> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
Unless your head is on the line, why do you care?