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Ask HN: Do you celebrate failures at work?

by ReginaDeiPirati on 2/8/23, 4:27 PM with 53 comments

• by bradleyy on 2/8/23, 4:57 PM

  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 tongue-in-cheek slack channel for those folks who have caused a "p0", i.e. most-severe-breakage
  

  I'd not want to work somewhere that didn't have the above; it's just part of being a mature organization.

• by belval on 2/8/23, 5:21 PM

  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.

• by bryanlarsen on 2/8/23, 5:10 PM

  “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”

  – Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM

• by JonChesterfield on 2/8/23, 4:43 PM

  The most popular ritual I've seen for celebrating failure is firing people. I can see a case for the company declaring bankruptcy being considered a ritual.

  I'm trying to imagine a world where failure is seen as a good thing - it implies risks were taken, and without risk there is unlikely to be progress. I suppose AirBnB is a bit of a poster child for move fast and get sued later so that sort of fits.

• by version_five on 2/8/23, 5:21 PM

  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.

• by linsomniac on 2/8/23, 5:38 PM

  This 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...

• by mikece on 2/8/23, 4:55 PM

  I've heard it said that in Japan management seeks to fix the problem when there's a failure rather than fixing the blame. I have no idea if that's true of the Japanese but I know it's true in America. And once the blame is fixed then the person blamed is ejected from the organization and that's considered a fix to the problem. So why would anyone volunteer to talk about failure when that is the status quo?

• by rlawson on 2/8/23, 6:01 PM

  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.

• by sublinear on 2/8/23, 5:38 PM

  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 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.

• by jdbiggs on 2/8/23, 5:45 PM

  I 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...

• by pm90 on 2/8/23, 4:57 PM

  I'll say there are ways to embrace it, but celebrating it, just that phrase, I suspect will turn off the suits who might misinterpret it.

  Anyway, the way I've seen it be embraced:

  * healthy incident management culture with postmortems

  * teams giving internal talks/writing blogs on biggest goof ups

  * coworkers buying you shit if they break something. Mind: this wasn't required, just something people did it because they felt bad. I've received many beers/whiskeys this way

• by logicalmonster on 2/9/23, 2:23 PM

  I'm not in the aviation industry or an aviation expert, but it seems like they have a really healthy approach towards viewing failures even though their failures can cost hundreds of lives and are far more impactful than some dumb bug in a dumb social media website.

  When something goes wrong in aviation, they don't seem to rush to blame the pilot or an individual engineer who coded or welded something badly.

  They look at the overall process and view it as a process failure.

  They look at the flight checklist requirements and see if there are are any ambiguities or gaps.

  They look at the manufacturing process and try and figure out if there are any better QA tests they can do.

  They look at the design of the plane and see if there's anything that might have been overlooked as a possible issue.

• by polonbike on 2/8/23, 4:53 PM

  In 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 french, we have a thing for breakfast and pain -bread)

• by phone8675309 on 2/8/23, 4:32 PM

  Usually passing the buck, playing the blame game, and most of all never changing anything and then being surprised, shocked, I mean, really shocked, that it keeps happening.

• by BryantD on 2/8/23, 5:57 PM

  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.

• by justin_oaks on 2/8/23, 5:43 PM

  I 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.

• by AnimalMuppet on 2/8/23, 6:17 PM

  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.

• by sodimel on 2/9/23, 8:02 AM

  We post a meme in our chat (this one: https://i.imgur.com/V54NdN0.png) every time there is a problem on prod, then we create an entry in our doc that explain the problem and how to resolve & prevent it.

• by Simon_O_Rourke on 2/8/23, 5:35 PM

  Used 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.

• by blablabla123 on 2/8/23, 5:22 PM

  At my past job yes, at the current one it's swept under the rug. I even know someone that got fired for doing an error. (edit: and actually most teams seem to struggle with a lot of technical debt)

• by giantg2 on 2/8/23, 4:59 PM

  "Do you celebrate failures at work?"

  I don't. But I'm sure my bosses celebrate my failures since it makes their decision of who to give a bad rating to very easy.

• by theflyingelvis on 2/8/23, 5:52 PM

  Why would anyone celebrate failure? Celebrating failure simply doesn’t make sense.

  Learning from failure makes complete sense, but not celebrating it.

• by giraffe_lady on 2/8/23, 4:53 PM

  Traditionally I embrace failure by taking a few weeks for my own hobbies before I start looking for a new job after they fire me.

• by Fatnino on 2/8/23, 7:32 PM

  We promote them to middle management.

• by whoomp12342 on 2/8/23, 5:15 PM

  with a pie to the face!

• by zabzonk on 2/8/23, 5:19 PM

  to be really honest, never had a failure at work. not boasting, simply never happened.

  oh no, i can remember. i once restarted a trading server process that could not easily be restarted once it crashed - crap code, not written by me, which caused quite a few problems. but that's about it.

• by johnea on 2/8/23, 4:32 PM

  This is trolling, right?

  Or maybe, you haven't ever worked in a real job?