Opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Rather than looking at mistakes as a failure, look at them as opportunities. The lesson is that there is no harm in trying, and if you use reasonable precautions, adequately test your code (either manually or with automated tests), and try to learn something from every mistake you make, there is no moving backwards. I learned more in the 9 months that I worked for that company than at any other point in my career. Operating in such a fast-and-loose manner allowed me to move incredibly quickly, but at the risk of breaking things. I was young, inexperienced, and had far more responsibility than I was ready for. Hindsight is 20/20, but in retrospect, I’m pretty sure my boss knew that I would break something eventually. If you’re working on a personal project, for which you are the only user, don’t be afraid to break things. When you’re starting out as a programmer, the cost of breaking things is so much less. ![]() But the opposite risk is so much more serious, and that’s the risk of not innovating or improving, and letting competitors move faster than you. Mistakes cause companies to lose customers, money, and credibility. In fact, the issue never came up again.Īnd while I wouldn’t advise making mistakes on purpose, they happen in the real world. Why would we fire you? We just spent $10,000 teaching you a lesson.Īnd the rest of the day proceeded as if nothing had happened. Without skipping a beat, my boss responded with a quote from a famous urban myth: ![]() I asked my boss if I was going to be fired. The project that I had been leading had a problem that resulted in the company losing $10,000. Needless to say, I was not looking forward to returning to the office the following day to admit the epic failure to my team.įirst thing in the morning, I apologized to my boss and accepted full responsibility. I quickly determined that my mistake had cost our company a little over $10,000. I ran the numbers to calculate how big of a deal my mistake actually was. ![]() I rushed into the office as soon as I could despite it being a holiday, and fixed the problem as quickly as I could.īecause the company was very data-driven, we knew precise metrics about how any change impacted the company. I started piecing things together and eventually uncovered that I had broken the application for a certain subset of our users. Monday morning, I checked my email and I was included on several strange email chains from a few other team members. Everyone at the company was eager to see early results of the experiment the following Tuesday (Monday was a holiday). So long as I continued to ship the features my coworkers were asking for, he was happy.Īnd things were perfect, until I shipped an experimental feature on a Friday evening. We didn’t have any test coverage, and my boss, who was very experienced and knew better, didn’t seem to care. Being a cowboy coder and hacking things together allowed us to move quickly. ![]() The code was a bit of a disaster, but things worked. Things happened quickly, and given my limited experience with ruby and the rails framework, I had no idea what the right way to do things was. This project quickly grew to be an important part of how our company made money.ĭespite my inexperience, when people asked for features to be added, changes to be made, or experiments to be run, I would quickly and efficiently implement the code changes that needed to happen. Through sheer work ethic and long work days, I was able to get responsibility for a small project. I, like most developers, joined a small team of developers. I was young and hungry, eager to make a difference at the company I was working for, and prove myself as a contributing team member. Zooming out, my first job as a rails developer was an interesting experience for me. It was a case in which I should’ve checked myself before I wrecked myself, but in the end, it caused me to grow and become a more humble developer. There is one mistake I’ve made in the course of my career that stands out as being the “biggest screw up of my career.” Before this mistake, I felt like an unstoppable programmer – and as such, I had a bit of an ego problem.
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