“Don’t feel bad […] but also do feel bad” sums up… a lot of engineering growth. Everyone makes mistakes, and we don’t want junior engineers beating themselves u

“Don’t feel bad […] but also do feel bad” sums up… a lot of engineering growth. Everyone makes mistakes, and we don’t want junior engineers beating themselves up about it. But if you don’t honor the reasons why they’re beating themselves up—eg pride in their work, caring about any time they cost others with an outage, etc—telling them not to worry looks a lot like an insult. The trick is to help them identify where that sense of responsibility stops being productive (e.g. by driving them to go read docs, or test that edge case in the future) and is just stressing them out (e.g. blaming themselves for a rocky release when the real problem is that deployments at your company are a 20-step process with poor visibility and no undo).