Skinned Knees

A dev lead, not yet thirty, was getting torn apart in a meeting.

He'd failed at spec alignment. Pushed ahead with implementation before getting proper buy-in from other teams. The whole thing got overturned right before release. Managers from other departments — people who knew the product inside out — were relentless. He sat there in silence. No room to argue. I remember his expression in that split second before his camera turned off.

That failure is probably one of his greatest assets now.

Spec alignment isn't engineering. It's politics. Reading who sits where, what they're protecting, and where the compromise lives. It's not in any document. You can't learn it from a book. You get burned once, and you start reading the room differently. Knowledge learned through pain doesn't fade.

A child learning to stand will fall. Fall, cry, stand again. Each fall teaches the body balance. Teaching them how not to fall doesn't teach them how to walk.

Don't take away the right to fall.

A senior's job isn't to say "don't fall." It's to put up guardrails so no one falls off a cliff. Set up rollback procedures. Build review layers. Create systems where falling isn't fatal. Leave room to stumble while preventing the kind of accident you can't undo.

Of course, some failures are unacceptable in business. Leaking customer data. Losing funds. A judgment call that puts lives at risk. Knowing where you can fall and where you can't — that might be what experience actually is.

I don't want my own right to fail taken away. As you get older, people stop letting you fail. As your title rises, there's this unspoken rule that you can't be seen stumbling. But someone who never fails is someone who never tries anything new.

The older you get, the harder the falls hurt. I'd at least like to fall without breaking anything.