

Ask HN: Tell us about your greatest failures - ehsanul

Preferably failures that taught you important lessons, maybe you'll stop others from learning the hard way.
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hga
Being so focused on leading and implementing a Maximum Effort software
development project that I failed to notice a couple of employees fatally
undermining my position until it was too late; I was purged immediately after
delivering version 1.0.

This triggered a disability that I later learned I was genetically disposed
towards (and that eventually totally disabled me) and fairly quickly killed
the project and soon enough the company.

Some people are "in it for themselves" but don't have the wit to realize it's
not a zero sum game and that some people _are_ indispensable in a small
startup (in my case, I was the architect and the only person who had what it
took to make one critical part of the system work (with only two other
programmers I hadn't had a chance to teach that yet (raw C Windows GUIs
interfacing to 3rd party libraries and our server, there was a lot of
unrelated raw learning required there))).

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schn
Made a website which was essentially an implementation of a GBA game I was
running over a forum. Took a lot of time. Haven't used it much.

Made a small dice rolling utility. Took a few hours. Used regularly by my
online DnD group.

Fairly cheap way to learn to make something people want.

