What was your mistakes in your career path?

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.

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.

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

I first mistake is very common which most of developers always do which is

"blindly get attrackted to shiny objects like new code editor, new programming language, new course, etc"

• Take people words without contract.
• Let vacations for later because my project "needed" me.
• Believe in "talk is cheap show me the code" managers seems to value more people who talk more and don't code.
• Practice algorithms and take interviews even when you're not looking for a Job maybe we don't agree that we need to take live coding challenges and algorithms to prove our value but those are the rules of the game and we have to be prepared.

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

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.

1. Not caring enough in high school
2. Not caring enough in college until I got a big fat F for a class (then I kicked it into gear)
3. 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.

Not collaborating with others on projects, opting to fly solo most times.

I only have the one internship under my belt, about 9 months. I do not work in development presently, but I work on various personal projects on my free time. So take this for what it's worth.

I've come to realize that having just one other person to collaborate with is a game changer. Talking through problems, developing a path forward, bouncing ideas of each other as we work towards a solution, and a greater drive to put in effort as to not disappoint our peers. We also bring something different to the table, which help fill in knowledge gaps.

Collaborating with others can also help with networking and employment later on. All it takes is for one of the people you've worked on a project with to suggest you as a candidate for an open position and you now have your foot in the door.

Not going freelance sooner ... my last "boring office job" was really a low, and a waste of time - it totally didn't live up to the expectations that I'd had, it was a dud on so many levels ... but, it really convinced me to change course and go freelance, and do things completely different :)