Reminds me of what they say about Formula 1 racing: The most important thing for a driver is to beat the other driver on their own team (there are 2 drivers per team).
And arguably this principle holds for most team members in any organization - since it’s only very few at the very top that actually get held accountable for overall team success.
I read a tongue-in-cheek blog post, maybe ten years ago, about “blame-oriented software development”: how to deflect blame from your code. The framing was amusing but the advice was good: extensive validation of input parameters and data, lots out logging, etc. Unfortunately, the blog post seems to have disappeared.
And arguably this principle holds for most team members in any organization - since it’s only very few at the very top that actually get held accountable for overall team success.