DEV Community

Princewhyte Dabotubo
Princewhyte Dabotubo

Posted on

What's one mistake you've made in your career you can't forget?

In course of our journey as software developers, we've encountered so many moments that'll forever stay in our hearts.

And so for this week , I would like to ask what's that mistake you made that has a spot forever in your journey.

Was is by deleting a database?
Crashing a code in production?

Let's hear you.
Thanks .

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

One time I was tasked to work on the weekend and I completely forgot to show up! πŸ™ˆ Luckily, the team was super understanding!

Collapse
 
princewhyte2 profile image
Princewhyte Dabotubo

lol what the ... please tell me more

Collapse
 
michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington • Edited

Haha, well for starters, I work here at DEV (Forem, the company behind dev.to) as a Community Manager.

As part of my position, I review abuse reports sent in by the community + am the keeper of our many inboxes... I do other things too, but these two jobs are kinda like ticket systems and so if you don't tend to the tickets, they just continually build up. And shoot, there are real people on the other end of these tickets waiting to be assisted, so they're not really something you wanna keep hanging around β€” in the case of abuse, you certainly don't want to keep someone waiting. As such, we work weekends to keep on top of this workload.

Each month, we split up weekend "support shifts" between 4 members of our team (shoutout to @caroline, @devencourt, and @ben β€” my fellow support shifters). Many moons ago, I was set to work a weekend shift and just completely forgot it was my go. πŸ˜…

This was back in the day when a weekend shift also meant that you were supposed to line up posts to share over social, including our main Twitter account @thepracticaldev. So, that weekend we were laying low. 😬

Anyway, come Monday, someone brought up that we had 0 social posts over the weekend. I quickly realized that I had forgotten to do the work and so apologized profusely. Luckily this team understands that accidents happen and no one really gave me any crap for it. To this day, I still remind folks whenever it's their weekend shift, haha!

Morale of the story: work for a team that won't roast you even if you make a big mistake. πŸ˜† Also, if you make a big mistake, admit to it, apologize, and try to put something into place to stop it from happening again. Don't be afraid to talk about your mistakes in public β€” we're all human and it's good to remind each other that making mistakes is normal and (in most cases!) things will be okay. Lastly, if someone else makes a mistake, be supportive!

Thread Thread
 
princewhyte2 profile image
Princewhyte Dabotubo

This is deep. Thanks for sharing