Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

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Yep, been adjacent enough to a couple large ones through my career to see the details and been up-close to a few that this is the right way to approach it.

Did the person know they screwed up? Did they show remorse and a willingness to dive in and sort it out? They likely feel like absolute shit about the whole thing and you don't need to come down on them like a ton of bricks. If that much damage could be done with a single person then you have a gap in your process/culture/etc and that should be addressed from the top.

One of the best takes I've seen on this was from a previous manager who when confronted with a similar situation as the article(it was a full DB drop). The person tried to hand in their resignation on the spot, they instead(and I'm paraphrasing here) said: "You're the most qualified person to handle this risk in the future as we've just spent $(insert revenue hit here) training you. Moving forward we want you to own backup/restore and making sure those things work".

That person ended up being one of their best engineers and they had fantastic resiliency moving forward. It turns out if you give someone a bit of grace and trust when they realize they screwed up you'll end up with a stronger organization and culture because of it.

> they instead(and I'm paraphrasing here) said: "You're the most qualified person to handle this risk in the future as we've just spent $(insert revenue hit here) training you.

This is an old quote that has been originally attributed to different people throughout the years. It shows up in a lot of different management books and, more recently, LinkedIn influencer posts.

It’s good for lightening the situation and adding some levity, but after hearing it repeated 100 different times from different books, podcasts, and LinkedIn quotes it has really worn on me as somewhat dishonest. It feels clever the first time you hear it, but really the cost of the mistake is a separate issue from the decision to fire someone for it.

In real world situations, the decision to let someone go involved a deeper dive into assessing whether the incident was really a one-off mistake, or the culmination of a pattern of careless behavior, failure to learn, or refusal to adopt good practices.

I’ve seen situations where the actual dollar amount of the damage was negligible, but the circumstances that caused the accident were so egregiously bad and avoidable that we couldn’t justify allowing the person to continue operating in the role. I wish it was as simple as training people up or having them learn from their mistakes, but some people are so relentlessly careless that it’s better for everyone to just cut losses.

However when the investigation shows that the incident really was a one-time mistake from someone with an otherwise strong history of learning and growing, cutting that person for a single accident is a mistake.

The important thing to acknowledge is point #3 from the post above: Once you’ve made an expensive mistake, that’s usually your last freebie. The next expensive mistake isn’t very likely to be joked away as another “expensive training”

I'm fairly certain it occured since the story was first-hand and about 12+ years ago(although they may have lifted it from similar sources). It's not a bad way to diffuse things if it's clear there was an honest mistake

Your point on willingness to learn is bang on. If there's no remorse or intentionally negligent then yes that's a different story.

Oh I’m sure it occurred. The CEO was just repeating it from the countless number of management books where the quote appears.

My point was that it’s a story that gets overlaid on top of the real decision making process

> This is an old quote that has been originally attributed to different people throughout the years. It shows up in a lot of different management books and, more recently, LinkedIn influencer posts.

And a similar story has been recounted by pilot Bob Hoover, where a member of the ground crew fuelled Hoover’s airplane incorrectly. Instead of a dollar amount, the cost is that Hoover and the two passengers could have died.

https://sierrahotel.net/blogs/news/a-life-lesson#:~:text=%E2...

To quote a statistician friend: 100% of humans make mistakes.

OP's leadership was shit. The org let a junior dev delete shit in prod and then didn't own up to _their_ mistake? Did they later go on to work at a genetics company and blame users for being the subject of password sprays?

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