Ask HN: what was the worst life/programming choice you ever made? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: what was the worst life/programming choice you ever made?

18 pointsnodemaker18 comments

Life: Not being frugal, spending too much, getting into consumer debt and a too-expensive rent contract, which shackles me in my current job and prevents me from fully pursuing my dreams.

Programming: staying at a company that works with Visual Basic, not learning Ruby/Functional Programming/jQuery/any modern stuff basically.

I'm fixing point 1, which will free me to fix point 2 hopefully :)

Life: Thinking a Community College to Uni route would be an easy transfer (I had the grades and extracurriculars to get into any Uni I wanted, but had no $$$ at the time), having a daughter at 18 with a (w)itch, this list is growing as I type so I'll stop now ;)

Programming: Taking a job at a company where the Web department is in the Marketing Department,and only our 2-man IT department has access to writing anything more then HTML/CSS. Politics.

Life: Not finishing college the first time around (I went back)

Programming: Thinking I could learn C++ architecture as I went and end up with a successful project.

My worst life mistake is the same, I wasted about 7 years in between periods of education.

What made you want to finish your education in the end?

I was unable to get a decent job, all I could get were telesales jobs.

I'm close to finishing up my Bachelor's now, I could graduate in June and throw myself full time into my business or I could do next year too which would be my Honours year.

Life: Taking too long to build my first company. Working as a H1B for one year in the US.

Programming: Ignored the benefits of testing for way too much time.

Life: coming back to india to start a company

Programming: Trying to create a framework that generates code.

Life: coming back to india to start a company

> Any particular reasons?

Well to be honest I dont really like living in India.

Its a personal thing based on my lifestyle and might and not apply to everyone.

Life : Nothing in particular as such. May be because I am a guy who finds positives even in so called "Worst decisions". They teach you something and help you get better. May be wasting 3 years doing job in a big Indian IT company. I should have get into startups earlier so that I could have failed earlier, learned earlier, improved earlier. If not in my own startup, I should have worked in some other startups instead of wasting my 2-3 years as ABAP developer.

Programming : Not testing my code properly(I only do manual user testing). I still don't do it. I find it too boring. May be I'm too lazy to do that.

Life: Getting married and having kids, before making my 'still future' fortune.

Programming: Switching majors from Computer Science to Economics (figured programming jobs would all be outsourced)

You regret having kids? Damn that's rough.

Not to use pirated software to become better at programming. It was really a mistake.

Care to elaborate?

Read this: http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-my-l...

Trying to build my own framework with PHP.

Life: Getting into Programming.

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