HACKER Q&A
📣 sweetheart

How do you deal with silent success and loud failures?


Im a software engineer, and I ship a whole bunch of cool stuff for my company. I love it. I’m often responsible for working on new features and designing the systems that support them. But when things work well, and I did my job well, it’s silent; no one gets paged when all systems are OK.

On the flip side, when things break, it’s noisy. People complain, Slack blows up, error messages are flying, etc. This leads to the sense that things are always bad, because it’s hard to see that in 99% of cases, our customers are happily using what we’ve built.

How do you avoid feeling like the things you make are just bad and broken? How do you maintain a sense of accomplishment when the only times your made aware of what you built is when it’s busted?


  👤 jimmyvalmer Accepted Answer ✓
Most jobs are like this (for the umpteenth time, altogether now, "that's why they call it work!"). I wouldn't sweat it.