Fear also makes you a better programmer: people these days are way too willing to take on cavalier amounts of risk and then offload deciding whether it worked o

Fear also makes you a better programmer: people these days are way too willing to take on cavalier amounts of risk and then offload deciding whether it worked or not onto others in code review, onto a stifling number of unit tests, and even--most frustratingly--onto the ability to scope or roll back changes before they affect "too many" users. The reality is that the number of people whose photo library or bank account--or even merely whose birthday party--it is "acceptable" to ruin is 0, not a supposedly-negligible 0.0001% of your billion users :(... that's a thousand people whose lives you have affected, and at least they deserve some kind of personal apology from the engineers who failed them! My entire job and most of the money I have made in my life is following behind "fearless" programmers and picking up after them: tearing open holes, protecting user funds, and even winning a (giant) bug bounty from a company that trusted their tests too much and leaned heavily into "move fast and break things" :/. You should have courage to stand up to fear, but you should never discard it or think you have somehow outsmarted it: that fear is your best defense from hubris and it also shows you have empathy for those who rely on the correctness of your work.