Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

Any culture where a failure means somebody needs to be fired is a toxic culture where people will be unwilling to take any risks whatsoever. That's not normal and is a sign that the company's future isn't going to be very promising.

It depends on the level of the failure. Some failures are minor problems that can be easily fixed with minimal impact on the business. Some failures are colossal and can drive the company out of business.

I wish the consequences for failure were uniform across various organizations. Some companies will fire you for minor infractions. Others let failures grow because they are never addressed. Government is notorious for having negative incentives (failures are often rewarded).

One of my favorite movie quotes is from Ray's character (played by Dan Aykroyd) in Ghostbusters when they were fired from the university: "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

> post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died)

Post-incident review

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/...

I run a 20+ person tech company.

People screw up and make mistakes all the time.

I'd have no employees if I fired everyone after every mistake. I'm almost certain the same is true of virtually every company on earth.

What really matters is how people handle themselves and others when failures occur, which is what the OP is asking about. Very valid question. Unfortunately a lot of low quality responses in the comments so far.

From my POV, mistakes/failures are a fact of life, you can't avoid them. So instead, you have to manage the risk of failures/mistakes and work to reduce that risk until it's at a risk level where management is comfortable. At in IC level, that probably means doing retrospects on major failures, why they occured, how to avoid in the future... and most importantly, focus the retros on the -process- rather than the -people-. Processes can be easily and quickly improved.. "this slipped through QA because it's not on our QA checklist" compared to "Bob is a bad coder, it's his fault"

I worked somewhere that did it and it was completely performative.

A culture of experimentation, which as a requirement leads to failures, does not need to celebrate failure. That's like cargo cult mentality, thinking that the failure itself is causally doing something good.