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by ezzzzz 2348 days ago
That failure is ok. As a software developer, you are going to receive all the smoke. Whether failure means missing some arbitrary deadline, delivering something that doesn't meet requirements, has bugs, is not extensible, or not delivering at all. Obviously, none of us want any of that to happen, but it's a reality you will face at some point in your career. Your management probably does not care about the myriad of challenges that led to failure and will shift the blame to you to save face for themselves. Doing your best is all you can do. Failure means you are challenging yourself and working outside of your comfort zone, and this is where growth happens. Be honest with yourself, and honest with your team. You can take responsibility for your actions, but there are so many variables which you can't control. From poor planning/management, legacy systems, infrastructure, tooling, unrealistic deadlines/deliverables, funding, initiative, the work of others. These represent systematic issues that have their own inertia, and expecting them to be solved by a single overworked developer is simply asking too much. Learn to recognize when too much is being asked and say something. Recognize all the variables which you can't control. If you have a solution, go ahead and propose one if it is one that you can implement with reasonable confidence, otherwise, leave it to somebody else. Sometimes the hardest thing to learn, is learning what NOT to do.