5 ms·

Just wondering - would the engineer who made the mistake be fired?

jaywalk 5y ago
How could anyone answer that question? We don't even know that an engineer made a mistake in the first place, much less what the mistake was and what led up to it.
tomelliott 5y ago
Nope: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa19/presentation/turner https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa19/presentation/turner
vthallam 5y ago
nope. an individual is never blamed for these sort of issues.
newobj 5y ago
The only person I've ever heard of being fired for an operational error was a principal networking engineer at Amazon who end-ran DNS policies and hand-edited a zone file. Somehow, the file got truncated. It brought down everything including the soft phones so people couldn't even spin up a phone-based conference call to deal with it. I think Amazon was down for several hours, with 8 digit losses. That was in the mid 2000's. Heard that person was fired but don't know for sure.
rainboiboi 5y ago
Thanks everyone for providing the insights, I have no ill-intention, just asking for curiosity sake.
yodon 5y ago
If a single person can cause the failure during the course of their normal tasks, it's not the fault of that person it's the fault of designers of the systems and processes used by that person.
aaomidi 5y ago
If they are then Facebook is worse than I thought.
baby 5y ago
That’s not the culture at facebook
- babuskov 5y ago
  "Move fast and break things". Yeah, it's exactly the opposite. The person should be promoted ;)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pc86 5y ago
What makes you think it was a mistake? What makes you think an engineer did it? Sometimes things just break and take time to fix.
YPPH 5y ago
This question doesn't deserve downvotes. While the answer is quite clearly in the negative (this will be a process failure, not a human failure), it looks as though it was asked in good faith, and might not be so obvious to those outside the industry. Vote buttons are not a substitute for proper responses to legitimate enquiry.
nicholasjon 5y ago
"Asking for a friend." I kid. If it were to come down to a single person, that's really a failure of the whole organization system and not of the individual. This apocryphal [1] punchline to the Jack Welch story also sums up how most orgs deal with this sort of thing: "I just spent a million dollars on your education - why would I fire you now?" [1]: http://www.nickmilton.com/2016/03/jack-welch-on-learning-from-failure.html http://www.nickmilton.com/2016/03/jack-welch-on-learning-fro...

How could anyone answer that question? We don't even know that an engineer made a mistake in the first place, much less what the mistake was and what led up to it.

tomelliott 5y ago

Nope: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa19/presentation/turner https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa19/presentation/turner

vthallam 5y ago

nope. an individual is never blamed for these sort of issues.

newobj 5y ago

The only person I've ever heard of being fired for an operational error was a principal networking engineer at Amazon who end-ran DNS policies and hand-edited a zone file. Somehow, the file got truncated. It brought down everything including the soft phones so people couldn't even spin up a phone-based conference call to deal with it. I think Amazon was down for several hours, with 8 digit losses. That was in the mid 2000's. Heard that person was fired but don't know for sure.

rainboiboi 5y ago

Thanks everyone for providing the insights, I have no ill-intention, just asking for curiosity sake.

yodon 5y ago

If a single person can cause the failure during the course of their normal tasks, it's not the fault of that person it's the fault of designers of the systems and processes used by that person.

aaomidi 5y ago

If they are then Facebook is worse than I thought.

baby 5y ago

That’s not the culture at facebook

babuskov 5y ago
"Move fast and break things". Yeah, it's exactly the opposite. The person should be promoted ;)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pc86 5y ago

What makes you think it was a mistake? What makes you think an engineer did it? Sometimes things just break and take time to fix.

YPPH 5y ago

This question doesn't deserve downvotes. While the answer is quite clearly in the negative (this will be a process failure, not a human failure), it looks as though it was asked in good faith, and might not be so obvious to those outside the industry. Vote buttons are not a substitute for proper responses to legitimate enquiry.

nicholasjon 5y ago

"Asking for a friend." I kid. If it were to come down to a single person, that's really a failure of the whole organization system and not of the individual. This apocryphal [1] punchline to the Jack Welch story also sums up how most orgs deal with this sort of thing: "I just spent a million dollars on your education - why would I fire you now?" [1]: http://www.nickmilton.com/2016/03/jack-welch-on-learning-from-failure.html http://www.nickmilton.com/2016/03/jack-welch-on-learning-fro...