So let it be with Caesar

The Life and Death of Julies Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2, William Shakespeare

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

Mistakes will live on forever. The new Pharaoh will remember the mistakes that were made before his time.

During my first job as an engineer, I found myself spinning on the details of project. The real problem was that I was given the details for my piece of the project without being told how it fit into the greater project. I lacked the experience to realize what questions to ask or that I even had to ask. The more I thought about my piece of the project, the more I came up with error conditions and coded solutions for them. This came up in my annual review. At my last annual review with the company, seventeen years later, “Gets lost in details” was still being listed in weaknesses, even though no supervisor for many years could list an example. However, they thought since it was mentioned in previous reviews that it should be carried over…just in case.

See the Rule of Stagnation.