[deleted]
Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#32Used to at Amazon, those guys had a great engineering onboarding that was nothing BUT failures and anecdotes about them. It was really memorable and humbling to see some great engineers share where they went wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#33We don't exactly celebrate failure, but: 1) We have a culture that accepts "failures happen". People screw up, sometimes badly. 2) Imperative to this is a culture of ownership. You hide failures, your job is at risk. You own it, go public, get help, and all is well. Well, not exactly well, since there was a failure, but you get the picture. 3) Blameless post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died) 4) We do have a tongu…
#4 does more good than most realize. If you can’t joke around about it then you aren’t really comfortable with it. And we all must be comfortable with the potential to cause problems occasionally. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#34The whole premise of this question is kinda backwards.
If a dev messes up an implementation detail, that's a bug. It could be a small bug, could be a big bug, or could be a forced bug caused by contradictory requirements. Usually if it's a big bug then it's also probably the requirements. So then now there's at least one more owner of that bug besides the dev. Then you dig in further and find that the requirements are bad due to other seeming organizational problems, etc. so there are even more owners of the bug...
Natural to ask at this point when is a bug a feature? What is failure anymore if you managed to redefine things and embrace that there was no organizational dysfunction after all and that the nature of the problem revealed some deeper truth about how to solve it?
These are not abstract questions. What I'm saying is that work is just as much a process of discovery as it is a process to get some expected result. When the expectations have to change that's not failure, so there's really no such thing as failure and nothing to really celebrate or blame anyone about. If you're working then there's progress and that's all that really matters.
If people can't keep up with expectations it's completely arbitrary to decide to either adjust expectations or fire people. That's a matter of running the business, not a judgment one way or the other of the work that was done. This is the reason they say to not take it personally. It's not just a bunch of bull to make you feel better. It's simply irrelevant.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#35This is an interesting question. I always am telling my kids: "If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough." Because they tend towards doing the easy thing so it'll be a success, but most of life's interesting things happen at the intersection of failure. But, on the other hand, I don't really want to enable their doing of totally asinine things, the number of views on Jake Paul's videos not withstanding...
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#36We don't exactly celebrate failure, but: 1) We have a culture that accepts "failures happen". People screw up, sometimes badly. 2) Imperative to this is a culture of ownership. You hide failures, your job is at risk. You own it, go public, get help, and all is well. Well, not exactly well, since there was a failure, but you get the picture. 3) Blameless post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died) 4) We do have a tongu…
Failure doesn't have to mean "people screw up" and one would hope there'd be something in place to avoid failing badly.
Failing early and often is a healthy approach to learning. That doesn't shame people or cause serious harm.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#37We don't exactly celebrate failure, but: 1) We have a culture that accepts "failures happen". People screw up, sometimes badly. 2) Imperative to this is a culture of ownership. You hide failures, your job is at risk. You own it, go public, get help, and all is well. Well, not exactly well, since there was a failure, but you get the picture. 3) Blameless post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died) 4) We do have a tongu…
> post-mortems (hate that term, nobody died) Post-incident review https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/...
We say our battery's 'dying' or the site or something's 'dead' or 'live' or 'alive again' though - post mortem makes sense in that case, I understand the objection but I think you have to object to the rest too.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#38I assume occasional mistakes are treated differently than negligence, willfully going against policy, or multiple failures from the same person (i.e. a pattern of failure, perhaps just incompetence).
I'd be interested in the cases when even a company that practices no-blame post-mortems has to fire the people who screw up multiple times.
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#39I started a podcast about this. I'm sick of the rah-rah confident founder BS we see on here and all over the Internet. Sometimes we need to learn from our failures. Anyway, check it out. Keep Going: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keep-going-a-podcast-a...
Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?
#40In my experience, you can own your mistakes by buying breakfast for the team the next day. I agree that this is different from a failure. But deleting your own account, or the production database, sending a useless email to the whole company, etc ... can all be redeemed with a breakfast, as long as it means that you own your mistake in good faith, and that you will do your best not to repeat it. (Disclosure: I'm fren…
Culture in a lab I worked at was to bring donuts in when you messed up. I don't think this is "celebrating" failure, so much as a fun way to say sorry for messing up.
[deleted]