I get angry when my coworkers make mistakes

by Alison Green on October 2, 2024

I’m off for a few days, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2017.

A reader writes:

I’ve got a question regarding how much “mistake tolerance” is expected in the workplace.

Just to give you some background, I’m a (tech) team lead, which, in my case, means my daily job is not very different from that of other team members, except for the part that I get to make technical decisions concerning the projects we are doing. That includes deadlines, technologies, methodologies, features to be included, etc. and most importantly, I decide whether a piece of work by any team member is acceptable. However, I don’t “manage” people; that is, I don’t give time off, I don’t give them feedback, I don’t decide their raise, etc. There’s a manager to do that.

Now to the main question. I have very low, almost zero, tolerance for mistakes. Whenever I see a mistake in anyone’s work, especially trivial ones, I will get very angry. The rationale in my head is always “We have ONE job and one job only, and that’s to get this done! No excuses.” As such, I will remove the person from the project, in addition to having a detailed (sometimes heated) conversation with both the person and our manager on why such mistakes are not allowed in my team.

So how bad is this? I know my intolerance could probably be attributed to some sort of OCD, and sort of know it is not good. But I just cannot forgive mistakes easily. Do you have any advice?

Yeah, what you’re doing sounds pretty bad.

I see two issues here: First, your expectations about normal amounts of errors are off. And second, you’re taking it really personally when mistakes happen and you’re having an emotional reaction where one isn’t warranted, rather than handling it professionally. (Which, as people are pointing out in the comment section, is a mistake in itself! So there’s some irony there.)

On the first issue, people are going to make mistakes because you work with humans, not robots, and humans make mistakes. If someone makes a mistake occasionally, that is normal — and you should see it as normal and not an outrage. Perhaps you’re the very rare person who truly never makes mistakes in your work. If so, you’re something of a unicorn. That’s not typical. If you are that unicorn, good for you — that’s a rare talent. But if you want to work with other people, you have to recognize that you’re not normal; if you expect others to be unicorns too, no one will want to work with you, because you’ll be out of touch with reality.

Now, obviously there’s a point where someone is making too many mistakes. And that brings us to the second issue, which is how to handle it when that happens.

Right now, you’re reacting very emotionally: you’re getting angry and having heated conversations. There should rarely be any need for that at work, and by doing it, you’re almost certainly alienating people and making no one want to work with you. That’s a big deal — not only are you making working with you a bad experience for other people, but you’re also impacting your own professional reputation. That will matter when you’re looking for a promotion, a raise, or a new job, or even just when you want to be included on something that other people don’t want to work with you on.

Here’s the thing that you’re losing sight of: At work, you have the tools you need to solve problems calmly and rationally. Getting angry and emotional says to other people that you don’t know how to do that. It makes you look out of control, and it can make you look inept. You don’t want that.

Your goal needs to be to solve the problem, not to punish people or let them know how wrong they are or how much they frustrated you. Instead of having a heated reaction, you just need to deliver information calmly and clearly.

That means that if someone makes a single mistake, all you need to do is say something like this: “I found mistake X. Can you take a look at it and fix it for me today?” If relevant, you can add, “Let me know if you’re not clear on what I’m talking about and I can walk you through it” and/or “Can you figure out how that happened so we can make sure to avoid it in future rounds?”

And if someone makes mistakes regularly, that’s a pattern you need to talk to their manager about, since their manager is responsible for addressing it. And that should be a calm, matter-of-fact conversation — as in “Fergus is regularly making mistakes like X and Y. I’ve pointed it out to him, but it’s continuing to happen and I’m concerned about the pattern. It’s causing me to have to redo his work and making me reluctant to keep him on the project.”

But there’s almost no reason to ever have a heated conversation over a mistake. This stuff shouldn’t be so emotional.

If you find that you can’t control your emotions about mistakes, it’s probably worth exploring with a competent therapist — because a pattern of strong negative reactions to something that doesn’t warrant that intensity is usually connected to something more deeply rooted, and likely isn’t about work at all.

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{ 149 comments }

{ 149 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. Foreign Octopus*

    Reminds me of the guy who tanked an interview because he never makes any mistakes. I feel those two would have fun together /s

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    1. ReallyBadPerson*

      How do we know this isn’t the same guy, now (finally) employed after convincing an employer of his perfection? I mean, have this LW and that one ever been seen together IRL?

      Reply ↓
      1. Hlao-roo*

        Ha! This letter was originally published August 2017 and the “I told my interviewer I never make mistakes” letter is from February 2024, so it could be that he got so fed up working with mistake-prone coworkers (a.k.a humans) that he decided to try to find a new job.

        Can’t say I’ve ever seen the two of them in the same room at the same time :)

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      1. H*

        In my most recent job, I was on a team of individuals who were all like this. I was the mistake maker and was terminated after about six months. The termination was likely fair but the rude comments and condescension only exacerbated my mistakes and made it much harder to ask for help and support when needed. What my team didn’t know is that I was in the diagnostic process for a rare progressive nueromuscular disease similar to young-onset Parkinson’s or MS. It was fair people were frustrated but being rude and aggressive helped no one and only made me feel far more scared of the future.

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        3. KJC*

          I’m sorry to hear that happened to you. And your comment makes a really good general point – being overly harsh about mistakes, as opposed to calmly focusing on problem solving together, makes people afraid to bring errors to your attention when they notice them or to ask for help when they need it.

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          1. Jackalope*

            In addition to that, it can put you into survival mode if the person pushes your button right, and you’re flooded with fight or flight hormones, anxiety, or whatever, depending on your reaction to said harshness. Rattling someone and pushing them into that stage causes MORE mistakes, because you can focus on something properly if your body is in panic mode.

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    5. I Would Rather Be Eating Dumplings*

      Oh man, this guy seems to have at least some degree of self-awareness; he acknowledges with the end that it’s a problem (‘so how bad is this?’) and that his intolerance of mistakes might be rooted in something other than reasonable expections.

      That interview guy…IFRC he felt throughout that the issues were entirely not with him.

      Reply ↓
    6. Curious*

      Reminds me of TOS “The Changeling”:

      I am Nomad I am perfect That which is imperfect must be sterilized.”

      Reply ↓
  2. Hlao-roo*

    This person should hire the letter-writer from “I was rejected because I told my interviewer I never make mistakes” (posted February 13, 2024)! I think they could work very happily together.

    Reply ↓
    1. dulcinea47*

      Try seeing people as human… people don’t have “just one job”. They have a million things to do and only one of them is their job that they’re paid for. Expecting anyone to be laser focused and perfect(!) all the time is a terrible standard that no one can meet.

      Reply ↓
      1. Overthinking It*

        Yes, and think about the part where LW gets especially wound up about TRIVIAL mistakes. Workers may be concentrating on the more crucial issues, and let little thinks like typos or page numbering get past them. I the lead wasn’t so busy dressing them down, maybe they could work our a system for catching these little errors, as well as the big ones.

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    2. Red Wheel Barrow*

      To be fair to this OP, they recognize that their response is not great and may stem from their own mental health issues. They’re also asking for advice, unlike the other poster, who was asking for justification (and doubled down in the follow-up, if I remember correctly). It’s true this OP’s behavior is very bad, probably worse than they realize, but it sounds like they’re potentially open to hearing what Alison says. I don’t want to pile on when they’re asking for advice that could improve their behavior.

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        This is a good point. Just because these are reprints doesn’t mean the LW isn’t reading the responses, people. Let’s all remember to stay constructive while Alison’s away.

        Reply ↓
    4. Sunflower*

      I thought it *was* that letter but knew something wasn’t quite right. I guess I got mixed up because they have the same vibe, except on different side of the desks.

      Reply ↓
    5. Ms. Eleanous*

      Did it never occur to OP to build in an editing layer? Tom edits Rachel’s work, Rachel edits Linda’s, etc.

      Gee, OP, i would count that lack of an editing system as your BIG mistake.

      Reply ↓
  3. T.N.H*

    We now have proof that even robots make mistakes because ChatGPT continues to make stuff up out of whole cloth. I doubt this person is that unicorn. They made a huge mistake in handling this situation, which makes me think they just don’t recognize their mistakes (or blame others for them).

    Reply ↓
    1. UnCivilServant*

      I have to be pedantic, ChatGPT isn’t a robot either. It’s a large language model. Just a bunch of software mashing together tokens it doesn’t understand and numerically rating how well the correlate to its library of token associations.

      Reply ↓
      1. T.N.H*

        I mean, you don’t. It’s already being used in robots who then presumably make the same mistakes. But more importantly, I read Alison as using robot colloquially.

        Reply ↓
        1. Dawn*

          I’m trying to be nice here but at the same time, yeah….

          Every year of my life I get increasingly frustrated by the existence of people who insist on unnecessary pedantry. It sure doesn’t make you any friends.

          Reply ↓
      2. MigraineMonth*

        I’m sure someone somewhere has created an actual physical robot that does nothing but run ChatGPT software and read the prompts out loud. I hope it looks like a parrot, just to drive the point home.

        Reply ↓
        1. UnCivilServant*

          That would be funny. Does it have to sound like a parrot? I have difficulty understanding what they say.

          Reply ↓
          1. Your Former Password Resetter*

            Sounds appropriate for ChatGPT, which is also often confusing because it doesn’t actually know what language is.

            Reply ↓
    2. MigraineMonth*

      That isn’t a mistake, that’s working as intended!

      We taught an electronic parrot to talk . The fact that we expect the parrot to understand what it’s saying instead of just regurgitating words that it’s heard strung together before is the real mistake.

      Reply ↓
      1. T.N.H*

        I understand why hallucinations happen but it’s still a mistake the way OP means it. As in, if your robot parrot said something incorrect, presumably she’d be furious.

        Reply ↓
        1. Kella*

          If someone uses ChatGPT as a tool to say correct things, *they* are making a mistake. ChatGPT isn’t programmed to be correct or factually accurate.

          Reply ↓
        2. MigraineMonth*

          Very true, I just feel the need to shout “It’s all beautiful nonsense!” from the rooftops every time I hear of someone trying to use it for yet another inappropriate purpose. There aren’t that many applications for a tool that writes grammatically correct but likely inaccurate information; spam and political speech writing, maybe?

          The absolute worst I heard is helping doctors write their notes faster: not only are there symptoms being made up, there’s just enough pattern recognition in the tool to be racist as well! They said they’d fix the “hallucinations” issue in the next release, as if it were a bug instead of a foundational problem with the technology.

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      2. Pita Chips*

        The fact that we expect the parrot to understand what it’s saying instead of just regurgitating words that it’s heard strung together before is the real mistake.

        I don’t think we can hit that point home hard enough.

        Reply ↓
    3. Strive to Excel*

      I’m wildly entertained by the chat thread where someone was desperately trying to get ChatGPT to figure out how many ‘R’s there were in ‘Strawberry’.

      Reply ↓
    4. Beany*

      Yeah, but … mistakes in management/social interactions aren’t the same as mistakes in technical work, and people have different aptitudes. It’s *possible* that OP really is error-free in their actual technical work, and I they’re not claiming anything like that for their interactions with their coworkers. I’m not saying it’s likely they’re 100% perfect at the technical stuff, just that one doesn’t logically follow from another.

      (This is different to the more recent letter from the clue-free interviewee who maintained their general perfectness, IMO.)

      Reply ↓
    1. restingbutchface*

      Please, point it out? Shame is a great way to learn, according to OP.

      I’m not asking because some of us have appalling grammar. (Me, I’m talking about me)

      Reply ↓
      1. Hlao-roo*

        I think the error is in this sentence: “That includes, deadlines, technologies, methodologies, features to be included, etc.”

        To the best of my knowledge, there shouldn’t be a comma after “includes.”

        Reply ↓
        1. Worldwalker*

          There shouldn’t. The commas are to set off items in the list, and “includes” is not such an item.

          So the LW made a mistake, and consequently should be removed from the team — or in this case, banned from ASM!

          Reply ↓
          1. Sandi*

            AAM, not ASM?
            I really don’t care and would have never mentioned it (and probably not even noticed) except… the topic of discussion made it irresistible.

            Reply ↓
            1. Airy*

              Muphry’s Law states that whenever you write something correcting an error in someone else’s writing, your correction will contain an error.

              Reply ↓
                3. Strive to Excel*

                  I don’t know – Murphy’s Law is “If it can go wrong it will”. Maybe Muphry’s Law is about the correction of errors!

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      Grammatical error, too.
      “Whenever I see a mistake in anyone’s work, especially trivial ones…” Should be either mistakes to match ones, or a trivial one to match a mistake.

      Somehow, my blood is not boiling.

      Reply ↓
    3. Dust Bunny*

      Starting that sentence with “but” is not the biggest grammatical sin out there, too, but it would have been better had that sentence and the one preceding it been a single sentence.

      Reply ↓
    4. RagingADHD*

      I see two punctuation errors and three very questionable word usages and sentence structures.

      And I still don’t think LW deserves to be berated for being human and missing something. Teased a bit in service of self-awareness, yes.

      Reply ↓
  5. restingbutchface*

    Like a parent who reacts with rage when a kid makes a bad choice, you’re creating an atmosphere where it is safer to lie and cover up mistakes rather than taking ownership.

    In a tech environment, that’s how minor issues become major incidents. Plus, it sounds exhausting for everyone involved. This style of management needs to die out like, yesterday.

    Reply ↓
    1. dulcinea47*

      The kid didn’t even make a bad choice necessarily, that’s adding blame, they made a mistake, which is human and often accidental.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nightengale*

        my professional work some days is 60% explaining to people why we shouldn’t frame children’s impulsive behavior as “a choice.”

        Reply ↓
    3. UKDancer*

      Yes, in aviation also it’s critical to build a culture where people can raise issues and admit to mistakes without feeling blame. Many aviation disasters happened when people made mistakes but couldn’t admit to them or couldn’t challenge mistakes made by those higher up.

      Reply ↓
      1. darsynia*

        If anyone would like to see what that attitude looks like, the channel Mentour Pilot is superb and has done a lot towards championing the idea of crew resource management as something applicable to more than aviation! The healthy notion that an increased workload means a person is more likely to make mistakes and/or be under stress is such a healthy one that more folks could do with recognizing!

        Re: the LW, I would find such an atmosphere extremely hostile and wouldn’t want to stick around, and I imagine that most workers with options will feel similarly. They’re really fostering a situation where they lose workers, here.

        Reply ↓
    4. Turquoisecow*

      I hope OP never works with people who are still learning or early in their career because this sort of atmosphere would have destroyed me.

      Reply ↓
    5. Kes*

      The fact that they’re a tech lead makes this even weirder to me. Mistakes happen in tech all the time, that’s why QA is part of the process.

      Reply ↓
    6. RVA Cat*

      That’s what I immediately thought, too. This is childhood trauma from (at least) verbal abuse parent or authority figure who demanded perfection *because it is impossible*.

      Anyone else wondering if the LW became the Hypercritcal Boss who destroyed their report’s whole sense of self? (Letter from Sept. 6, 2023)

      Reply ↓
  6. Ceanothus*

    I worked for a team where a senior reviewed certain work and was very similar to the LW in her tolerance for error. She was eventually moved to a very high-priority project — she is also something of a unicorn — and I took over the review for six months.

    People cried because I was professional and pleasant about it. After a couple of months, people were willing to dig into recurring issues because it didn’t involve being buried under contempt. We figured out the source of the most common errors and put together process and reference documents to prevent 95% of the problems that the senior was catching. When she returned, her reviews found significantly fewer errors (despite her conviction that we had just been screwing up constantly in her absence). ((She also got pretty upset when she found some errors and we were like “OK! Let’s update the references to reflect this!” because we shouldn’t NEED references for corner cases, we should just KNOW.))

    Reply ↓
    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Ugh. I’ve only just started working on a large technical team after being the sole tech person in a couple of very small non-profits, but from what I’ve learned so far, you’re SUPPOSED to have references, aren’t you??? At my new job, we document EVERYTHING. So not only was that senior a jerk, but she was doing it wrong. (Right?)

      Reply ↓
      1. Howard Bannister*

        Absolutely. People who rely on ‘just knowing’ take a perverse pride in being the only person who is always absolutely correct, but have no real interest in sharing their knowledge.

        It’s often something you observe in a certain kind of dysfunctional workplace because it also feels like job security — nobody else holds all that knowledge, so they’re irreplaceable. (and at my job we all say that no matter how good any of us are, none of us should be irreplaceable, because in the normal course of things every single one of us will need to be replaced)

        References and documentation are the backbone of an organization that allows it to plan for the future. Standing in the way of that and protesting it is shooting the whole organization in the foot!

        Reply ↓
        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Right! And actually, at my last several jobs where I was the only tech person, I documented EVERYTHING as I was working my last few months on the job. I only gave two weeks notice, of course, but once I started looking for a new job I started documenting what I did so those last two weeks would be less chaotic.

          At my last job, over the course of my first year, odd things would happen where my boss or grandboss would say, “Oh, yeah, this happens every year and I know to look out for it….” or whatever. I started to document those too, right in our database, because I knew other people would be filling in for me or when the grandboss announced her impending retirement I knew we were losing her institutional knowledge. Growing pains at a small org where suddenly there are four people doing the job that used to be one person’s, but the lack of documentation frustrated me so I started making note in obvious locations of all the weird things that happened every year.

          So…yeah. Document, document, document! And any boss or coworker who says you shouldn’t should be expelled.

          Reply ↓
    2. Goldenrod*

      “People cried because I was professional and pleasant about it.”

      First of all: Sad (and I’ve been there)!

      Secondly, this really illustrates why this fault-finding behavior is so nonsensical. Humans naturally make FEWER mistakes when we aren’t made to feel terrified of making mistakes. You can’t learn and grow in a totalitarian culture of fear.

      Reply ↓
  7. Sandi*

    There is also a logic that says fixing all the small mistakes isn’t worth the effort to attain perfection. For example I pride myself on writing well, and I’ll catch many of my mistakes. Yet I can’t spend days rereading the document to catch any others, especially since as humans we become almost blind to the mistakes we make. Instead, I send it off to a coworker who quickly reads it through and offers a few edits. My workplace would much rather that I do a pretty good job and have my coworker spend 30 minutes providing feedback, as this is much more efficient than my spending days trying to find perfection. If I’m writing code then I’ll ensure it works well, but I use it for small internal projects so I don’t spend weeks perfecting its efficiency as that would be wasteful overall.

    I feel like the LW is wasting a lot of time and effort trying to find perfection. And wasting a lot of emotional energy and relationships with coworkers!

    Reply ↓
    1. Dawbs*

      it’s rather like typing that way.

      when i was a child and learned to type on typewriters (tar pit ink on mammoth hide), we were docked 5wpm for every error (considering how long it took to correct, i probably should have been docked more. Which meant i could for 45 wpm perfectly OR i could type way faster, but “officially” still around 45 wpm once the errors were tallied in.

      Now that there’s an easy way to have my”teh” and “tge” get instantly changed back into the “the” i was trying for, even though my speed on the keys is slower (finger issues) i can really claim 55wpm.
      i could type with fewer errors, but correcting is faster than allowing my fingers down

      Reply ↓
    2. Dawn*

      Great news, major corporations releasing major external projects don’t spend any time perfecting their code’s efficiency nowadays, either.

      Reply ↓
      1. MigraineMonth*

        For the most part, they shouldn’t worry about the code’s efficiency unless it is an actual issue. Even in performance-critical code, so much time and effort is wasted (and complexity introduced) for small or non-existent efficiency boosts.

        Example 1, I worked for a company that used extremely short variable names (so “v1” instead of “averageWeight”) and instead of the null check (v1 != ‘ ‘) did an equivalent but difficult-to-read “does not follow” check (v1 !] ‘ ‘). Why did we do these things that made the code harder to read and errors more likely? Because 15 years ago, those made the code slightly more efficient before the compiler was updated and made them redundant.

        Example 2, I was given a program that requested information from an API and wrote it to a database. This process ran nightly and took about 6 hours, thanks to the optimization that used multi-threading to pull data from the API with five simultaneous processes. The only problem? 95% of the time was writing to the database, which required exclusive locks, so the processes pulled lots of data simultaneously and then waited in line to save it. I actually undid all the multithreading because it was too much of a headache to maintain for the 30 minutes saved.

        As Donald Knuth said, “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

        Reply ↓
        1. Dawn*

          I’m talking more about the AAA game companies who don’t bother optimizing their code because “they can just buy another hard drive” here.

          We used to squeeze entire operating systems onto a floppy disk and now the newest Call of Duty is 175 GB and just increases our rare earths deficit because people keep having to buy more storage space.

          Reply ↓
  8. ReallyBadPerson*

    How do we know this isn’t the same guy, now (finally) employed after convincing an employer of his perfection? I mean, have this LW and that one ever been seen together IRL?

    Reply ↓
  9. Priscilla Tells It Like It Is*

    Honey, your behavior is a big fat blatant obvious mistake. Let’s address that first before having meltdowns at your team members.

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      1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

        People are removed from the project for one mistake! That is so messed up, I cannot even begin. This is affecting people’s professional development, their standing at work, and possible even their evaluations which affect their income. OP needs to stop affecting people that way. And bosses needs to stop allowing OP to do so.

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        2. jlp*

          I mean, depending on the consequences, I might just weaponize incompetence and intentionally make a mistake to get off the team – but that’s just a random thought.

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        3. owen*

          it’s also affecting the project as they are now down one resource until they get another onboard and caught up – a process that might (shock!) involve mistakes as they are learning… and now you need ANOTHER new resource….

          Reply ↓
  10. duinath*

    “The rationale in my head is always “We have ONE job and one job only, and that’s to get this done! No excuses.” “

    This is the bit that stood out the most, to me. I feel like it demonstrates such a misunderstanding of how life, and indeed most tasks at any job works, that I do see this statement in itself as an excuse.

    At most workplaces, it’s not “one job” it’s a series of things that need to be done. And even if the job itself is something incredibly simple and not complex, people have lives. People live in the world. Things can be difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with work, and things can fall through the cracks for so many different reasons.

    If you won’t work with anyone who ever faltered even slightly, you cannot work with *anyone*, not even yourself. Your mistake here is a very serious one. More serious, I would guess, than any that led to your heated conversations.

    I hope this letter gave LW the wakeup call they needed and things got better for them. This sounds like an unpleasant way to live.

    Reply ↓
    1. girlie_pop*

      This stood out to me as really weird too. Maybe if your job was to staple packets of paper together all day, every day, then yeah, you have “one job”? But basically, nobody in the professional world that I’ve ever met has “one job”. Everything we do has multiple steps and stages; we have to coordinate with other people and collate information, and even with checks and balances, mistakes are going to happen. Acting like the whole process is so simple and basic is not going to help anything.

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      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        “You had ONE JOB” is the kind of phrase I use for things that don’t work right. Like, say, a can opener that doesn’t actually open cans – what even good is it? But humans? We all have more than one job, right from the beginning. Even newborns are supposed to eat, sleep, stare at the ceiling, and other biological functions (of which there are too many to even count). Any one of these things can interfere with every other thing (butterfly effect, in other words). And while maybe OP means that their ONE JOB is to get things right, there are so many other jobs that have to be done right before that ONE JOB (get things right) can happen, which by definition means they all have more than one job.

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    2. Miss Muffet*

      And what are even the consequences for the errors? Very few situations are going to be life-or-death. Some may have bigger consequences than others (say, an error that drops someone from their medical coverage right before a surgery) but can be fixed. And doesn’t software development usually come with testing before things go live? So hopefully you’re catching the errors there and that’s LITERALLY WHAT THAT PHASE IS FOR.

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      1. metadata minion*

        And the situations that are life-and-death usually have checklists and more than one person signing off on the finished product, precisely because humans aren’t perfect and are going to miss things.

        Reply ↓
        1. MigraineMonth*

          Bringing this kind of attitude to managing a project with life-and-death consequences will literally kill people. You CANNOT make people afraid to admit mistakes, talk about their mistakes, or put in processes to detect similar mistakes when the stakes are high. That’s why they aspire to a “blameless culture” in safety-critical fields like medicine and aviation.

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    3. Lana Kane*

      I know this is an older letter but I think that mindset is a reflection of a lot of “motivational” social media content that we see out there. No excuses! We all have the same hours in the day! etc And it’s easy for some to see that as all very logical and apply it to their lives in a whole-cloth way.

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    4. Roland*

      Same! I’m a software engineer and I very much do not have “one job”. There’s always many things to be done.

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  11. Ellis Bell*

    I feel like there’s a real disconnect on what this person’s job actually is and what they think it is. It’s phrased as though they’re not responsible for working with people, just responsible for judging the work: ” I decide whether a piece of work by any team member is acceptable” but these kind of interpersonal skills and responsibilities are considered basics and often never spelled out in job descriptions. Just because you’re not a manager doesn’t mean you don’t have to manage relationships. I would say to OP: 1) How many perfect team members who never make mistakes do you have, and are there enough of them? 2) Is the mistake easily fixed and easy to learn from? 3) This habit of writing people off because of errors is probably your mistake. How would you like someone to speak to you about fixing it? Angrily?

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    1. Paint N Drip*

      I totally agree on the disconnect. It seems like they’re a tech person who refuses to incorporate non-tech things into their internal job description, even though it seems obvious that soft skills are part of this reviewing task and thus the job is more than just the “cut and dry” coding or whatever. Yet again, soft skills being undervalued!!

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    2. MigraineMonth*

      How many people is OP booting off these projects, and are they getting replaced with new people? If so, I can’t imagine these projects aren’t blowing their deadlines; getting people up to speed on a project is a huge time sink.

      Not to mention the issue with too many cooks having contributed to the soufflé, even if half of them have been thrown out of the kitchen: “Well, Bill designed it as an instantiable class, but his replacement Blair moved most of the logic to a static utility, then their replacement Alexis extracted a helper class that calls a JS library, except her replacement Sue is uncomfortable with JS so she encapsulated it…”

      Reply ↓
  12. Boss Scaggs*

    I hate to say this but your team probably really dislikes you if this is how you treat them. I dont’ have any actual advice other than perhaps talk to a therapist. It’s not healthy for anyone to continue to behave this way

    Reply ↓
    1. Anon for this one*

      Seconding this.

      (Also, LW, for the sake of stigma reduction, OCD does not cause people to act like this and it’s a misconception that it does. However, your deep-seated resentment and entrenched beliefs about how the world should work are definitely worth talking about in therapy.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Cat Tree*

        Thank you for clarifying that. I have OCD and it doesn’t make me an asshole. It’s also worth pointing out that most adults with OCD recognize that the disorder is affecting them, at least to some extent.

        Reply ↓
  13. RagingADHD*

    The entire reason for having a review and approval step in the process is to catch errors. The presumption that there will *always* be errors that need catching is built in to the LW’s job function.

    If it were abnormal and unacceptable to ever make any errors in the work, there would be no need for LW to have a job at all, and everyone would just be pushing code or publishing documents, or whatever, based on their own inherent perfection.

    LW is not only completely out of line and counterproductive for reacting this way, they are highly illogical in thinking their own job should not need to exist.

    Reply ↓
    1. Paint N Drip*

      That’s a good point. I wonder if the OP’s perspective on the job is more ‘I don’t make mistakes so they choose me to catch yours’ rather than ‘this process is inherently at risk of mistakes so it’s industry standard to have a system in place to catch them’

      Reply ↓
      1. RagingADHD*

        It goes to LW’s understanding of how things “should” be. As humans, we react strongly when our sense of what should / should not be is violated, and the further our expectations are out of line with reality, the more we overreact or react inappropriately to ordinary situations.

        If the LW believes the number of errors in the work submitted for review should be zero, their expectations are out of line with the existence of their job. The number of error in the finished product should be zero (or as close to zero as humanly possible), but the work submitted for review is not finished until they have done their job.

        Their job is to catch and correct errors, not berate people.

        Reply ↓
    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      LW should thank their coworkers for making mistakes that LW can fix. In one of my first jobs, I was taught that this is job security.

      Reply ↓
  14. TeapotNinja*

    There is only one reason to get upset at someone for a mistake. And that’s if it was done deliberately. The person knows it was going to break something and did it anyway. Even then there’s a professional way of dealing with that.

    Reply ↓
      1. Aye, Aye, Ai*

        Even setting aside the semantics, I disagree with the original statement. If the worker is making *enough* mistakes, or doing nothing to fix them or avoid them, that is surely a reason to “get upset.”

        Reply ↓
        1. UnCivilServant*

          Getting upset won’t fix anything.

          Collect documentation, try to politely and calmly address the errors with the employee. If they continue to resist implementation of processes to reduce errors, bring it to the manager (as the LW isn’t in a hire/fire position.)

          Reply ↓
        2. MigraineMonth*

          Agreeing with UnCivilServant: as a manager, you should never be upset or angry over poor performance. You need to go through the process of letting the employee know that it needs to improve in order to stay employed, and then follow through with letting them go if they don’t improve, but that shouldn’t come from a place of anger or frustration.

          Believe me, it’s hard enough hearing you don’t measure up and are going to lose your livelihood without having to deal with your manager’s emotions on top of that.

          Reply ↓
    2. Cat Tree*

      Honestly even then there is some nuance. My company (manufacturing) is big on human error prevention. When someone knowingly and deliberately does something wrong, it can be an organizational benefit violation, personal benefit violation, or reckless violation. The first two are potentially fixable to a certain extent. Only reckless violations warrant getting upset, and those are the most rare.

      Reply ↓
  15. Buffalo*

    Talk about a silly nitpick, but it’s bugging me – Alison’s response includes:
    (Which, as people are pointing out in the comment section, is a mistake in itself! So there’s some irony there.)

    Wouldn’t her response have been written before anyone in the comments section was pointing out anything?

    Reply ↓
    1. Juicebox Hero*

      Sometimes she adds to her response, like if someone adds relevant information or points out why her advice won’t work.

      Reply ↓
    2. duinath*

      She sometimes edits her advice after the comment section gets going. Best guess, if you find the original it’ll be noted there as an edit, but here I don’t think that’s necessary since it’s noted this is an older letter.

      Reply ↓
    3. there-are-roaches-in-my-pie*

      This letter was originally published in 2017, so she probably added it in once this sentiment gained enough traction in the comments. I’m assuming since she’s just rerunning the letter, she’s not going to edit it out.

      Reply ↓
    2. Grammatik*

      I read OP’s letter three times and am not seeing the run-on sentence, although she should put a comma before “etc.”

      In general, though, yes, run-on sentences are absolutely a mistake, and it is not a subjective matter to be decided by someone “critical enough.” If you’re overlooking run-on sentences, you shouldn’t be an editor. I also have no problem screening job applicants based on grammar.

      Reply ↓
  17. CommanderBanana*

    If you worked for me, regardless of how ‘perfect’ your work was from a technical standpoint, I would fire you.

    Reply ↓
    1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Certainly remove them from reviewing other people’s work and never ever promote them to a position of managing people.

      Reply ↓
    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I really want an update from this LW. I want to know how long they were working in this job, how long they’ve had the power to remove ppl from projects for one mistake, and if they were able to keep this job. I figure either LW took Alison’s and commenters’ advice and changed their attitude (which: yay!) or they unfortunately were let go from this position (which: boo).

      Reply ↓
  18. Naomi*

    “We have one job and one job only!” is a very misleading way to think of this. In many jobs (especially in tech!) people have to carry out complex tasks with many components. If there’s a mistake in the work because someone had 50 steps to do and got 48 of them right, it’s not fair, compassionate, or productive to treat that as a complete failure.

    This is why the entire field of QA testing exists: because software is complex, and it’s extremely unlikely to be perfect on the first try. The best you can do is check carefully for mistakes and correct them before the product goes out.

    Reply ↓
    1. Double A*

      Yeah most jobs that can be described as “You had one job only” have been offloaded to automation at this point.

      Reply ↓
  19. Czech Mate*

    In defense of OP: we don’t know what kind of work these folks are doing or what the stakes are for making mistakes. If they’re writing launch codes for nuclear missiles and they’re regularly making the same errors, then yes, that’s pretty serious.

    But! If that’s the case, then safeguards need to be put into place to catch errors/typos when they happen (à la NASA launch status check). If the work is that serious, you need to assume that you will always need multiple sets of eyes on something to double, triple, quadruple check that everything is a go.

    Reply ↓
    1. MigraineMonth*

      I said this above, but this behavior would *actually kill people* in a safety-critical environment. Medicine and aviation are two that are famous for trying to create “blameless” reporting processes specifically so that people can make and admit their mistakes without getting fired. It’s also important that everyone admit that *they* might have made a mistake and be open to listening to corrections from even the most junior member of their team, which I suspect LW also isn’t doing.

      If a patient is seizing, is it better to have a nurse who immediately admits he might have administered the wrong dose, or one who clams up because he doesn’t want to lose his job? If the plane is heading straight towards a mountain, is it better to have a pilot who has a track record of listening to his copilot, or one who is so arrogant or abusive that his copilot defers to him until they crash into the mountain? (If the latter seems farfetched… it unfortunately happened.)

      Yes, if someone’s performance is bad because they’re making a lot of avoidable mistakes, you should flag the mistakes and notify their manager (the person *actually* in charge of managing their performance). That’s nothing like getting enraged and berating everyone about every trivial mistake.

      Reply ↓
    2. biobotb*

      The OP doesn’t describe pulling people off projects for making repeated mistakes. They say even a trivial mistake will trigger removal of the person who made it.

      Reply ↓
  20. Lisa*

    I work on highly-regulated, life-sustaining medical products, where mistakes could literally kill someone. Even we do not expect people to never make mistakes, because human beings make mistakes. Instead we put in place systems and processes that make mistakes less likely and also catch mistakes so we can fix them. The LW’s expectations are unreasonable, and they need to focus on what to do to mitigate mistakes, not get angry when they inevitably happen.

    Reply ↓
  21. Aye, Aye, Ai*

    On the first issue, people are going to make mistakes because you work with humans, not robots, and humans make mistakes.

    I’m not disagreeing with the above, but…look at the longshoremen’s strike for its implications.

    Reply ↓
    1. Orv*

      Longshoreman aren’t threatened with being replaced by robots because they made too many mistakes, though. It’s because robots would be cheaper.

      Reply ↓
  22. Jax*

    This was a tech lead writing in, and I’m curious whether the phrase “trivial mistakes” in that context is kind of the opposite of how most of us think of it? (What makes me think it is that OP said it is especially the trivial mistakes that are upsetting.) By which I mean: One wrong character or space in coding — what seems like a trivial mistake — could keep everyone searching for hours or days to find and correct it and torpedo deadlines in major projects and divert resources from focusing on substantive areas? It might be a big deal is what I mean and shouldn’t be happening even once.

    Not that it makes a difference in recommendations to the OP on seeking help in controlling emotional reactions in this context.

    Reply ↓
    1. MigraineMonth*

      I don’t think a tech lead would describe a mistake that torpedoed deadlines as a “trivial mistake.”

      Even if that was the case, OP is profoundly misunderstanding their role as a reviewer. They are supposed to look for mistakes, flag them to be fixed, and only approve when all the mistakes they can find have been fixed. That is a completely normal step of software development everywhere I’ve worked, and nowhere did that person fly off the handle because they… had to do their job?

      OP isn’t supposed to be managing anyone’s performance; if there is a pattern of avoidable mistakes by a certain team member, they can flag that to the person’s manager.

      Reply ↓
  23. Erelen*

    Never mind that the emotional and heated reactions probably cause some anxiety in even the most confident people, thus causing MORE mistakes to happen.

    Reply ↓
  24. Insert Pun Here*

    I work in a job/industry where mistakes are Not Acceptable and a high degree of polish for anything public-facing is the norm, and the way you prevent mistakes is by having everything reviewed by multiple people. Expecting individuals to never make mistakes is unrealistic.

    Reply ↓
  25. MakingBiscuits*

    Tech VP here. I *guarantee* that a tech lead like this wouldn’t last long in any dev shop I’ve ever been associated with. His people would hate him, and (being and knowing nerds) would actively work to get him fired/removed, which would almost certainly be accommodated pretty quickly by somebody in his chain of command.

    As Allison noted, there are two options here. Therapy or unemployment.

    Reply ↓
  26. Caz*

    I work in IT, and frequently have “one job to get right”. “One job” is almost never one *step*, and we get it right by having up to four different levels of review – all asking essentially the same question (“does it work?”) but all looking from different perspectives. Despite all that, mistakes occasionally slip through! They might be minor, such as typos; they might be more significant, and might even impact health outcomes for individuals (I work in healthcare). We do our best with all of them, we sort what we can sort whenever we come across it, and work with services to put things right when they raise them. 100% accuracy is absolutely not an expectation of our team, and my manager will happily regale us with tales of times that he cocked up! This LW would benefit from some time in my team…but with his attitude, he’d never be hired.

    Reply ↓
  28. Fluffy Fish*

    Soft skills are as important if not more important than technical skills.

    So as critical as OP is of others, they are actually failing 50%+ of their job.

    Reply ↓
  29. Coverage Associate*

    In the developed world, especially in tech, there aren’t many functions that theoretically could be automated that have not already been automated. I’m struck by how much discretion OP has while having the attitude that other team members only have 1 job.

    I admittedly don’t know a lot about tech, but in all the jobs I know, things like deadlines and methodology are not black and white. If they were, it wouldn’t be a person’s job to decide them. There would be nothing to decide.

    And in well run places, deciders get input on things like methodology and internal deadlines (especially if the decider isn’t approving leave time).

    My long winded point is, in addition to everything emotional already pointed out, perhaps OP is also calling “mistakes” what are actually differences of opinion.

    Reply ↓
    1. Roland*

      As a software developer, it’s definitely very rare that I see developers other than interns doing things that are really, truly, no-opinion-involved mistakes. There’s better and worse ways to do things, technically and project-eise workflow-wise. But it’s almost all subjective.

      Reply ↓
  30. Honoria Lucasta*

    I mean, props to OP for at least being self-aware enough to recognize that this is bad, and for being able to describe their own reaction clearly. I could imagine many worse and less honest ways of writing in about the same issue — you know, the LWs who say “My team hates me because I have Standards, and sure I raise my voice a little bit but they deserve it.”

    At least this OP asks “how bad is it?”, admits that they “sort of know it’s not good”, and asks for general advice given the whole set of circumstances (rather than specific advice on how to keep doing the same things without experiencing consequences).

    ISTM that this is what taking a first step toward positive change can look like!

    Reply ↓
  31. Strive to Excel*

    Apart from all the other excellent points Alison and the commenters have made, it’s common that having people fix their own mistakes is a bad use of time! Humans tend to start not noticing mistakes in our own work after a while, because our brain ‘fills in’ with what should be there. So it takes more time and energy. You can also have a situation like writing where the person creating the content is not the person checking for grammar and spelling mistakes, because those are different skillsets. If you are ok with them being done by separate people, you broaden your ability to get good people.

    Reply ↓
  32. Jake Purralta*

    A lot of their team will end up so anxious due to their behaviour they’ll end up making more mistakes and it will end up in a vicious circle and the employee will lose all their confidence. I’ve seen this happen numerous times over the years. Once to me, I left a job after 2 months as it was awful, it took me a year to get my confidence back.

    Reply ↓
  33. Lab Snep*

    I worked at a lab where someone ONLY ever communicated with me when I made a mistake, and then was really awful about it.

    Even minor errors that had been caught before going anywhere and immediately rectified were the worst thing ever.

    I was blamed for mistakes I didn’t make. When I pointed that out I was never apologized to.

    It was one of the most demoralizing experiences ever.

    Reply ↓
  34. WaffleWizard*

    I think it’s worth a mention that this is a great way to stifle innovation too. Who on earth would want to try new things you’re not super familiar with if you’re going to have to deal with a manager having an emotional meltdown if it isn’t perfect the first time?

    Reply ↓
  35. Boof*

    Frankly even machines make “mistakes” / errors / mechanical failures / etc
    It’s odd that they are MORE angry about trivial mistakes too – like why does their emotions go up the lower the stakes are?

    Reply ↓
  36. RVA Cat*

    Is LW is Jane the Hyper-Critical Boss from September 2023? Though even she seemed to be more contemptuous than angry.

    Reply ↓
  37. Larry, I'm on Duck Tales*

    Seems like the way this person deals with others is a bigger mistake than the routine ones made by the mere mortals they work with.

    Reply ↓
  38. Heffalump*

    It was well known at Apple Computer that when you showed Steve Jobs something you’d done, you didn’t give it your best shot the first time around. He’d tear it to pieces no matter what. He once said, “You’ve baked a lovely cake, but you’ve used dog shit for frosting.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Goldenrod*

      Yes, and from what I’ve heard about him, he was not actually a good leader after until he left and came back with an improved attitude.

      Reply ↓

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