

Ask HN: what was the worst life/programming choice you ever made? - nodemaker


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GFischer
Life: Not being frugal, spending too much, getting into consumer debt and a
too-expensive rent contract, which shackles me in my current job and prevents
me from fully pursuing my dreams.

Programming: staying at a company that works with Visual Basic, not learning
Ruby/Functional Programming/jQuery/any modern stuff basically.

I'm fixing point 1, which will free me to fix point 2 hopefully :)

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RollAHardSix
Life: Thinking a Community College to Uni route would be an easy transfer (I
had the grades and extracurriculars to get into any Uni I wanted, but had no
$$$ at the time), having a daughter at 18 with a (w)itch, this list is growing
as I type so I'll stop now ;)

Programming: Taking a job at a company where the Web department is in the
Marketing Department,and only our 2-man IT department has access to writing
anything more then HTML/CSS. Politics.

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Rickasaurus
Life: Not finishing college the first time around (I went back)

Programming: Thinking I could learn C++ architecture as I went and end up with
a successful project.

~~~
jamesjguthrie
My worst life mistake is the same, I wasted about 7 years in between periods
of education.

~~~
masanqi
What made you want to finish your education in the end?

~~~
jamesjguthrie
I was unable to get a decent job, all I could get were telesales jobs.

I'm close to finishing up my Bachelor's now, I could graduate in June and
throw myself full time into my business or I could do next year too which
would be my Honours year.

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eduardordm
Life: Taking too long to build my first company. Working as a H1B for one year
in the US.

Programming: Ignored the benefits of testing for way too much time.

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nodemaker
Life: coming back to india to start a company

Programming: Trying to create a framework that generates code.

~~~
anujkk
Life: coming back to india to start a company

> Any particular reasons?

~~~
nodemaker
Well to be honest I dont really like living in India.

Its a personal thing based on my lifestyle and might and not apply to
everyone.

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anujkk
Life : Nothing in particular as such. May be because I am a guy who finds
positives even in so called "Worst decisions". They teach you something and
help you get better. May be wasting 3 years doing job in a big Indian IT
company. I should have get into startups earlier so that I could have failed
earlier, learned earlier, improved earlier. If not in my own startup, I should
have worked in some other startups instead of wasting my 2-3 years as ABAP
developer.

Programming : Not testing my code properly(I only do manual user testing). I
still don't do it. I find it too boring. May be I'm too lazy to do that.

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GoldenMonkey
Life: Getting married and having kids, before making my 'still future'
fortune.

Programming: Switching majors from Computer Science to Economics (figured
programming jobs would all be outsourced)

~~~
mdonahoe
You regret having kids? Damn that's rough.

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dragonbonheur
Not to use pirated software to become better at programming. It was really a
mistake.

~~~
drewrv
Care to elaborate?

~~~
dragonbonheur
Read this: [http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-
my-l...](http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-my-life)

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Axsuul
Trying to build my own framework with PHP.

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taligent
Life: Getting into Programming.

