5 ms·

I don’t know when this was turned into a Facebook trope, but I’ve heard it before as an engineer asking “Am I being fired?”, to which the director responds “We

I don’t know when this was turned into a Facebook trope, but I’ve heard it before as an engineer asking “Am I being fired?”, to which the director responds “We just invested four million dollars in your education. You are now one of our most valuable employees!”

arethuza 3y ago
Pretty sure the first time I heard that it was about IBM (possibly in the book "Big Blues") - here is a reference to it: https://www.discerningreaders.com/watson-sr-we-forgive-thoughtful-mistakes.html https://www.discerningreaders.com/watson-sr-we-forgive-thoug...
latexr 3y ago
> four million dollars That looks like a value inflated by retellings of the popular Thomas Watson quote (see sibling comments).
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  Probably, though when your business is making billions this is still just a few hours outage, or one long-running experiment dragging your conversion down by a few percentage points.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  Four million is definitely in the range of an outage at peak, that's not counting reallocated engineering resources to root cause and fix the problem, the opportunity cost of that fix in lost features, extra work by PR, potential contractual obligations for uptime, outage aftershocks, recruiting implications, customer support implications, etc. If you have a once a year outage, how many employee-hours do you think you are going to lose to socially talking about it and not getting work done that day? $116.6 Billion in revenue is ~13 million an hour. Outages usually happen under greater load, so very likely closer to ~25 mil an hour in practice.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    By that measure a loss of 1 second would be $7k lost revenue. A 100ms outage would be $700. Reality is that revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage, it wouldn't even be noticed.
    - teolandon 3y ago
      It doesn't scale linearly.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        Indeed, so arguing that if revenue is 24m a day that a 1 hour outage loses 1m is wrong
        hayst4ck 3y ago
        Arguing it is $1,000,000.00 is wrong. Arguing that it represents the order of magnitude of potential damage is cogent.
    - ricardobeat 3y ago
      > revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage If that little blip cascades briefly and causes 1000 users to see an error page, and a mere five of them (0.5%) to give up on purchasing, boom you just lost those $700 (at least in the travel industry where ticket size is very high). Probably much more.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        So I invest all that time deciding where, when and how to travel and don't press refresh when I see an error which is more than likely on my end?
        ricardobeat 3y ago
        An error page can be enough for a handful of customers to decide to “come back later” or go with a competitor website. If you think about experiments with button colors and other nearly imperceptible adjustments, that we know can affect conversion rates, an error page is orders of magnitude more impactful.
polynomial 3y ago
This is the version I've always heard.

arethuza 3y ago

Pretty sure the first time I heard that it was about IBM (possibly in the book "Big Blues") - here is a reference to it: https://www.discerningreaders.com/watson-sr-we-forgive-thoughtful-mistakes.html https://www.discerningreaders.com/watson-sr-we-forgive-thoug...

latexr 3y ago

> four million dollars That looks like a value inflated by retellings of the popular Thomas Watson quote (see sibling comments).

ricardobeat 3y ago
Probably, though when your business is making billions this is still just a few hours outage, or one long-running experiment dragging your conversion down by a few percentage points.
hayst4ck 3y ago
Four million is definitely in the range of an outage at peak, that's not counting reallocated engineering resources to root cause and fix the problem, the opportunity cost of that fix in lost features, extra work by PR, potential contractual obligations for uptime, outage aftershocks, recruiting implications, customer support implications, etc. If you have a once a year outage, how many employee-hours do you think you are going to lose to socially talking about it and not getting work done that day? $116.6 Billion in revenue is ~13 million an hour. Outages usually happen under greater load, so very likely closer to ~25 mil an hour in practice.
- ta1243 3y ago
  By that measure a loss of 1 second would be $7k lost revenue. A 100ms outage would be $700. Reality is that revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage, it wouldn't even be noticed.
  - teolandon 3y ago
    It doesn't scale linearly.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Indeed, so arguing that if revenue is 24m a day that a 1 hour outage loses 1m is wrong
      - hayst4ck 3y ago
        Arguing it is $1,000,000.00 is wrong. Arguing that it represents the order of magnitude of potential damage is cogent.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    > revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage If that little blip cascades briefly and causes 1000 users to see an error page, and a mere five of them (0.5%) to give up on purchasing, boom you just lost those $700 (at least in the travel industry where ticket size is very high). Probably much more.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      So I invest all that time deciding where, when and how to travel and don't press refresh when I see an error which is more than likely on my end?
      - ricardobeat 3y ago
        An error page can be enough for a handful of customers to decide to “come back later” or go with a competitor website. If you think about experiments with button colors and other nearly imperceptible adjustments, that we know can affect conversion rates, an error page is orders of magnitude more impactful.

polynomial 3y ago

This is the version I've always heard.