Everybody makes mistakes. Being senior doesn't make you infallible, or otherwise we wouldn't spend huge amounts of resources building tools that are essentially

Everybody makes mistakes. Being senior doesn't make you infallible, or otherwise we wouldn't spend huge amounts of resources building tools that are essentially mistake-catchers: smarter type systems, linters, static analyzers and so on. Also, senior people are more likely to make the kind of mistake explained in the article than less experienced developers. This is because: - They are more focused on the "big picture" (algorithm correctness, general approach, system architecture, etc.) than on minute details. - They tend to read less documentation because they don't need to reach for it so often. - They have learned that a mistake such as this one can be easily corrected, and hence dedicate their attention to more important matters (avoiding data corruption for instance).