Post by Avantika Penumarty

My second week at Meta. I pushed code to production without proper testing. It broke a pipeline processing 2 billion events a day. The Slack alert hit my manager at 2AM. I woke up to 47 missed messages. I expected to get fired on the spot. Instead, my manager sent me one message: "Let's debug this together at 9AM. Get some rest." That morning, he didn't fix it for me. He made me walk through every decision I had made. Every assumption I had skipped. Every edge case I had ignored. It took 4 hours. But after that session, I NEVER made the same class of mistake again. The incident cost the team 6 engineer-hours. That one debugging session saved me from 600 hours of future mistakes. The best seniors don't fix your bugs. They make you understand why the bug happened. That's the difference between a senior who makes you better and one who just gets the work done. Was there a moment early in your career that rewired how you approach your work?