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now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engine

now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engineering screw ups. Can you point me to a Fortune 500 public post mortem for a bad acquisition or something else CEO driven?

lhorie 4y ago
Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. Screw ups are something else. When you think about cases like WeWork or Theranos, then I think we get into more familiar territory: gross negligence is a widely acceptable reason for firing, no matter if you're the CEO, Joe developer or a janitor. An operational mistake by a SWE might be something like picking the wrong technology, and for a CEO, an operational mistake might be something like a bad acquisition. Just as a technology is a tool for the dev, an acquisition is a tool for the CEO. Both of these are examples of getting bad outcomes from their tool usage decisions, but they're still categorically operational mistakes, as opposed to gross misconduct. So my two cents is that if one wants to argue that operational mistakes categorically warrant firing personnel, then yeah, I think I'm gonna have a problem with that line of thinking.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. This is bullshit. An earnings call is nothing like an engineering post mortem for an outage. There’s zero introspection or root causing. It’s typical Silicon Valley style hypocrisy, where founders and CEOs claim there’s a certain company culture but never walk the walk themselves. Give me a NY bank any day. At least they aren’t constantly blowing smoke up employees’ asses. Everyone knows the score.
  - lhorie 4y ago
    > There’s zero introspection or root causing You mean unlike the Experian breach post mortem, or the numerous "everything is green" Slack outages? IMHO, Costco talking about container costs is introspection. I'll grant that taking analogies too literally does indeed lead one to conclude the other party's arguments are bullshit, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and unwillingness to engage in good faith discussions.
Hermitian909 4y ago
So far as I'm aware blameless postmortems don't really exist for project level failures. If I propose a new system, say a new load balancing scheme, it staffed and built and then is a failure as a system I am actually going to get blamed for that failure. The same is true for directors and CEOs.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  In theory Pichai took the blame but in practice that means nothing. On the one hand there were no job repercussions, on the other there was no attempt to break down the factors that lead to the errors and discuss what changes would be made to prevent similar errors. So not blameless or blamefull, nothing at all.

lhorie 4y ago

Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. Screw ups are something else. When you think about cases like WeWork or Theranos, then I think we get into more familiar territory: gross negligence is a widely acceptable reason for firing, no matter if you're the CEO, Joe developer or a janitor. An operational mistake by a SWE might be something like picking the wrong technology, and for a CEO, an operational mistake might be something like a bad acquisition. Just as a technology is a tool for the dev, an acquisition is a tool for the CEO. Both of these are examples of getting bad outcomes from their tool usage decisions, but they're still categorically operational mistakes, as opposed to gross misconduct. So my two cents is that if one wants to argue that operational mistakes categorically warrant firing personnel, then yeah, I think I'm gonna have a problem with that line of thinking.

bradleyjg 4y ago
Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. This is bullshit. An earnings call is nothing like an engineering post mortem for an outage. There’s zero introspection or root causing. It’s typical Silicon Valley style hypocrisy, where founders and CEOs claim there’s a certain company culture but never walk the walk themselves. Give me a NY bank any day. At least they aren’t constantly blowing smoke up employees’ asses. Everyone knows the score.
- lhorie 4y ago
  > There’s zero introspection or root causing You mean unlike the Experian breach post mortem, or the numerous "everything is green" Slack outages? IMHO, Costco talking about container costs is introspection. I'll grant that taking analogies too literally does indeed lead one to conclude the other party's arguments are bullshit, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and unwillingness to engage in good faith discussions.

Hermitian909 4y ago

So far as I'm aware blameless postmortems don't really exist for project level failures. If I propose a new system, say a new load balancing scheme, it staffed and built and then is a failure as a system I am actually going to get blamed for that failure. The same is true for directors and CEOs.

bradleyjg 4y ago
In theory Pichai took the blame but in practice that means nothing. On the one hand there were no job repercussions, on the other there was no attempt to break down the factors that lead to the errors and discuss what changes would be made to prevent similar errors. So not blameless or blamefull, nothing at all.