What is a direction you took in your career that turned out to be the wrong direction, and you had to pivot or reverse course?
Perhaps you took the wrong promotion, or pursued the wrong focus? What is yours?
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Latest comments (54)
My actual job. When I was changing to this, after 3 years in my old company, I was between this really concise and mature company and a startup.
I chose the concise company and it is totally boring, but, at least now I'm learning that I make my career not the company that I work on.
I really like this question because I think I would answer it differently depending on the situation.
If I were unhappy with my current situation, I might say, "If I had done this or that differently, then maybe..." .
Since I am very happy with how my life has turned out in the last 2 years, I can say that everything had to happen exactly the way it did to get to where I am now.
At the end of the day, we never know if things would be better or worse, just different (but maybe just as shitty), that's for sure.
Frustrated by how stagnating one of my positions was, I left to find work at a studio and get experience on a team. It was the right decision in that situation but I didn't do enough research about the studio.
It was dreadful. They would charge clients $120/hr, pay the developer a maximum of $30/hr, inevitably disappoint the client, then try to make it right by getting the developer to work with no additional pay. They also ran a scam of a technical college that was associated with the studio and they failed to tell me that it was mandatory to teach at the technical college when working as a developer. They also failed to mention that instructors were responsible for course content until literally the night before the first lesson.
I left in a full-time capacity and continued on a contract basis. When I was working alone and responsible for client communication, that was the only time a project went well. I eventually got in the door at a successful SaaS right as they were starting to scale and that was a great experience.
Lesson learned: do your research on a new workplace before accepting, preferably before applying. Some employers are a great deal less competent than you are, even if you don't think of yourself as that competent. Use Glassdoor, use LinkedIn, do what you need to to have a conversation with an employee and be upfront about looking for red flags. It'll certainly be worth the cost of a coffee for the sake of your career path.
Every turn is a wrong turn. It's a maze with no solution. :)
Diving into a 'lone wolf' project which propelled me into bad practices, a tonne of stress, and a narrow specialism.
Around 5 - 6 years ago I was the only developer within a finance team - I just did ad hoc developments around the finance system, few integrations - basically it was a stop gap job as I was going to be moving countries in 6 months time, it was pretty chilled and a good location.
When the time came to leave and move - I was encouraged to stay, to embark on a big project to build a completely custom Purchasing system. Big pay uplift, complete freedom to design and develop, it sounded great. It was not great.
No colleagues, no support, no proper processes... essentially I was a one-man Product owner, Developer, Lead Developer, QA... the project lasted almost 2 years. I worked 90 hour weeks and developed stress induced alopecia. It was never going to succeed but I didn't see that at the time. The system did go live. But by that time I was super specialised being tied in to the Finance/ERP package that the system was built on. I tried applying for general dev jobs but I was too out of touch.
I did get out - I was able to join a consultancy that specialised in the Finance/ERP package, and joined a project working within a large development department that was implementing that package into their event driven architecture. They offered me a full time role as a developer and in exchange for my specialised knowledge on the package, I was able to enjoy a huge learning curve, getting back into 'normal' development practices - CI/CD, code reviews, colleagues, varying languages and frameworks. NB: I took a significant pay-cut for this and do not regret it one bit, although I appreciate not everyone has the luxury to do that - I don't yet have a family.
I've been there 2 years now, pay already increased to where I was when I took the cut, and am at the point where I could apply for general dev jobs again. (And finally make that country move!)
Ghh
Not a wrong turn per say...
I opted out of applying to Microverse. Today, I am a software engineer, but sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had joined Microverse
I was in the final stages of getting a remote position through a recruiter agency... And took an offer from a local company (which had a lot of benefits like retirement fund and healthcare) only for the company to be liquidated 3 months in.
Also in my country long term contracts have a "trial period" in which any part can finish the contract scott-free... Well, I was still under that trial when the contract ended, so no parachute for me.
Back at the beginning and my first serious company as a Frontend Developer. The company agreed to hire me and gave me a choice if I want to join team Angular or team SAP UI5. I chose the UI5, because I thought later on it will be much more profitable as it isn't that popular.
Well the point regarding money was true, but I wasn't aware back then that using UI5 will make me a frontend n00b and now when I want to make switch to the React, I can only apply for Junior roles as I don't know nothing about really big scalable, customizable applications.
Staying too long in a role that had no career progression. I had to re-learn JavaScript from scratch.
Early in my career I thought I needed to shift away from designing and building software systems to become a hands-off project manager.
I was wrong.
Best way to grow is to do what you love which people are also willing to pay you to do. And I love getting my hands dirty while leading teams to do more than they thought was possible.
Switching to front end from backend development job.. now lost touch and unable to go back to backend development job again.
You never loose the touch, just be patience and spend some time it with when you are ready. Theres always something in the menu you love, which is hidden.
Didn't stay long enough at a good company. Chased money.
Didn't pursue jobs at big product companies earlier in my career. They are different.
Could you please elaborate on that? How long is not long enough? And why wasn’t it long enough? Did you miss out on compensations because of leaving too early? Why wasn’t the better paying job a good choice? And how do you mean big companies are different? Why should we pursue them early in our careers?
Great question.
When you're at a company where the assignments are challenging and people respect you, you need to stay there. I know sometimes promotions can take awhile but in the long run staying will pay off.
That being said, you should be able to pretty much tell what your future is at any place after 3 years. I would at least stay somewhere 3 years unless the place is just toxic.
Noted, thanks!
The biggest regret of my career is taking a job out of desperation.
I was working for a small agency (~75% of its income came from two clients) and the boss pulled me into his office on a Friday and said that he had to let me go because we weren't getting enough business in. I freaked out a little and ended up getting a job at a shop that paid less pretty much just because their stack matched what I was familiar with. Since then, I both started putting money into an emergency fund (three months of expenses) and started diversifying my skills. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do the first thing but the second is pretty universally doable.
Another wrong turn, much earlier in my career. I worked as an employee doing software development consulting work for a consulting company. The company wanted to train in other consultants to do OS/2 software development, since at the time there was a big demand for OS/2 developers.
Since I had just done a big single-developer job with ISDN integration on OS/2 platform in C++, they asked me to train in other co-worker consultants at the company.
I naïvely thought, "Sure, sounds like fun!" Hoo-boy, I didn't realize that I had jumped into the deep end of a cold pool. I had a week to prepare.
What I came to appreciate is:
Fortunately, that wrong turn gave me a bitter taste of my own limitations. I'm good at one-on-one mentoring, I'm not good at classroom teaching.
Alas, I regret having floundered in front of my co-workers, and burning a week of their time and two weeks of my time. The embarrassment still stings.
Please don’t be too hard on yourself. Teaching is a job in itself. One-on-one tutoring and classroom teaching are almost polar opposites. It baffles me how companies think they can use one employee to teach others without providing any (teaching) materials or support (prior training in teaching for example) and think that everything will go smoothly.