So we stress about not breaking something in production. About some untested changes not going to final users. We conduct regressions. Many people participate in releases. At the same time, the companies where most of us work aren't the top ones in the industry. Maybe top locally, but definitely not on a planetary scale. We don't always succeed, but we try. We see people around us gathering who also care.
Then in the evening after work you want to relax, launch Hearthstone Battlegrounds Duos mode from Activision Blizzard themselves to play. And you see that they just casually released a patch with tons of changes. Great, you're happy, new content, new mechanics. And you realize that literally the main mechanic of this patch simply doesn't work as it should. For everyone. Always. All of Reddit is flooded with complaints from players. It's absolutely obvious to you that in this entire chain from developers to production, literally no one even launched a single game in Duos mode, because the bug is visible in the first few minutes of the game. And this bug has been in production for two days now, making this mode practically unplayable.
Even if the team is small. Even if the mode isn't the most popular compared to solo and especially standard. Even if it's not the most monetizable. But you're releasing a huge patch with hundreds of changes specifically in this mode. And you never launched a single game to check what these updates affected. You have thousands-millions of users, you have a big name, is everything okay there?
What am I getting at? We all have some idealistic notion that somewhere high up there, the specialists are more skilled and the processes are much better built. I'd even say this is the reason that pushes you to grow and develop in your career path, to someday end up there. But moments like this bring you down to earth and hit your motivation, because you realize that this isn't the case at all.
I understand perfectly well that Blizzard is a small indie company and generally a whipping boy in terms of catastrophic production bugs, but sometimes it reaches such absurdity that you reevaluate your life looking at all this.
The above is not a reason to relax in life. It's rather a reason to weaken your impostor syndrome.