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To be honest, I never understood the point of companies publishing post mortems after outages. What is it supposed to accomplish? We the users don’t understand
by TedShiller 6y ago
To be honest, I never understood the point of companies publishing post mortems after outages. What is it supposed to accomplish? We the users don’t understand their infrastructure anyway, how are we expected to understand the post mortem? Besides, as the users why should we care why things went down? The fact is, they did. And that’s the only thing that matters. I don’t feel better knowing WHY I lost my services. I just feel bad BECAUSE I lost them. Or are post mortems supposed to reassure users that the outage won’t happen again? It doesn’t reassure that either because by definition unpredictable outages always happen due to something new and unpredictable. This post mortem certainly won’t stop the next outage from happening. We KNOW there will be more, we just don’t know when. Or are post mortems supposed to show that the company takes full responsibility for what happened? But they always do and are fully expected to. So it’s meaningless. No company would ever say “we don’t take responsibility for this error we caused”. Even in the case of massive data leaks, which cannot be reversed, companies always take full responsibility. And it doesn’t help anyone.
The only thing post mortems show is that the company didn’t do their job or was careless or disorganized or confused. But we already know that, because they had an outage.
So what’s the point?
- ithkuil 6y agoRecruiting?
- tpxl 6y agoA good post mortem is basically "We've made a mistake, try not to make the same mistake as us". Useless to end users, useful to engineers in similar situations.
- Terretta 6y agoLearning. If problems were solved, nobody would write code. That new code or config is being deployed shows these problems (new feature rollouts, migrations, scaled resilience, etc.) are not yet formally solved. As such, things not known will become known — and usually be revealed in prod. Similarly, in technology systems, there’s no such thing as human error, only uncaught error conditions. Postmortems capture learning, so the conditions can be caught next time. Publishing them shows the engineering organization understands and applies this learning loop.
- TedShiller 6y agoSure, but it doesn't stop future outages
- neop1x 6y agoLearning for others to let them see what kinds of problems can happen. To demonstrate they are competent and can diagnose and fix a problem quickly. Sometimes to explain why the downtime took that amount of time. For example Interactive Brokers was down completely for almost the whole trading session and they just said that they are sorry and that it was their database vendor who messed up. No more details, nothing. Just "we take the quality and resiliency of our systems very seriously".