Some of this post reminds me of a story I heard long ago from someone who had worked at a HW/SW company. They’d transferred an engineer from the ASIC design team to the OS kernel team, though he’d never been on a software team before. After a while the manager called him in for the following conversation:
Manager: You’re doing amazing work — zero bugs in production! I’d like you to mentor the other SWEs on how to get their bug count down too.
Manager: You’re doing amazing work — zero bugs in production! I’d like you to mentor the other SWEs on how to get their bug count down too.
Engineer: We’re allowed to have bugs?