4 ms·

> One of my best early-in-career lessons was that it takes maturity to own up to your mistakes (no matter how bone-headed), and it also takes good managers and

> One of my best early-in-career lessons was that it takes maturity to own up to your mistakes (no matter how bone-headed), and it also takes good managers and a good company to foster an environment in which you can own up to them without fear of losing your job. Any company that wants to hang a weight around an intern's neck for something like this is not a company I would want to support in any way. owning up to your mistakes also gives you an incredible amount of credibility and respect in my opinion. Mistakes happen, especially in complex systems. Owning up to mistakes and explaining your reasoning about your actions makes you and your compatriots better engineers. Excluding malicious action, most people make a (semi) critical error sometime in their career, especially if you work on the ops side of things, these can often be disasterous. Engineering who claim they never have made a mistake that usually either not working on anything that has value or are just lucky in my opinion. engineering who are afraid to say they made a mistake are a cultural issue aswell, because it delays troubleshooting during incidents. Something we tell employees during our onboarding in a technical comes down to this. - reason about a problem by yourself first - think about impact before you do a change, if in doubt, ask and doublecheck. - admit mistakes when you realise them, explain your reasoning and why you did the action. - learn from your mistakes, but accept that being error-free is simply not possible.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"Engineering who claim they never have made a mistake that usually either not working on anything that has value or are just lucky" Third option: they don't realise when they make a mistake, either because they are not smart enough or too full of themselves.
- MikeDelta 6y ago
  Like the engineers who never have to refactor, because their code is good enough in the first go. The only way to guaranteed never have mistakes in your code, is to not have any code at all.
  - dustymcp 6y ago
    To be fair sometimes people hyper focus on refactoring rather than fixing business problems, which isnt really helpful either, have to find a decent middle ground.
    - MikeDelta 6y ago
      You are absolutely right, I forgot about the other extreme.
mns 6y ago
> owning up to your mistakes also gives you an incredible amount of credibility and respect in my opinion. Mistakes happen, especially in complex systems. Owning up to mistakes and explaining your reasoning about your actions makes you and your compatriots better engineers. If you are in the right company. I made a big mistake at one point. We had all of the people responsible for one of the payment methods away on holiday (this one payment method was managed by another team in another country, as it wasn't using our normal payment gateway and provider that my team was maintaining). Huge panic, someone needs to fix this, you can't use X any more for completing your order. I'm in the right team that's handling payments and fulfilment, only one at work at that point so I'm told to fix it. I do, I fix it, send it over to testing, get the green light, fix is deployed, everyone is happy. 2 hours later, we figure out the payments are working, but the orders are not being finalised and are still in unpaid. We realised that that single payment method done by this other team in another country was not using our standard payment processing workflow and it has a different way of actually getting the confirmation from the payment provider. This was quite a big company, we had around tens of thousands of Euros blocked in those 2 hours. I own up to it, I admin I made a mistake, go deeper (we did not have anything about this documented) fix it again, we unblock everything, all good. Until 1 month later I got fired (there were layoffs because of larger financial issues, but I was on the list because of the incident), it was the only time in my career this happened to me. In the same time, someone else in my team made a mistake, hid it from management, even though we knew about it internally, fixed it and bragged about fixing the issue (no mention of him being the one who caused it) and got somehow (didn't even know we had such a thing) employee of the month and big praise in the next department meeting from management. My lesson from this? Screw these companies and the people running them. I was asked to help, I did it, I made a mistake, fully aware of that, but then I'm the only one thrown under the bus for it.
- andaric 6y ago
  Man that sucks. You deserve better for jumping in and helping. Hope you're in a much better company now.
  - mns 6y ago
    Leaving that company was one of the best things that happened to me. It also thought me that when a company, especially a big one, blames a low level employee for a big mistake or some visible incident, there is something very wrong there. There is usually so much politics, so many layers of management, that blaming one person that does some actual work is the easiest way of hiding your actual problems.
pmiller2 6y ago
> Excluding malicious action, most people make a (semi) critical error sometime in their career, especially if you work on the ops side of things, these can often be disasterous. Engineering who claim they never have made a mistake that usually either not working on anything that has value or are just lucky in my opinion. engineering who are afraid to say they made a mistake are a cultural issue aswell, because it delays troubleshooting during incidents. Bingo. I’ve made mistakes that have taken down systems or caused them to silently fail. The worst mistake I’ve made took down basically my entire company for about 20 minutes. This turned out not to be critical, because our site was still operating, and it was just external data feeds that weren’t getting updated, but I freaked out about it for a minute. After that minute, I went and got help, and we fixed it. Had I not, I probably could have fixed it myself, but it would have taken much longer and cost much more than it did. If you’re in an environment that doesn’t recognize that, you aren’t in a place that actually values and understands engineering work.
deleted 6y ago
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citizenkeen 6y ago
I've also found that being forthright about your mistakes gives credence to your _disavowal_ of responsibility. When it's not your fault and everybody's looking for a root cause, if you're known as someone who is quick to admit fault, then when you deny it everybody accepts it.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

"Engineering who claim they never have made a mistake that usually either not working on anything that has value or are just lucky" Third option: they don't realise when they make a mistake, either because they are not smart enough or too full of themselves.

MikeDelta 6y ago
Like the engineers who never have to refactor, because their code is good enough in the first go. The only way to guaranteed never have mistakes in your code, is to not have any code at all.
- dustymcp 6y ago
  To be fair sometimes people hyper focus on refactoring rather than fixing business problems, which isnt really helpful either, have to find a decent middle ground.
  - MikeDelta 6y ago
    You are absolutely right, I forgot about the other extreme.

mns 6y ago

> owning up to your mistakes also gives you an incredible amount of credibility and respect in my opinion. Mistakes happen, especially in complex systems. Owning up to mistakes and explaining your reasoning about your actions makes you and your compatriots better engineers. If you are in the right company. I made a big mistake at one point. We had all of the people responsible for one of the payment methods away on holiday (this one payment method was managed by another team in another country, as it wasn't using our normal payment gateway and provider that my team was maintaining). Huge panic, someone needs to fix this, you can't use X any more for completing your order. I'm in the right team that's handling payments and fulfilment, only one at work at that point so I'm told to fix it. I do, I fix it, send it over to testing, get the green light, fix is deployed, everyone is happy. 2 hours later, we figure out the payments are working, but the orders are not being finalised and are still in unpaid. We realised that that single payment method done by this other team in another country was not using our standard payment processing workflow and it has a different way of actually getting the confirmation from the payment provider. This was quite a big company, we had around tens of thousands of Euros blocked in those 2 hours. I own up to it, I admin I made a mistake, go deeper (we did not have anything about this documented) fix it again, we unblock everything, all good. Until 1 month later I got fired (there were layoffs because of larger financial issues, but I was on the list because of the incident), it was the only time in my career this happened to me. In the same time, someone else in my team made a mistake, hid it from management, even though we knew about it internally, fixed it and bragged about fixing the issue (no mention of him being the one who caused it) and got somehow (didn't even know we had such a thing) employee of the month and big praise in the next department meeting from management. My lesson from this? Screw these companies and the people running them. I was asked to help, I did it, I made a mistake, fully aware of that, but then I'm the only one thrown under the bus for it.

andaric 6y ago
Man that sucks. You deserve better for jumping in and helping. Hope you're in a much better company now.
- mns 6y ago
  Leaving that company was one of the best things that happened to me. It also thought me that when a company, especially a big one, blames a low level employee for a big mistake or some visible incident, there is something very wrong there. There is usually so much politics, so many layers of management, that blaming one person that does some actual work is the easiest way of hiding your actual problems.

pmiller2 6y ago

> Excluding malicious action, most people make a (semi) critical error sometime in their career, especially if you work on the ops side of things, these can often be disasterous. Engineering who claim they never have made a mistake that usually either not working on anything that has value or are just lucky in my opinion. engineering who are afraid to say they made a mistake are a cultural issue aswell, because it delays troubleshooting during incidents. Bingo. I’ve made mistakes that have taken down systems or caused them to silently fail. The worst mistake I’ve made took down basically my entire company for about 20 minutes. This turned out not to be critical, because our site was still operating, and it was just external data feeds that weren’t getting updated, but I freaked out about it for a minute. After that minute, I went and got help, and we fixed it. Had I not, I probably could have fixed it myself, but it would have taken much longer and cost much more than it did. If you’re in an environment that doesn’t recognize that, you aren’t in a place that actually values and understands engineering work.

deleted 6y ago

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citizenkeen 6y ago

I've also found that being forthright about your mistakes gives credence to your _disavowal_ of responsibility. When it's not your fault and everybody's looking for a root cause, if you're known as someone who is quick to admit fault, then when you deny it everybody accepts it.