4 ms·
We all make mistakes but rarely at this scale. I hope whoever accidentally sent out the integration email to everyone doesn't get in trouble. I would hate for m
by mattsolle 5y ago
We all make mistakes but rarely at this scale. I hope whoever accidentally sent out the integration email to everyone doesn't get in trouble. I would hate for my dumb mistakes to be put on blast by hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
- dag11 5y agoSurely HBO will be trending on twitter within the hour. The engineer should get a raise :)
- lathiat 5y agoI often see "this person should be fired" etc in response to legitimate mistakes.. but that's massively undervaluing the mistake. There's a pretty good chance the person who made such a mistake is less likely to repeat it or other mistakes than someone who hasn't yet had the experience. So at best you're just sending a more valuable employee to one of your competitors. There's some gray area when it comes to making a poor judgement call to skip a well defined procedure or be lazy.. and some cases this doesn't apply to like intentional malice or a continued series of similar obviously avoidable mistakes. On a related note im often frustrated when people play a blame game (even if one might be somewhat called for, in a way) instead of considering "human factors" and how to systematically avoid people being able to make such mistakes. Or refuse to accept a human factors style explanation and just say the person "should have known better" etc. The best high profile example was that hawaii missile alert that was supposed to be a test having an incredibly poor UI. But there are countless examples everywhere all the time. I often try to think about this a lot in my work.
- jffry 5y agoHow's the anecdote go... "Why would I fire him? I just spend $200,000 training him not to do this thing, he'll never make this mistake again!"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- edgyquant 5y agoWasn’t it, “I just spent 1,000,000 on training there’s no way I could afford to fire you.”
- jffry 5y agoAh, that's I think closer to what I was remembering!
- _kst_ 5y agoAccording to one source: “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” – Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM
- collinvandyck76 5y agoIf someone can make these kinds of mistakes, IMHO it is usually not their fault and instead is the fault of the systems that failed to prevent it from happening.
- avgDev 5y agoYou would think there was some kind of thing in place to prevent an email like this.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThere usually is, after you've done this the first time.
- edgyquant 5y agoOnly way there wouldn’t be is if this was a high level engineer who made this mistake (I hope.)”