The Development Lesson That Backfired
I learned this lesson the hard way during what should have been a mentoring moment with one of my best developers.
Sarah was a senior engineer on my team, known for her technical expertise and problem-solving ability. She’d been working on a critical API integration for three weeks: complex authentication protocols, real-time data synchronization, and strict performance requirements. The client had high expectations, and this integration was essential for their system modernization.
The demo failed spectacularly. The authentication kept timing out, the data sync was dropping packets, and the performance was nowhere near acceptable levels. Worse, this happened in front of the client’s technical team and their CTO. Sarah had to watch her work fall apart while trying to explain what was going wrong in real time.
She came to my office afterward, clearly shaken. This was someone who took pride in her technical work, and she was devastated. “I don’t understand how I missed those issues,” she said. “I tested everything. The authentication worked in dev, the sync was fine in staging. I feel like I failed everyone.”
My instinct as a technical leader was to turn this into a learning opportunity immediately. I started asking coaching questions: “What do you think we should have done differently in our testing approach?” “How can we prevent this kind of integration failure in the future?” “What additional performance benchmarks should we implement before client demos?”
I thought I was being helpful. Helping her analyze what went wrong so we could improve our development process. But I watched her face fall further with each question. She wasn’t ready to dissect the failure. She was still processing the emotional impact of having her work fail publicly.
What she needed was someone to acknowledge that the situation was genuinely difficult and that her feelings made sense. What I gave her was immediate problem-solving pressure when she was already feeling like she’d failed.
That mistake taught me: there’s a time for coaching and a time for comfort. Confusing the two makes people feel worse, not better.