It's easier to win when you pull the slot machine so many times.

This is a really great list. I see that you're constantly doing many things at the same time, do you ever feel like you're spreading yourself too thin? I wonder if you could benefit from focusing on one thing as opposed to working on many things at once.

I actually just leave the other stuff in autopilot and focus on the next one entirely unless I see it isn't working out.

I like this. It’s a bit cheeky but the point still lands. Even if you have the greatest startup idea, there are myriad ways it can fail, many of which are totally outside a founder’s control.

Fail early, fail often still seems to be the best wisdom.

Mixed emotions. Just thinking here.. the build piece you have down pat.

Have you thought about investing in a community or many for a year or more. Understanding their needs then build products? 90% community / rep building 10% building.

The profitable projects took 2-4 years each of my life. If anything what I learned from this is to move on much much faster when it isn't working but leave it up for future opportunities to happen.

Have you ever thought about opening a business to teach people how to fail?

I would fail at that

That would be a success, no?

Holy sh*t. That list is outright insane. They should be allowed to retire and just drink cocktails or something. I would not be able to do a tenth of that even if would live 900 years. Amazing.

How did he know the CEO of LoyalSnap used his code in production?

Interview: Build this feature we want on our website that isn't there.

After interview: Feature is suddenly on the website exactly as I wrote it.

These guys aren't smart.

The list of jobs is jobs unsuccessfully applied for is that right?

It can’t be a list of jobs that this person did, there’s too many to make sense. The blog post is not clear.

Yes, interviewed with, or put some kind of time investment in

I'm just impressed by sheer number of things you have done, failed or not. I really want to learn how do you manage your time to have done all these.

I didn't have money or income for the vast majority of this. Parents couldn't help. What else do you have to do than think about where your next dollar will come from?

The best way to reduce failures is to not try at all.

You started out in Boston Dynamics, destined to fail :) j/k

(The again, everyone I worked with from BD seems has a similar pattern after leaving!)

Love this! What's your tech stack for all these projects? Also how do you aggregate all those live viewer counts?

Django/Python/Jquery/Javascript/Heroku. Thanks for making Saaspegasus - I used for the last 6 :)

The concept of failure here reminds me of the Tiger Woods quote: "Second Place is just the first loser".

I really don't like the false modesty

Sorry I'll try harder next time

Just don’t make such a post

The mentioning of school slights and "failures" seems disturbingly petty. It concerns me that someone remembers this kind of stuff as some sort of personal failure. He didn't "fail", as much as his 18 year old self did or was just unlucky. What does that matter?

I felt the same. The presentation is innovative and impressive (for sure a SUCCESS), but I do not feel like there's anything broadly meaningful in the content and the whole thing feels like a massive exercise in namedropping.

Yep. Marketing yourself as partly a failure when you have managed to do so many projects in the first place feels off. A true failure page would be an empty page, just of sadness. Yet not only does he have many projects, but also multiple big successes.

I wonder how many times each successful person had failed before becoming successful.

There's lists that make the rounds. Einstein, Edison, Abraham Lincoln, and JK Rowling have notable stories. Google's top pick is https://www.wanderlustworker.com/48-famous-failures-who-will...

Specifically Lincoln was a failure well into his 40s - https://mrsteinberg.com/creatives-who-made-it-when-they-were...

I love the lessons learned section. Thanks for being so open with sharing!

This is so cool! I really love the lessons learned. Keep it up!

There are no failures, only learning opportunities.

Hmm, if only you could add a bit of information.

So much persistence, be my focusmate

Sure - how?

I love the attitude behind this

This is so refreshing

I only see one failure here: not using ISO 8601 for dates.

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