Is saying "I'm sorry" an admission of guilt somehow? Genuinely interested.
Edit: found in this same thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14749389
Or it is insincere.
Saying "im sorry" or never saying "im sorry" has expansive meanings and "sides"-
--- "My favorite mug is broken."
"Im sorry."
"Did you break it?"
"No."
"Then why apologize??!!!"
("I feel bad" is a better response)
I was reared in an "im sorry" said often environment. It was used to placate and move past someone's issue. A phrase that was never meant but effective.
I work now with a man that will always say (after hearing someone say im sorry), "Never say you're sorry. Its a sign of weakness." where i say im sorry to make others feel comfortable and to relate to complainers.
A sibling had and will never say she is sorry. It is like a commandment. Thou shall not ever apologize.
I do an im sorry test when i meet someone. Do they ever say that phrase?
There is no real simple answer "does it mean guilt" but my decades of experience say "Yes" more than "no"
Being explicit about it could help, but I agree my default inclination is also to assume it's an apology.
(Grieves might be a bit heavy of a word to use, so saddened works too—the concept is the same.)
Obviously this doesn't imply guilt.
If your most recent code breaks the company website, the correct response is probably "I'm on it - ETA of <x> mins/hours."
You could argue that an apology is redundant, although a post-mortem may be useful.
It's a difficult cultural issue, because it depends how avoidable show-stopper problems are.
The law doesn't fully distinguish between negligence caused by personal error; negligence caused by stress, distraction, or overwork; trivial error which may be magnified because of circumstances or other contributory factors; basic incompetence of one individual; basic incompetence of one or more other individuals which ends up being the problem of someone who isn't directly responsible (e.g. a site crashes because of an ancient bug buried in ancient code); and a series of extremely unlikely but unfortunate events.