Buddy Ltd Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Mifsud on Monday brought to light the cruciality of business leaders backing their teams even when making mistakes, since these could have a “significant impact” on someone’s life.

While watching the England versus Iran game of the FIFA World Cup, Mr Mifsud noticed a “little glitch, error, bug, or whatever you want to call it”, as the stoppage time indicator showed “+null” rather than the time allocated by the referee.

“I’ve been in tech all my life and seeing an issue like this, come up on the world stage, is a realisation that we are all human,” he said.

“Sometimes we are tough on our teams to deliver world-class products, sometimes on shoestring budgets. Trying to get quality control and testing all possible scenarios before going live,” Mr Mifsud explained.

He remarked that everyone who uses software, in some way, shape, or form, needs to be patient with others as “sometimes they are trying to identify what scenarios caused an anomaly they were not able to foresee”.

“I know this may look like a small or trivial error, however, similar, very minor errors could have a significant impact on someone’s life, things like missed wages, accidents, especially with all the self-driving AI coming in, and I could keep going on and on,” Mr Mifsud said.

Addressing the engineer or developer that was tasked with coding the stoppage time indicator, Mr Mifsud explained that “it seems like you assumed that someone will key in the additional time before the 90 minutes run out. I don’t check as far back as the first game, but certainly, this didn’t hold true on the second game played this World Cup!”

However, he also told them not to worry, as “it happens to the best of us”.

Mr Mifsud co-founded Buddy, a cloud payroll software company, in 2019, utilising his years of software development experience to introduce payroll systems to the world of automation. He is also a XERO Developer & Integration Expert at Malta-based digital marketing agency Maze Digital. He holds a Master of Science in Intelligent Computer Systems and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, both from University of Malta.