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This. Everyone, even the best, most experienced people, can and do slip and make outright mistakes.

If someone's answer to that is "just don't slip or make mistakes", well... I don't even know what to say to that, it's so dumb it can't really be meaningfully responded to.



It's the combination of things if you ask me.

I'm out of car analogies today but how about a software analogy?

"just don't slip or make mistakes" makes sense as an "Acceptance Criteria".

The implementation details of that? I minimize my mistakes and slip ups by doing things like always fully curly-bracing all of my if-statements and actually enforcing it through a linter that doesn't let me merge any code to master that doesn't adhere to this rule, because it'll make the build red and our repo doesn't allow me to merge anything that doesn't have a green build and I can't push directly to master.

Do I still slip up sometimes? Sure, the build catches it. The slip ups this doesn't catch? We try to find implementation details that reduce those slip ups too. Rinse, repeat.

If you slip up as a manager/team lead? Show your developers. Show how you handle it. Lead by example.


In our team(and i suppose in most places), the maxim to follow is to make novel mistakes. Making the same kind of mistakes is frustrating for both users and developers.




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