Ali Navidi

Posted on Jun 16, 2022

What was your mistakes in your career path?

#career #programming #devjournal #discuss

Mistakes help us grow, What was your one mistake that you want others not to do that?

Oldest comments (55)

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22 • Edited

Starting with me: I trusted my employer on my first job and gave him my code without a contract so he didn't gave me any money so, DO NOT GIVE YOUR CODE TO ANYONE WITHOUT A CONTRACT

Chris Gustin • Jun 16 '22

Adding to this, I found out late in my freelance career that a contract can be as simple as an email laying out “I’m going to do {scope of work} for {payment details} within {timeline}” and having the other person reply that they agree.

Obligatory: I’m not a lawyer, check your local laws, this worked for me but it may not apply to every situation.

Just putting it out there in case anyone feels daunted about trying to draft up contracts (make sure you have something in writing before you start working on stuff).

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22

Thank you very much🙏🏻

Tawhid • Jun 17 '22

I also fall into a similar trap and it was something I learnt the hard way

Ali Navidi • Jun 17 '22

me too :(

Ben Halpern • Jun 16 '22

Probably anything that involved trying to go it alone in different contexts if there was help that was available.

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22

thanks a lot for sharing!

Brad • Jun 16 '22

Not caring enough in high school
Not caring enough in college until I got a big fat F for a class (then I kicked it into gear)
Maybe sticking around longer than I should have at specific companies that were not going to go anywhere.

I'd also like to point out, none of these mistakes are regrets. Each was a learning experience.

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22

thank you very much for sharing!

Keith Lee • Jun 16 '22

Being reluctant to change jobs

When I realized that I was coding myself into a corner where I knew that:

No-one would maintain my code after I left and the project would slowly self-deprecate
I was going to be stuck on the same project for the duration of my tenure regardless of my skills, and have limited upward mobility

I should have developed my exit strategy immediately.

Be realistic about your prospects and your self-worth. Don't trap yourself because you still really like your job.

Keeping my creativity to myself

I often find myself coming up with great ideas from which my company could really benefit or I will have an epiphany about how to drastically improve one of my projects. Sometimes I've kept these to myself in case I can turn them into something on my own time, or I'll do little more than mention them in passing to my supervisor.

A better approach would be to write something up. Flesh out the details, do a cost/benefit analysis, approximate number of person-hours required, and so on. If you don't champion your ideas to the right people, they'll never see the light of day.

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22

thanks a lot for sharing!

Chris Gustin • Jun 16 '22

Thinking that a handful of free tutorials and short courses would be enough to learn web dev. When I finally started investing time and money into in-depth courses with experienced teachers and planned curriculums, I learned way more, way faster, and retained it a lot better.

In that same vein, I wish I had picked up some certifications earlier on than I did. Once I did that and added them to my LinkedIn profile, I started getting good quality inquiries from agencies/recruiters/employers.

Ali Navidi • Jun 16 '22

thanks a lot for sharing!

Yannis Folias • Jul 13 '22

have you got some examples of more in-depth courses?

Chris Gustin • Jul 13 '22

Your mileage may vary, but some paid books/courses/platforms I found helpful in my career path, in the order I did them:

A Better Way to Learn... (series of books, I went through the HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery ones and highly recommend)
Javascript: Novice to Ninja (book, highly recommend although may be a tiny bit dated)
Various Wordpress books and a PHP/MySQL book that I can't remember the name of now. If you're going into Wordpress dev I highly recommend going through an intensive PHP-specific course of some kind, as opposed to just grinding out Wordpress courses and fumbling through the PHP. Makes things way easier
Frontend Masters (online platform, very helpful for learning intermediate to advanced JS)
Academind Vue.js courses on Udemy (I think I did the Complete Intro and their Nuxt.js course too. very easy way to learn Vue, highly recommend any course Academind makes)
Packt (online platform with access to technical books. very hit or miss but I did find a few gems in there)
CS50 (free course through EdX, I opted to pay for the verified cert. highly recommend if you're serious about a career in IT. it's like learning music theory after being a self-taught musician: you can get by fine without, but knowing it will open even more doors)
CS50W (this is the web programming specific follow-up to CS50, i'm about halfway through and took a pause to focus on some career changes that came up, to beef up my JS chops, and to learn React. it's very Python/Django-heavy, but the overall concepts are valuable if you're a web dev and want to be full-stack)
Scrimba.com (i'm going through their Frontend Dev Roadmap course and can't recommend it enough. one of the pricier platforms i've used, but also one of the easiest, best designed, thorough, and up to date. have skilled up quickly on Flexbox/Grid, modern JS, and currently working through their React modules. i feel like i've leveled up the most going through their material, although i'll probably look for something else once i finish the React modules)

Hope that helps!

Yannis Folias • Jul 13 '22

many thanks for your reply. my path does indeed vary but in any case these are extremely valuable resources

Jan Küster 🔥 • Jun 16 '22

Not starting a side business early on.

Ali Navidi • Jun 18 '22

Thanks a lot for sharing🙏🏻

ADS-BNE • Jun 17 '22

Pushing through and ignoring burnout. The longer you leave it the worse it gets

Ali Navidi • Jun 17 '22

Thanks a lot for sharing🙏🏻

Randall • Jun 17 '22 • Edited

I would say the biggest mistake I've made was when I started getting into freelancing, I started out by just going to the biggest freelancing platforms and placing bids there. Got very little good work from those places, and wasted quite a lot of time there. Eventually I joined a more exclusive contracting agency and got good work relatively easily through that.

Besides that, there are some things I wonder about sometimes, but it's unclear if they were mistakes.

After I graduated from university, I had an offer from Amazon. I turned it down because I had heard a lot of bad things about working there, and I took a lower paying offer from a lesser known company with a great work culture instead. Now I tend to think I would be better off if I had gone to Amazon, stayed for a year or something, got Amazon on my resume, and got my career off to a faster start that way. But I don't know, maybe I made the right choice after all.

Another thing was when I quit my programming job and moved to Japan to teach English. That didn't work out so well and I didn't stay there for very long. But that began a two year journey of digital nomadding and freelancing. It probably slowed me down career-wise, but it was also a great experience over all. Mistake? Perhaps, but I tend to think not.