Not starting a side project earlier. And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.
Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do. All he cares about is how much money he can make with your energy. Know what hard work gets you? A pat on the back and more hard work.
Gone are the days where you could build a career based on mutual respect and trust. Nowadays it's just a list of previous employments. Nobody cares how good you are or what problems you can solve. All they care about is overqualified warm bodies. Hire skilled developers and throw them on meaningless tasks controlled by business politics. At least this seems to be the general experience among my peers.
If you want to be successful, become a good politician. It's the only thing that will make your life better. Anything else is just a lie designed to squeeze more value out of you.
> And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.
> Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do.
Hard work will get you places. But nobody said anything about hard work for your employer. You have to work hard, but you have to work hard on your personal goals.
If that means climbing the ranks at an organisation. Do that. Climb them as hard as you can. Identify what gets them climbed. Do that above all else.
If that means starting a business. Launch a side project. Or two. Or twenty. Or even fifty. However many it takes until you have enough of a side-income to drop your job and live off of yourself.
If that means starting a VC-backed business. Well, work hard on knowing what ticks the checkboxes for VCs. Work hard on meeting a lot of VCs. Work hard on whatever it takes to get VCs to dump money into your idea.
I'm sorry for your situation. I assume you're in the USA.
I care about our team and their wellbeing more than I do profit - although the two can go hand in hand if you reinvest in your people.
We send folks to conferences, as they learn and network, which is good for them and us. We generally give annual raises around the 15% mark. Above all we don't allow or accept the master-slave relationship anywhere in the company, and we're careful not to hire people who we feel will want to dominate other people.
I'm sure, in fact I know, many employers are assholes who treat their team like slaves - but it's not a universal law.
> And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.
I try to work harder than average. If you don't, you get a lazy reputation, may not get a good reference, and might be one of the first to go in a round of lay-offs. However, I make sure I'm never the hardest worker. Some of the hardest working people I know are poor and too often taken for granted. I've never seen the hardest working person in a company get a fair deal. So, it's a balancing act, trying to work hard but not too hard.
Staying in a job for too long. I started fresh out of school at 18 and stayed there for over 10 years. During that time I got very few pay rises and always felt like I was being treated as a kid still despite my experience. When I finally left my pay jumped by over £15k. In the 4 years since I left my pay has nearly quadrupled and I'm in a much better position at a much more awesome company.
For example, I could regret I didn't leave my previous employer earlier because they just didn't pay me more money eventhough my skills and impact had gone way up since starting there. But not leaving that job taught me my own value.
And knowing my value has now materialized in the form of lots of appreciation shown by later employers as well as better money and more challenging jobs. In the previous job it did suck to realize I won't be rewarded for my hard work but, in comparison to what followed, that suckage was a bargain price and I'd never waste my time regretting it.
Being shit at building lasting relationships with former colleagues and people I worked with. In the end that's what it all seems to come down to, a network of people.
Regretting things in your life is awful. I learned a LOT from not finishing deadlines, messing up complete branches of code and working on projects I don't like at all! In the moment I could have a regretted it, but looking back on things, it was always a valuable life-lesson.
It's very true, you often learn most when things break or you have to work with old and bad code which makes you realize why certain design patterns exist
Made me waste 5 years of my productive life, to leave me in debt that made me waste 4 years working just to pay that debt, this year will be my first real year working to actually earn money.
My biggest "regret" was deciding to stay in the ERP space. When I originally jumped in via an internship, I did so because I wanted to get a better understanding of the monolithic systems that ran most the world. I got pulled into an interesting project, became an expert of sorts, and before I knew it I found myself with what felt like golden handcuffs.
I'm hard pressed to say I actually regret it because I've gotten myself to a very comfortable point in life with plenty of options and I've met a bunch of great people along the way. I really only dislike my ERP choice because I've become an expert in technologies that aren't easily leveraged outside of the enterprise space and my interest there is waning.
Mistake #1 - leaving a secure job at a pre-IPO company before I vested in order to join a company where I had greater authority.
Mistake #2 - using my authority to hire several friends from school who hadn't previously held responsible full-time positions.
Mistake #3 - trusting them to manage themselves.
My friends were all smart but none of them really cared about the business or each other. They just preferred getting paid to not getting paid and slowly left after the novelty wore off. One of them even wrote a draft of a crappy novel when we thought he was coding, which we found when cleaning out his desk.
We've all since moved on. Some of them are now quite successful. But I was burned pretty badly by that experience and am no longer friends with any of them.
Not meeting more interesting people outside my discipline in college. My network is mostly limited to people in my field because I spent too much time with people similar to me because that was easy and comfortable.
My first regret: having not the balls to do what I really wanted when I was a teenager.
I went to the university mostly to please my parents and to reassure them. I think that was my biggest mistake and I never really learned anything there.
My second regret: quitting. I'm getting bored very easily.
I'm thinking about 2 projects I started with friends where I left the ship eventually because I felt less motivated than them. Now they are both making tons of money and expansing there companies (while I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my life).
I also started a lot of projects which I will probably never release, but that's a pretty common thing.
The last one: working for someone else.
Studying led me on the logical path of getting a job. I first said to myself that it will be temporary and I listened to people who were telling me that I had to have a little experience before launching my own thing (and my advice is: don't listen to their bullshits and do what the fuck you really want to do). The truth is that when you get a job it consumes you and you can forget what your dreams are pretty quickly.
The counterbalancing point of this last regret is that I met extraordinary people while I was an employee, who are still very good friends nowadays. Actually the guy with whom I'm trying to build a startup right now is a former coworker of mine ;)
Big mistake: Joining a start-up with non-technical[1] "idea people" founders as a young father during the last year of my studies. Put a lot of effort into it, got little recognition, burned out all resources (money, friends, family). Have been doing the work of an entire dev team, 12h days, weekend work, and still got like "Oh, you go home already? What about all the work? I've been sleeping in the office and doing super important stuff!" There were days I didn't see my kid for days. Before, my colleagues promised me a super relaxed time, "you can go home early and play with your kid!"
Now I'm freelancing with friends, making good money, flexible hours, feeling much better already! Finally paying off the debts I made during the startup time. Also working at a real company can be quite nice!
Startups are like cults, you only realise what it was after you left. Got myself dragged into this sick mindset of overworking. And as it turned out, we've been working 90% of the time for nothing! Not exaggerating here. Hope it will pay out at least, but not sure about that even... I had better worked half as much time as a freelancer and just bought the shares for money.
Fresh fathers and mothers out there, beware! Startups have to be really family friendly, then it could work. Considering we've only been doing 10% valuable work that eventually contributed to a good product, I believe it's possible to work, say, half as much, have a good work life balance and still get a better product shipped in the end.
[1] With "non-technical" I mean economics people, the "We have a super great idea and are looking for somebody to just do the little boring work of just executing it" bunch. I enjoyed working with non-technical people in general very much, but I've had bad experience with business people, those that only care about money, not about the product or employees.
I took an easy job (UK financial software) when I was downsized from a job that I loved (Embedded systems). I told myself I'd quit within one year and either move to somewhere else in the commonwealth (NZ, SA, Canada) or do a year of university in Sweden on a course I found really interesting, with a view to getting back to Embedded work. I did neither, and I'm still there.
I'm moderately well paid, I have a plan to save money + quit, I moved to a new country and now have a lovely girlfriend, so I'm still in a happy situation - but I wish I could have had these things and pursued my career a little better.
Sticking with my first start-up for too long after it became obvious to me that it wasn't going to work out with the team I had. We were almost dead, then received a flurry of interest from accelerators, accepted an offer and spent another year going solidly nowhere.
I learned a lot from the experience, but there was a point at which I should have called it quits. Then again, I guess I learned that as well.
I don't regret having done it, and I accept the time lost as a necessary price, but looking back I think I could have saved myself a lot of time by calling it quits a year sooner.
Assuming that the place I worked at would always have work for me. I'm older, so I didn't have the newer philosophy of job hopping for experience, and believed I could make a career at this one place. I was there over 20 years and had 2 positions. It was union so I was making good money just from the seniority. I was on my 3rd supervisor (previous ones retired) and we didn't get along so well. I got laid off and trying to find a new job I was like a baby getting born -- didn't know a thing about the outside world. It's been tough.
Staying in college at a school that didn't let you change majors (Cal Poly). I picked up what I can in night school in the years following and have cobbled together the job a 25 year old should have now that I'm 32. Worst mistake of my life, not just career.
If you're in a major you don't like and can't switch, drop out. University is largely a scam that exists to impoverish students and adjuncts for the benefit of a bloated administration.
Junior college, however, is an amazing thing and I encourage it for anyone.
(From your comment to this:) "It took me an entire extra year just to get one class I needed to graduate"
Yeah, from what I've read, a lot of state schools are much less of a bargain than they appear because they simply don't care if you can really graduate in 4 years. The private school I went to would move heaven and earth to make this possible, deal with unexpected overflows in majors (you could pick any and change to any as you wished), etc., which is one of the things you pay the big bucks for.
I have something akin: gross parental betrayal I didn't cotton onto soon enough, resulting in my fruitlessly mostly wasting a decade trying to get the necessary undergraduate science degree, which includes useful recommendations for graduate school, i.e. lower tier schools aren't good for this, for the career I'd prepared for starting in 1st grade. Programming and system administration were just things I was good at, but I didn't truly dedicate myself to programming until all that drama was over, with a huge opportunity cost. Never tried to learn a lot of more pure CS when that would have been a possibility, then again I started seriously studying software engineering in high school.
Also thinking I had plenty of time to work things out; turns out I have a genetic disability that permanently took me out of the work force in my early-mid '40s (picking a date is hard because it started when I was 37 and I turned 41 when the dot-com crash made finding employment very hard).
I.e. make the most of the here and now without foreclosing on the future (as I've seen others now regret).
[+] [-] mrcold|11 years ago|reply
Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do. All he cares about is how much money he can make with your energy. Know what hard work gets you? A pat on the back and more hard work.
Gone are the days where you could build a career based on mutual respect and trust. Nowadays it's just a list of previous employments. Nobody cares how good you are or what problems you can solve. All they care about is overqualified warm bodies. Hire skilled developers and throw them on meaningless tasks controlled by business politics. At least this seems to be the general experience among my peers.
If you want to be successful, become a good politician. It's the only thing that will make your life better. Anything else is just a lie designed to squeeze more value out of you.
[+] [-] Swizec|11 years ago|reply
> Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do.
Hard work will get you places. But nobody said anything about hard work for your employer. You have to work hard, but you have to work hard on your personal goals.
If that means climbing the ranks at an organisation. Do that. Climb them as hard as you can. Identify what gets them climbed. Do that above all else.
If that means starting a business. Launch a side project. Or two. Or twenty. Or even fifty. However many it takes until you have enough of a side-income to drop your job and live off of yourself.
If that means starting a VC-backed business. Well, work hard on knowing what ticks the checkboxes for VCs. Work hard on meeting a lot of VCs. Work hard on whatever it takes to get VCs to dump money into your idea.
The world is literally your oyster.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
I care about our team and their wellbeing more than I do profit - although the two can go hand in hand if you reinvest in your people.
We send folks to conferences, as they learn and network, which is good for them and us. We generally give annual raises around the 15% mark. Above all we don't allow or accept the master-slave relationship anywhere in the company, and we're careful not to hire people who we feel will want to dominate other people.
I'm sure, in fact I know, many employers are assholes who treat their team like slaves - but it's not a universal law.
[+] [-] jassorno|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teknologist|11 years ago|reply
> All they care about is overqualified warm bodies
Seems conflicting, no?
[+] [-] re_todd|11 years ago|reply
I try to work harder than average. If you don't, you get a lazy reputation, may not get a good reference, and might be one of the first to go in a round of lay-offs. However, I make sure I'm never the hardest worker. Some of the hardest working people I know are poor and too often taken for granted. I've never seen the hardest working person in a company get a fair deal. So, it's a balancing act, trying to work hard but not too hard.
[+] [-] nnoitra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellweaver666|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vetler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparaker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|11 years ago|reply
For example, I could regret I didn't leave my previous employer earlier because they just didn't pay me more money eventhough my skills and impact had gone way up since starting there. But not leaving that job taught me my own value.
And knowing my value has now materialized in the form of lots of appreciation shown by later employers as well as better money and more challenging jobs. In the previous job it did suck to realize I won't be rewarded for my hard work but, in comparison to what followed, that suckage was a bargain price and I'd never waste my time regretting it.
[+] [-] pan69|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analogmind|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhildings|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|11 years ago|reply
Made me waste 5 years of my productive life, to leave me in debt that made me waste 4 years working just to pay that debt, this year will be my first real year working to actually earn money.
[+] [-] brd|11 years ago|reply
I'm hard pressed to say I actually regret it because I've gotten myself to a very comfortable point in life with plenty of options and I've met a bunch of great people along the way. I really only dislike my ERP choice because I've become an expert in technologies that aren't easily leveraged outside of the enterprise space and my interest there is waning.
[+] [-] friendsnomore|11 years ago|reply
Mistake #2 - using my authority to hire several friends from school who hadn't previously held responsible full-time positions.
Mistake #3 - trusting them to manage themselves.
My friends were all smart but none of them really cared about the business or each other. They just preferred getting paid to not getting paid and slowly left after the novelty wore off. One of them even wrote a draft of a crappy novel when we thought he was coding, which we found when cleaning out his desk.
We've all since moved on. Some of them are now quite successful. But I was burned pretty badly by that experience and am no longer friends with any of them.
[+] [-] mgraczyk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1user1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pym|11 years ago|reply
I went to the university mostly to please my parents and to reassure them. I think that was my biggest mistake and I never really learned anything there.
My second regret: quitting. I'm getting bored very easily.
I'm thinking about 2 projects I started with friends where I left the ship eventually because I felt less motivated than them. Now they are both making tons of money and expansing there companies (while I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my life).
I also started a lot of projects which I will probably never release, but that's a pretty common thing.
The last one: working for someone else.
Studying led me on the logical path of getting a job. I first said to myself that it will be temporary and I listened to people who were telling me that I had to have a little experience before launching my own thing (and my advice is: don't listen to their bullshits and do what the fuck you really want to do). The truth is that when you get a job it consumes you and you can forget what your dreams are pretty quickly.
The counterbalancing point of this last regret is that I met extraordinary people while I was an employee, who are still very good friends nowadays. Actually the guy with whom I'm trying to build a startup right now is a former coworker of mine ;)
[+] [-] Jean-Philipe|11 years ago|reply
Now I'm freelancing with friends, making good money, flexible hours, feeling much better already! Finally paying off the debts I made during the startup time. Also working at a real company can be quite nice!
Startups are like cults, you only realise what it was after you left. Got myself dragged into this sick mindset of overworking. And as it turned out, we've been working 90% of the time for nothing! Not exaggerating here. Hope it will pay out at least, but not sure about that even... I had better worked half as much time as a freelancer and just bought the shares for money.
Fresh fathers and mothers out there, beware! Startups have to be really family friendly, then it could work. Considering we've only been doing 10% valuable work that eventually contributed to a good product, I believe it's possible to work, say, half as much, have a good work life balance and still get a better product shipped in the end.
[1] With "non-technical" I mean economics people, the "We have a super great idea and are looking for somebody to just do the little boring work of just executing it" bunch. I enjoyed working with non-technical people in general very much, but I've had bad experience with business people, those that only care about money, not about the product or employees.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smcl|11 years ago|reply
I'm moderately well paid, I have a plan to save money + quit, I moved to a new country and now have a lovely girlfriend, so I'm still in a happy situation - but I wish I could have had these things and pursued my career a little better.
[+] [-] aerialcombat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atroyn|11 years ago|reply
I learned a lot from the experience, but there was a point at which I should have called it quits. Then again, I guess I learned that as well.
I don't regret having done it, and I accept the time lost as a necessary price, but looking back I think I could have saved myself a lot of time by calling it quits a year sooner.
[+] [-] fallinghawks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|11 years ago|reply
If you're in a major you don't like and can't switch, drop out. University is largely a scam that exists to impoverish students and adjuncts for the benefit of a bloated administration.
Junior college, however, is an amazing thing and I encourage it for anyone.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
Yeah, from what I've read, a lot of state schools are much less of a bargain than they appear because they simply don't care if you can really graduate in 4 years. The private school I went to would move heaven and earth to make this possible, deal with unexpected overflows in majors (you could pick any and change to any as you wished), etc., which is one of the things you pay the big bucks for.
I have something akin: gross parental betrayal I didn't cotton onto soon enough, resulting in my fruitlessly mostly wasting a decade trying to get the necessary undergraduate science degree, which includes useful recommendations for graduate school, i.e. lower tier schools aren't good for this, for the career I'd prepared for starting in 1st grade. Programming and system administration were just things I was good at, but I didn't truly dedicate myself to programming until all that drama was over, with a huge opportunity cost. Never tried to learn a lot of more pure CS when that would have been a possibility, then again I started seriously studying software engineering in high school.
Also thinking I had plenty of time to work things out; turns out I have a genetic disability that permanently took me out of the work force in my early-mid '40s (picking a date is hard because it started when I was 37 and I turned 41 when the dot-com crash made finding employment very hard).
I.e. make the most of the here and now without foreclosing on the future (as I've seen others now regret).
[+] [-] ThatPlayer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rikkus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcl|11 years ago|reply
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061451 [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061437
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]