[jamesRaybould]

Working in a team where the senior engineer let me fail.

We were working on a fairly large new system and I had an idea about how I wanted to do something. We discussed the pros and cons and afterwards he sat down and said to me "If you do it like this you'll have problems when you want to refactor it in the future, but if you want to do it that way go ahead". I went ahead and did it my way, he was exactly right and I learnt a very valuable lesson in application design, architecture, and how to lead people in the future.

I like to think that now in all the teams I lead that failure is always an option.