Ask HN: What choice you made in your career you regret the most? - abdelhadikhiati
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scmoore
Quitting jobs and moving without having the next job lined up. I always
figured I was a smart guy, I could land on my feet wherever I ended up. And
that was true, but it took some time and effort to get a job that lined up
with my career goals, and while that was happening I was pretty stressed out.
I also feel like I've lost about a year of growth (and salary!), which is hard
to let go of.

I realize that this isn't really a big revelation, but it didn't really hit
home for me until I got into a real "career" \-- it wasn't such a big deal
when I worked retail jobs.

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ratfacemcgee
discovering hackernews?

but seriously, probably thinking i had to "pay my dues" before I begun my
career. Thinking I wasn't good enough to get a job, and I had to spend time at
Uni first. It wasn't until I was mid way through my masters before I realised
that a job wasn't going to magically appear the day I graduated. I dropped out
and never looked back.

Also, thinking I had to shoehorn myself into the industry by working my way up
to it from tech support. That was fruitless.

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mswen
Not buying that Perl book at the college bookstore in 1994 and not really
digging in deep when I first encountered RDBMs at about the same time. At the
time I was learning grad level social science with a quantitative focus - lots
of statistics with SPSS. Around 2012 I started adding in HTML, PHP,
Javascript, SQL, R and now working on Python. I was right on the verge of
putting together the multi-disciplinary skill set that serves me well today as
early as the mid 1990s.

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fenier
Not taking Statistics in high school. Ended up taking it in College, but found
I enjoy it quite a bit and would have been able to enjoy it nearly a decade
earlier.

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maxerickson
Statistics should replace algebra II or maybe trigonometry as a high school
requirement.

~~~
fenier
I think High Schools focus to much on theory and not enough on practical
application to make it interesting.

They do the same for most math. Always learned math better when it was being
applied to actual things I cared about personally.

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rajacombinator
Not learning web coding earlier. Although it wasn't a conscious choice, just
something I wasn't exposed to.

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re_todd
Taking such a long time to get my degrees. When I finally had the educational
background I wanted, I found it's difficult to get those entry-level positions
when you're over 35. And if you can't get those entry-level positions, it's
extremely difficult to have a career in the field you want.

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gonyea
That time I had to call a lot of SOAP APIs. Not Java SOAP, but .NET SOAP.
There's a difference and I regret having had to know what it was.

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deathtrader666
Accepting the first offer that came through, every time I went job-hunting.

Nearly drowned in toxic work culture..

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jcfausto
work for more than 10 years on the same company and almost with the same
technology. bad mistake.

