What was the biggest mistake you made early in your career that ended up teaching you a valuable lesson? One of mine was assuming everyone interpreted requirements the same way I did. Learning to ask clarifying questions saved me from a lot of rework. What’s yours?

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Not taking risk earlier in life, you got to risk it for the biscuit. Decided to stay on the safe path and now here I am 5 years later trying to get into an industry I had an offer to join when I first started that I didn’t take because I was too comfortable to move.

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Great answer, good luck getting your foot in the door!

"Never blame the person who made a genuine mistake with no malice, find the gap in the system that allowed their mistake to even be possible in the first place."

I did an experiment on a medical device manufacturing robotic system when I was a grad (2 months into my job), and I made a mistake when resetting some mechanical jigs - I didn't notice because the large jig and medium jig are IDENTICAL in look and shape and profile (logically it makes no difference, but for auditability in case of product issues, medical device companies care about how this is managed and tracked).

The next day i come back to 2 shifts worth of product being quarantined under temporary deviation and my lead engineer focused:

1. Identifying why our processes had a gap that meant a grad could easily have an impact on production.

2. How we can rectify the batch (100% manual quality verification of every part)

3. How can we improve the system so we don't have such an issue again.

He made it very clear that:

1. We don't blame the people, we find out why the system allows for that failure mode to be possible.

2. That while it's not my fault, it is still my responsibility to help rectify things. So I made sure to run the temporary deviation process to make sure that every part met our quality standards before releasing them.

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Amazing? Hahaha hardly 😅😅 let's just say that this is only part of the experience of working with him.

Nevertheless... it pays to take heed of a valuable lesson and credit it no matter where it comes from.

Assuming what you know gets you places rather than who you know. Politics is real.

So true

Same here

Nice!

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