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Comment by sujinge9 | Hacker News Reader

Why would firing someone make you feel like reparative measures have been taken?

Reparations would show an actual sense of responsibility. Firing someone would be appropriate if they were negligent. Other measures might be more appropriate. Is it enough that any time there's a Cloudflare incident, all we get are lengthy blog posts and sorries from Cloudflare?

Firing people for making mistakes is a great way to watch productivity dive. The easiest way to prevent mistakes is to do nothing at all.

I understand the point being made here, but what are those affected supposed to take away? Cloudflare made a mistake that caused (x millions of dollars of lost online commerce revenues, y number of missed telehealth sessions, etc.) and since we do not punish mistakes, nothing was done. Sorry everyone!

Understood. Typically, as a company, you write - 1) what went wrong 2) how did it go wrong and 3) what you have or will put in place to prevent it from ever happening again

It's a learning process for all involved, really.

From the affected parties point of view, well, they should diversify their network a bit better. End users should hold those companies feet to the fire, not Cloudflare's.

Firing people for making mistakes is just going to foster a culture of secrecy and shame. Being so quick to fire is not how you retain talent and it isn't how you foster a healthy, blameless development culture in your workplace.

> Firing someone would be appropriate if they were negligent

Maybe, but making mistakes is far from negligence. Besides which, if a single person can accidentally break your system, at least at Cloudflare's scale, that's an organizational failure, not a personal failure.

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