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mjgoeke | 3 years ago
And this is true for reasons I didn't understand when I was soley technical and younger.
At the end of the day people - _teams_ - want people they can trust in. That doesn't mean you handle things flawlessly, or that your boss can necessarily "set it and forget it" with you. Being trustworthy and responsible means acting out of good intent. Take a breath, keep your head on straight, look at the slightly bigger picture, and make reasonable choices. Communicate. Act as if the world isn't on your shoulders - because it isn't.
Take a step back, realize that we're all people, trying to make good decisions, and we're responsible to work with the outcomes and address problems as they arise.
I've found I grow by leaps and bounds when I embrace this.
noduerme|3 years ago
This is a great comment. It reveals the truth about how we grow into roles of higher and higher responsibility. I believe I was on the lucky side, though, that most of my bosses understood this about me. Part of it actually is the fact that they know you will take the world on your shoulders in their absence if the situation demands it. It's a test. If it goes off the rails, they're basically saying they can afford it and they don't care, but they want to know who stayed up all night trying to fix it. It sounds paradoxical and maybe jaded, but it's actually better for OP if the upgrade breaks shit all over the place and he's sleeping under a table 36 hours later responsible for managing the failure state. If everything goes off without a hitch, the boss won't even notice. That said, hope for the best, plan for the worst and go in with the best of intentions - but just like if you're an honorable person, you'd never take credit for something you didn't do, you should never take blame for something you warned people about.
People who see ahead and are capable to intervene and mitigate other people's disasters are literally priceless, and OP will go far just by having the attitude of foreseeing and managing crises created by other people's lack of engagement or imagination. This is also the origin story of every superhero and mob boss.