
Ask HN: What was your biggest failure in 2019? - topicseed
Let&#x27;s stop listing our incredible achievements from the year that has passed.<p>Instead, let&#x27;s discuss our biggest failures, what we didn&#x27;t do, what we launched that flopped, and so on.
======
deanmoriarty
Not being able to overcome the fact that a lot of people are technically
better than me, after 10 years in the field.

You know how bad people feel after they go on Facebook and look at how
beautiful their friends' lifestyle is, without realizing it's all fake? Well,
that's how I routinely feel when I browse HN, except that the work on HN is
not fake, is way too real.

I see people posting brilliant work, work that is very much related to my
field and that I should be able to come up with myself, and instead I barely
comprehend.

It then gets worse: I navigate to their personal blog, and find hundreds of
incredibly well-crafted articles about a wide range of topics. For example,
just today from a front HN link I jumped to a personal blog of an engineer who
was writing impressively deep thoughts about unit testing, dependency
injection, Go, Java, hardware, architecture, backend, frontend, performance,
... Very, very thoughtful posts. I would not be able to reflect so deeply on
those topics, even if I am relatively familiar with them. I have no other
choice than believing I am stupid, at least in comparison to such person.

It then gets worse one more time: I look them up on LinkedIn, infer their age
and see that they are younger than me, and that they were holding a demanding
full time job all along, while writing those incredible articles and producing
that amazing work on the side.

And it's not even that I could work harder. I literally cut 90% of my
recreational activities: I don't have a TV, I don't watch Netflix, Youtube,
games, I completely ignore news, I don't read novels, I don't have kids to
take care of, ...

Every day after work I read technical books/articles until I go to bed. The
only things I do non-related to my professional development are going to the
gym regularly, and spending quality time with my girlfriend a few hours on
weekends. But, I would say that on a given week I routinely put 70-80 hours on
my professional development (including my full time job), so I couldn't do
more than this without it affecting my mental and physical health.

~~~
natalyarostova
Is it imposter syndrome? Or just being unwilling to come to terms with the
fact that other people will inevitably be better than you?

~~~
deanmoriarty
Fair point, I changed the wording. Thanks.

~~~
natalyarostova
You should try to make peace with it. It’s no way to live always being upset
someone is younger and smarter than you. Keep working hard, but do it for
yourself.

~~~
topicseed
I am, myself, still struggling with how un-smart I am. Not stupid, but just so
much to learn from people I meet (in real life, or online) yet so little spare
time.

~~~
rramadass
Look at it this way. Your abilities/worth/knowledge/whatever are
multidimensional and can be mapped on a "Radar
Chart"([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart)).
They can also be classified as "Inherent" or "Incidental/Accidental". Thus
there can be no single "smartness" index defining a person.

Thus for example, i am "un-smart" on both Web Dev and Statistics/Probability
axes. The former is Incidental and easily fixed in a couple of months of work
but the later is Inherent and needs a lot more time for assimilation. Thus the
same word "un-smart" actually conveys two different meanings in the two
different axes and one should not conflate the two.

------
hola_mundo
My biggest failure in 2019 was getting utterly trapped in analysis paralysis.

Throughout the year, I explored many different side project ideas but I rarely
took any action on most of them.

I didn't ask people for feedback on the ideas. I didn't cold email potential
customers to see what they thought. I didn't build much.

Instead, I got stuck in a "research" mindset and consumed endless information
on new industries or business models, often eventually talking myself out of
most of my ideas -- without having any direct data on whether or not something
would have worked out.

I think a more productive approach to 2020 will be defining specific actions
or experiments I can run on new ideas, rather than remaining purely in the
theoretical realm.

It's moderately depressing to look back at how little I _really_ learned. Few
of my theories ever made contact with reality.

~~~
thrwaway69
Been there. I realized doing something was better than planning most of the
time in the initial stage. Most ideas or things you will come across have
already been done, so trying to find something original isn't a solid
strategy. If it's entirely new/original, then it will come to you naturally.
You will discover it because you are the consumer facing the problem.

Otherwise, focusing on getting feedback and people to talk to you, get them to
send their email (even though I personally hate the practice of collecting
private info without any product and sending 'spam') is important to maintain
their investment along with a simple sketchy prototype to show off. It's
easier to give feedback on something that you can see or interact with than
written details. Showing vision is better than explaining it even if it is
completely basic. Your users will flesh out the product for you, they will
tell you what features you can add, how it should work and how you can
actually do it.

All of that wouldn't happen without a basic structure. Without seeing a shitty
painting, I wouldn't comment on it.

I wonder how depressed marketers and other similar people feel for
manipulating others and hogging their personal life with irrelevant
things.....such as getting someone's dad addicted to a gambling or social
platform and that resulting in negligence.

------
batt4good
Getting let go from FAANG basically because I didn't ignore huge red flags
while getting hired (thought bc it was a FAANG there wouldn't be atrocious
mgmt policies etc).

The requirements for the position as the recruiter described was Go / Elixir
experience, did my code screen / take home in elixir and nailed it, principle
engineer reviewed my code and green-lit my application mostly bc he was also a
devout elixir fan. My manager had a language barrier and seemed pushy when I
did my on-site and told her I wanted to use the normal allotment of time for
the take-home (they fast tracked my app which would've only given me two days
for a take-home that is usually give 5 days). Learned the team wasn't doing
any Go / Elixir (was "maybe going to transition at some point" and never did)
and was basically just servicing a shitty monolith built in Ruby.

Lots of $$$ so I just decided to take the offer, since my prior situation was
a startup that was trying to avoid paying me my full salary and boss didn't
"believe" in benefits.

Team at FAANG was also socially inept enough to always send my comments up to
my boss instead of team member meant to onboard me - first task was also
horribly scoped and made me look like an idiot for double checking my work
(small fix with HUGE implications and side-effects if done wrong, with flaky
tests galore). Boss berated me for being the only person who would tell her I
wasn't going to be done at the end of the day, but never caused a critical
problem in prod. Basically got fucked when I admitted a mistake that I
promptly fixed and re-deployed, proving their BS "nobody gets blamed for
fuckups" _policy_ was definitely bullshit.

I got paid $20k to leave as my team was let go for unrelated reasons (you can
guess which FAANG) and did some work with a friend on a startup for a few
months. The transition out / lack of luck searching for new jobs really kicked
me in the stomach and confidence - and on top of that I'm still looking for
work. But hey, hopefully 2020 goes better.

~~~
T3OU-736
Dogpiling onto the well-wishing. Having recently been through a bit of
interviews at various places, can't help but wonder - how does (and is it even
possible) a candidate defect this toxicity or the interview stage? With the
20/20 hindsight, were there any tell-tale signs?

~~~
batt4good
I have very limited experience, but the few that jump out to me emanate from a
few conversations I had with employees during my on-site. For context, the
role was for a "Golang / Elixir Engineer" during my onsite all anyone talked
about was relatively new code written in Ruby and only mentioned Golang or
Elixir in a "maybe 8 months down the road" way. Language barrier with your
manager seems innocuous, but the problems I ran into were deeper and seemingly
cultural. (she expected to only be told things were going right, nothing was
ever her fault, asking for help is indicative of weakness or incompetence etc.
- I'm trying to not sound racist but other employees had similar comments)

Also, it took me quite a bit of time to work through the mental gymnastics as
to whether I was just bad at my job or if I was in a toxic environment. In
hindsight it was definitely toxic - as an example senior engineers on my teams
were being put in a position where they had to make decisions TPM's should be
making (but still hung out when they made the wrong decisions).

~~~
T3OU-736
So, nothing _really_ jumped out, though there were weak clues/hints. I am not
a coder, so it isn't obvious to me that a mention of a technology being "8
months down the road" is unreasonable. But now it would be.

Language (and, it appears, also a _culture_ ) barrier with management is...
tricky since we don't want to come off as racist/*-ist. Not sure how to
evaluate it, aside from asking scenario questions if the manager. Maybe if
there manager, during their interview, didn't care about finding the
candidate's behavior when they reached their knowledge limits is another sign?

------
sevilo
Ignoring my personal relationships because I put too much time and focus on
reaching the goals for my side business. I did reach the goals I set out to do
in the beginning of 2019, it gave me hope to move forward with this project
and potentially work on it full time. But I often canceled weekend plans with
my boyfriend, ignored things he wanted to do, because frankly the idea of
being able to build my own brand is an idea I'm so excited for and I just
can't wait to prove that I can reach my goal.

I learn that relationships, just like businesses or work, the more commitment
you put in, the more result will show. Also, it's important to balance work
and life and make expectations clear.

------
WinonaRyder
Like another comenter, I'd say mine was "not starting". More specifically
writing. I often get ideas about articles I'd like to write but I just end up
talking myself out of it.

This past Sunday morning - like countless others - I woke up with an idea
comparing JavaScript ES5/ES6 to vanilla ice of various quality and decided to
just post it in all its shitty glory on Twitter. It didn't go viral and I
didn't gain any fame from it... but I wasn't the only one that found it funny
(my biggest fear crushed) so it's a start, I guess.

------
ahi
Took over responsibility for some shell scripting glue. Task: migrate to new
servers. "How hard can it be?" 2 months later I am still completely lost. I
have random input/output files going everywhere, complete flustercuck of perl
dependencies, and ftp processes I can't test lest I bork prod.

Edit: and even if I "succeed" I'm pretty sure it needs a total rewrite. I
think I'm performing a cross-org table join using ftp and text files with
undocumented time dependencies.

------
psychox2c
My biggest failure for 2019 is not starting. Overanalyzing ideas to the point
that I forget about them and then doing that same process again on another
idea. So my new year resolution is going to be 12 startup mvp's in 12 months!

~~~
topicseed
Oh yes, that's a tough one. Procrastination is a lethal mind weapon.

------
Can_Not
Rewrote a non-trivial app from Vue to svelte/sapper. It was a success until we
discovered that it turns out Svelte handles errors by freezing instead of
letting you show an error page and/or report it to Sentry.

------
dr_j_
I have difficulty in letting go of engineering problems. My mind is always
racing for a fix.. I have been in danger of burnout several times because of
this. 2020 I need to learn to chill a bit more.

------
6700417
I would suggest that rather than just listing things that didn’t work out,
people also discuss what they learned from the experience and how they would
act differently if they had a chance to do it all over.

------
Swtrz
Accepting a job without doing more research on the company and the actual job
but of impatience. 11 months down the drain.

------
Havoc
Lack of movement forward.

Looks good on paper (got a promotion) but I can feel I just drifted with the
current.

------
petsoundz
Flunked out of a really good sales job I wasn't qualified for, and proceeded
to get fired from an Amazon warehouse because my sleep problem still eludes
medicine/psychiatry/homeopathy/jungian therapy. Still unemployed, won't be
able to make 15/hr again.

Still dwelling on past relationship, failing at current.

Still stuck at home.

2020 is the year, though. "This time" I'll get around to the language learning
and applications.

