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Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#41

Post by mytailorisrich »

bradleyy wrote: post #19
bradleyy wrote: post #16

We 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…

I'd also add that high-performing teams require psychological safety (e.g. mistakes don't get punished), the research is pretty clear. So punishment is explicit blocking of high-performance.

It depends what kind of mistakes and whether they are repeat mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes, sure, and that should be accepted, but if they are caused by carelessness or incompetence, or if the same mistake keeps being repeated then there ought to be consequences.

A safe environment does not mean anything goes.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#43

Post by nlarew »

theflyingelvis wrote: post #42

Why would anyone celebrate failure? Celebrating failure simply doesn’t make sense. Learning from failure makes complete sense, but not celebrating it.

If you succeed at every project you work on, you're likely not taking on ambitious enough projects.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#44

Post by theflyingelvis »

nlarew wrote: post #43
theflyingelvis wrote: post #42

Why would anyone celebrate failure? Celebrating failure simply doesn’t make sense. Learning from failure makes complete sense, but not celebrating it.

If you succeed at every project you work on, you're likely not taking on ambitious enough projects.

That’s fine and I agree. But, why ‘celebrate’ the things that fail? I don’t get it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#45

Post by BryantD »

Yep, sure do. When I got to my current job last year one of my early activities was brainstorming a set of team principles for my SRE team, and one of them is “We improve by taking risks, learning, and taking risks again.” The critical thing about failures is learning from them. So really you’re celebrating the learning, not the failures.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#46

Post by madeofpalk »

OJFord wrote: post #37
madeofpalk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We declare an "incident". After it, you review the "incident". The site might not have even "died", but you still have an incident.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#47

Post by rlawson »

Ha I worked for a startup that said this was one of their guiding principles. What it really meant was we will pretend to understand and will save it for later when we need to lay people off. Was also big on radical candor but that really meant radical candor flowed from above but not so welcome when it went back the other direction.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#48

Post by nerdile »

belval wrote: post #26

The only place I ever worked at that "celebrated failure" (their own words) was an overgrown startup with no customers that was unable to ship a single product. Now I find the expression almost repulsive. Failure is part of work, not punishing failure is ok, celebrating it by saying "we learned so much" is a serious company smell for me.

THIS. I have seen cultures that performatively celebrate failure:

* Where, when systems fail, they go through the motions and jump straight to celebrating. "Thank you for finding this, X!" "Thank you for fixing this, Y!"

* Where a post-incident report is little more than "We found defect X and then we fixed it"

* Where psychological safety means "let's avoid talking about this and the risk management systems that allowed this to happen because the people responsible for those areas might feel attacked. Trust that the managers have dealt with the situation"

We need to be more specific than just saying "celebrate failure" to non technical managers, or this is what we get.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#49

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Somebody (DEC, maybe?) had something they called a "perfect failure". They had a very precise definition. You had to try something, realize that it wasn't working, kill it quickly, and learn something from it.

They celebrated these - like, a real celebration. But first they made sure that it really fit the definition.

Re: Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

#50

Post by basch »

sublinear wrote: post #34

The 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 ar…

Process can fail.

Something can be communicated and not acted upon.

Org structure can prevent action.

Failure can be an outcome from a hedged bet, where the chance of success was low, but the reward potentially high.

There are more abstract types of failures than engineering bugs. I would be impressed with a company that can turn a bug report into a ticket owned by a c suite person to reorganize the company.

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