Ask HN: Tell us about your greatest failures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448734

by ehsanul • 16 years ago

6 2 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Preferably failures that taught you important lessons, maybe you'll stop others from learning the hard way.

hga• 16 years ago

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))).

schn• 16 years ago

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.

Ask HN: Tell us about your greatest failures

Related Stories