"When some young idiot fucks up, check to make sure that they are sufficiently freaked out. If they are, no need to yell at them. Instead support them in solving the problem."
My first job was as a Marine avionics technician and I had the misfortune to work for bosses who reassured themselves by blaming you at full volume and making you feel like shit. Usually with the 'you could have killed somebody you useless idiot' which is actually not that often true. Not a great environment.
Last week I'm just starting my second year at this company as a real proper electrical engineer and I neglected to run all the steps of the pre-tests I said I ran and I therefore missed a (in retrospect, really cool) bug that showed up in front of the certifying examiner on a Friday afternoon. Said examiner costs a lot of money per hour, it's a government agency, etc. etc. I spent a weekend and Monday finding the bug and squashing it. It took til Friday before the new code was released and all the paperwork up to the certifying agency was fixed.
The whole time my boss was there and clearly frustrated but also very clearly keeping quiet. I definitely went and thanked him on Friday afternoon when it was all over for being so chill about it. He said it was no problem as he could see I had sufficiently embarrassed myself and was working hard to fix it. It's so true. I was keeping my head down, being calm but intent on the problem, and I don't know how I could've solved anything if he'd lost his shit.
Fear and care are definitely with me now. As is proper testing and better logging of my own day-to-day dev process. (Note to self: power cycle in the test when it tells you to power cycle. You're also testing the non-obvious functionality.)
My first job was as a Marine avionics technician and I had the misfortune to work for bosses who reassured themselves by blaming you at full volume and making you feel like shit. Usually with the 'you could have killed somebody you useless idiot' which is actually not that often true. Not a great environment.
Last week I'm just starting my second year at this company as a real proper electrical engineer and I neglected to run all the steps of the pre-tests I said I ran and I therefore missed a (in retrospect, really cool) bug that showed up in front of the certifying examiner on a Friday afternoon. Said examiner costs a lot of money per hour, it's a government agency, etc. etc. I spent a weekend and Monday finding the bug and squashing it. It took til Friday before the new code was released and all the paperwork up to the certifying agency was fixed.
The whole time my boss was there and clearly frustrated but also very clearly keeping quiet. I definitely went and thanked him on Friday afternoon when it was all over for being so chill about it. He said it was no problem as he could see I had sufficiently embarrassed myself and was working hard to fix it. It's so true. I was keeping my head down, being calm but intent on the problem, and I don't know how I could've solved anything if he'd lost his shit.
Fear and care are definitely with me now. As is proper testing and better logging of my own day-to-day dev process. (Note to self: power cycle in the test when it tells you to power cycle. You're also testing the non-obvious functionality.)