<story><title>Ask HN: Dealing with Career Mistakes</title><text>Two years ago I had an option to go into the management path. My leadership was supportive and wanted me to take up the opportunity. I chose to pivot into the product management instead. My peer took that role. My role change didn’t go very well. Personally i was unhappy and felt unfulfilled at work. While I was respected at work and my manager very supportive I didn’t enjoy it. I quit and joined another company and pivoted into program management. Since then my work hours have doubled and while I am earning the highest paycheck I could have dreamed of, I am extremely unhappy being an IC.  I have 25 years of industry experience and I feel I should mentor people instead of moving JIRA tickets around.&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I saw my former colleague who grabbed the manager role, got promoted to a director. I was hard working and intelligent than him. I could’ve played my card right and be in that place. Yet here I am being ‘advanced beginner’ in a different role every couple of years doing grunt IC work. How do I turn the wheel of time back and undo my career mistake. I feel incredibly stupid. I am losing confidence in making good decisions.&lt;p&gt;How do I deal with my feelings? Should I seek professional help?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>somehnacct3757</author><text>You have no way of knowing that you would have done well in the manager role and gotten promoted to director like your peer. You claim to be more hard working and intelligent than him but who&amp;#x27;s to say what you view as hard working and intelligent are objectively true? Who&amp;#x27;s to say success in those roles is even a function of hard work or intelligence? Who&amp;#x27;s to say your peer didn&amp;#x27;t have some third skill relevant to managering and directoring that you lack in comparison? Maybe the thing that led to your peer&amp;#x27;s promotion was his boss&amp;#x27;s partner meeting his partner at a holiday party which put him on the radar. Who the heck knows.&lt;p&gt;If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Punishing yourself for not knowing what you didn&amp;#x27;t know in the past is cruel.&lt;p&gt;Your misery comes from your own self-imprisonement. Happiness will not come from a time machine. Rather you should work on keeping your ego out of the driver&amp;#x27;s seat. A therapist might help, to teach you frameworks around catastrophization. Eastern philosophy has a lot of answers for dealing with ego as well. Alan Watts&amp;#x27; The Book is a good way to experiment on that path.&lt;p&gt;Forget the past and focus on the present. If you don&amp;#x27;t like the present, focus on the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moonchrome</author><text>&amp;gt;If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a very nice analogy - is it something you came up with ? (I am going to steal it so I would like to know who I&amp;#x27;m stealing from :) )</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Dealing with Career Mistakes</title><text>Two years ago I had an option to go into the management path. My leadership was supportive and wanted me to take up the opportunity. I chose to pivot into the product management instead. My peer took that role. My role change didn’t go very well. Personally i was unhappy and felt unfulfilled at work. While I was respected at work and my manager very supportive I didn’t enjoy it. I quit and joined another company and pivoted into program management. Since then my work hours have doubled and while I am earning the highest paycheck I could have dreamed of, I am extremely unhappy being an IC.  I have 25 years of industry experience and I feel I should mentor people instead of moving JIRA tickets around.&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I saw my former colleague who grabbed the manager role, got promoted to a director. I was hard working and intelligent than him. I could’ve played my card right and be in that place. Yet here I am being ‘advanced beginner’ in a different role every couple of years doing grunt IC work. How do I turn the wheel of time back and undo my career mistake. I feel incredibly stupid. I am losing confidence in making good decisions.&lt;p&gt;How do I deal with my feelings? Should I seek professional help?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>somehnacct3757</author><text>You have no way of knowing that you would have done well in the manager role and gotten promoted to director like your peer. You claim to be more hard working and intelligent than him but who&amp;#x27;s to say what you view as hard working and intelligent are objectively true? Who&amp;#x27;s to say success in those roles is even a function of hard work or intelligence? Who&amp;#x27;s to say your peer didn&amp;#x27;t have some third skill relevant to managering and directoring that you lack in comparison? Maybe the thing that led to your peer&amp;#x27;s promotion was his boss&amp;#x27;s partner meeting his partner at a holiday party which put him on the radar. Who the heck knows.&lt;p&gt;If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Punishing yourself for not knowing what you didn&amp;#x27;t know in the past is cruel.&lt;p&gt;Your misery comes from your own self-imprisonement. Happiness will not come from a time machine. Rather you should work on keeping your ego out of the driver&amp;#x27;s seat. A therapist might help, to teach you frameworks around catastrophization. Eastern philosophy has a lot of answers for dealing with ego as well. Alan Watts&amp;#x27; The Book is a good way to experiment on that path.&lt;p&gt;Forget the past and focus on the present. If you don&amp;#x27;t like the present, focus on the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sph</author><text>Agreed 100%. I had an opportunity for a managerial role, I took it, I thought it would make my career better.&lt;p&gt;It didn&amp;#x27;t. I crashed, burned, couldn&amp;#x27;t write as much code as I wanted and managing people is an entirely other and opposite skill than writing code. I quit, I took a break and I&amp;#x27;m now planning on writing code as an engineer for the rest of my career. I&amp;#x27;ll leave herding cats^H^Hdealing with people to more suited candidates.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t know that your current choice is a mistake. That&amp;#x27;s an unproductive attitude to have in life.</text></comment>