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> owning up to your mistakes also gives you an incredible amount of credibility and respect in my opinion. Mistakes happen, especially in complex systems. Ownin

by 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.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    in my experience this is detrimental for a company in the long term. It results in people who are in charge of taking leadership not actually leading the company and it shows everyone in the company taking risks is instant failure in their eyes. To give you a counterexample. The same company my prior example came from, also had some other "silly mistakes" made by an intern. He had to do inventory of a couple of old servers and remove hard disks from these servers. The servers where to be sold. Sadly, no one told him we had additional servers in the back of the storage room which he forgot to check because they where not on the same pallet as the batch he was told to check. Result, an couple of servers got sold with disks still in them. Luckely the company we sold to was friendly enough to give us a headsup about it and it resulted in no further issues, but still. Our company director personally took this as a reason to spearhead a plan about improving operational security and change processes (Aka, remove the hard disks when the machines are put out of service instead of half a decade later when their sold). The intern felt pretty bummed and thought he was responsible for the mistake, but in my opinion he done the job that was asked of him, he just got incomplete instructions. This was also explicitly communicated with him by his direct supervisor. In my experience, not throwing people under the bus to hide organizational or process failure, but simply admitting the processes could be better and striving for improvement does absolute wonders for morale and team building. Being perfect is impossible, organizations should keep people to impossible standards, especially to hide incompetence.
  - Xunjin 6y ago
    Great for you. The company that I currently work hired a new manager, he is amazing on how he shows that we are a team and a "person" mistake, is actually, the process which need better thinking/layout.

by mns 6y ago

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.
- kazen44 6y ago
  in my experience this is detrimental for a company in the long term. It results in people who are in charge of taking leadership not actually leading the company and it shows everyone in the company taking risks is instant failure in their eyes. To give you a counterexample. The same company my prior example came from, also had some other "silly mistakes" made by an intern. He had to do inventory of a couple of old servers and remove hard disks from these servers. The servers where to be sold. Sadly, no one told him we had additional servers in the back of the storage room which he forgot to check because they where not on the same pallet as the batch he was told to check. Result, an couple of servers got sold with disks still in them. Luckely the company we sold to was friendly enough to give us a headsup about it and it resulted in no further issues, but still. Our company director personally took this as a reason to spearhead a plan about improving operational security and change processes (Aka, remove the hard disks when the machines are put out of service instead of half a decade later when their sold). The intern felt pretty bummed and thought he was responsible for the mistake, but in my opinion he done the job that was asked of him, he just got incomplete instructions. This was also explicitly communicated with him by his direct supervisor. In my experience, not throwing people under the bus to hide organizational or process failure, but simply admitting the processes could be better and striving for improvement does absolute wonders for morale and team building. Being perfect is impossible, organizations should keep people to impossible standards, especially to hide incompetence.
- Xunjin 6y ago
  Great for you. The company that I currently work hired a new manager, he is amazing on how he shows that we are a team and a "person" mistake, is actually, the process which need better thinking/layout.