With power comes responsibility

I was looking back at my career at work where in I had joined as a developer fixing bugs in a reporting system. Just recently, I was assigned the lead architect role for a new product. It had been a long journey with lot of ups and downs. However, little did I realize that some things I do impacts lot many people, not only their careers but also their personal life. Yesterday, I saw a good friend of mine looking very depressed because her work was delayed by two weeks for which I had estimated the effort as one week and she had to miss her dance practice for the annual day. I felt sorry for her deep within my heart as I was very aggressive in my estimation and I talking to her manager also didn't help her situation as the dates have been committed to the dependent products in other departments and her manager told me that he was helpless. In another instance, a colleague of mine was telling me that a good member in his team was denied confirmation because of me. I was wondering that he was a talented person and I had never given any bad feedback about him. Later I remember the talk I had with my leader last day when I chose another member for a specific task for a new product instead of him (the reason was that the other member had already worked in a similar product before), little did I know that this would have created a negative impression about that person in the leader's mind. Guess I need to be more careful on what I do or say as I remember a dialog in one of the spider man movie "With great power comes great responsibility".