What do you regret now from the first year/years of starting in your career?
I truly deeply regret believing small people that wanted to make me doubt myself and not search for other options, better ones, ranging from how to learn, how important is to share knowledge with peers and strangers, how to respect myself and others and demand that in return and how to write code. Literally, it was bad but aggressively told it's how things should be done.
How about you? No names, or details, just a bit of lashing out so that other new beginners can learn from this. Thank you! You are awesome!
Top comments (11)
I regret over the years unquestioningly treating and describing open source contribution as a fun hobby that benefits everyone, rather than a source of free labor for giant corporations that use our creations to extract profit from our fragile Earth.
I only really had 1 PR so far on open source, so I don't completely understand the situation, but I do think that not everything is perfect, after some info reading here and there. I hope you can find/or found already something that makes you happy as well.
I don't like to say regret, as I wouldn't be who I am, but there are a few things I would change, if I could redo my schooling. I'd work on studying harder, and probably take some different classes, such as Software Engineering, instead of Artificial Intelligence, and perhaps Fortran instead of Cobol, and not take C++, and take a statistics course. I'd also stick with Linux.
This is a nice realization, and I as well would have liked to have learned harder, but I think that if you do your best with what you have it's enough. I can tell from my experience that I didn't understood in school that I should learn some stuff more, or that I even liked the subject.
As you said, your past helped you do what you do now.
HMM, regret seem to me (IMAO) to be a good word, When I first started (and that date is still on calendars today) I had career options that tore me in 2 directions, engineering and Database. I think I picked the wrong one, Oracle RDBMS. I can see today that I went that direct due to the advice of people that I Trusted, but since than I have realized that they had their own agenda and I should have continued as an embedded processor programmer and not listened to those that needed a programmer that could could pick up new skills rapidly for their projects. My advice to those that are just getting started is to pick something you enjoy doing and test the motive of anyone that suggest you go do something else; that you test their motives and then do what you want which may not be what they want you to do. In the end your career is yours to manage.
Hi, that is a very powerful message and advice. Thank you. I honestly believe we all made mistakes, or seemed-as-mistakes in our careers. I do regret some as well, but because we cannot change what is done, think of it as something that made you who you are today. And you can learn new stuff, I am doing that now, it's not comfortable, but then again neither is being miserable. Hang in there and I hope you find something you like again.
I really regret that I haven't gone abroad to work somewhere with a different culture. I have some places that I would like to go, but I'm still in my comfort zone.
I agree that travelling and working with people from different cultures, or even just living in a new country will open up your opportunities. And most important your own ideas of what is acceptable, how things should be done etc will expand, because your bubble world will expand. A person becomes more understanding of others. I hope you find what you are looking for.
At least I'm with the first step, working in a multicultural team where more or less the 50% are foreigners and I'm learning how to talk technically in English with people that are in the same situation as me (Indian, Russian, French or Italian people, for example) and learning from lots of cultures! The next step will be travel or working on remote for another country to broaden my chance of working on-site there. Thanks for the support!
Not learning to ask for help from an early age. I was selfish in thinking I can do things all alone. Now, I see the benefits of dropping my ego and working together with others.
Congratz. This is an awesome realization and I am guessing it came from introspect. We all look for kind people to work with.