Simon Willison’s Weblog

How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed?

20th October 2012

My answer to How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed? on Quora

It is your fault. Part of being a good front-end engineer is knowing the ways in which a page might break and working with your team to mitigate them.

This involves a LOT of work: plenty of browser testing, asynchronous loading techniques so external script errors won’t kill your site, load testing, monitoring, carefully balancing the trade-offs of things like CDNs or external font services...

Stuff will still break, and that’s your fault for not thinking of everything—but you accept responsibility and take steps to prevent that particular problem from happening again. There should be no shame in making mistakes and learning from them—but seeking excuses rather than taking steps to prevent the problem from reoccurring is bad engineering.