> then you start to see common causes behind a lot of the mistakes and you think, if people would just fix those, I'd like my job a lot more.
> And that attitude is self-defeating. It leads to unhappiness and unfulfillment and procrastination and mistakes of your own and, finally, resentment.
I get that there's a bad attitude lurking in there, but if you see the common causes behind a lot of the mistakes and you don't work to fix those, then you are just going to be constantly shoveling dirt around. In my mind the most important thing you can do to level-up as an engineer, is to ask, "how could we have avoided these hours/days/weeks of pain?" and then work to address those root (or more root) causes.
Sometimes the answer is very simple, like changing the naming scheme for your data files, because we just spent days chasing our tails looking at the wrong data and making assumptions that weren't true (has happened at several teams I've been on). You can't just tell everyone to be more diligent and "check all your assumptions", because they won't (and no one has time for that in a crunch anyway). But you can make it easier for them to validate their assumptions in the background with things like filenames and clean logs. (Too many false warnings and people stop paying attention.)
> And that attitude is self-defeating. It leads to unhappiness and unfulfillment and procrastination and mistakes of your own and, finally, resentment.
I get that there's a bad attitude lurking in there, but if you see the common causes behind a lot of the mistakes and you don't work to fix those, then you are just going to be constantly shoveling dirt around. In my mind the most important thing you can do to level-up as an engineer, is to ask, "how could we have avoided these hours/days/weeks of pain?" and then work to address those root (or more root) causes.
Sometimes the answer is very simple, like changing the naming scheme for your data files, because we just spent days chasing our tails looking at the wrong data and making assumptions that weren't true (has happened at several teams I've been on). You can't just tell everyone to be more diligent and "check all your assumptions", because they won't (and no one has time for that in a crunch anyway). But you can make it easier for them to validate their assumptions in the background with things like filenames and clean logs. (Too many false warnings and people stop paying attention.)