Do your best, and only focus on the things you have control over

I accidentally stole something from a hotel safe.

Whenever we stay at a hotel, I put our passports, wallet, car key, and valuables in the safe. Before checking out, these are quickly grabbed and put into my backpack.

This time something else happened, but I didn’t realize it until I got back to the office the next day. I was unpacking my backpack there when I realized there were a couple of elegant-looking pens, wrapped in leather pen holder with an inscription WITTCHEN on it, made in Italy. Turns out I grabbed everything from the safe box and put it in my stuff without realizing the extra item.

I don’t care much about pens, but if someone had those put in a hotel safe -> they were probably dear to them. Who knows, it might have been a gift from an old friend, on inherited from a family member, or the first pen their company bought. Anyways, I immediately emailed the hotel, explaining the situation and offering to send the item back to the home country of the owner at my expense. I followed up a couple of more times, but they never gave me any info. So, then I started searching review sites like TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and similar ones, with the hope of finding anyone with a comment regarding the lost pens. I even asked the reception the following year (no, we did not return for the pens only; it is an amazing place) if there was anyone asking about these. I tried my best and used all of the tools at hand. Despite the fact that the result was unsatisfactory, I feel good for doing everything I thought of + more.

That accident reminded me of something I have always done throughout my career: I don’t judge myself by outcomes alone. I do it by whether I exhausted every reasonable option.

I try to leave problems better than I found them. Even when the final outcome is not entirely mine to control.

I have worked with teams where weak practices had become the norm, simply because nobody had challenged them for years. And some of my colleagues had the urge to “blend in”. Things like “If they have done this like so for the last 5 years, why should we do it better?” were suggested, but I pushed back. Existing momentum wasn’t a good enough reason to preserve poor practices.

In that particular example, the test suite looked substantial on paper, but we found more than 1200 tests contained no meaningful assertions. They were creating the appearance of coverage without actually protecting the product. We gradually described them and started to chip away at that tech debt. 20% each sprint. Five months later, the gap was closed. We could have always pretended that the tests were actually meaningful (as the customer up until that point), but hey - that’s not what we have been brought in for.

We could not control every decision or guarantee that no defect would ever escape. But we could control whether the problem was traced, and eventually solved. This is the standard which I apply everywhere: own the work within your reach, use all available options, and make more available if possible. And do not carry guilt for outcomes that were never under your control.