[supriyo-biswas]

The language is just so anodyne and there’s just that bit of implausible detail in the story (approaching the CEO yourself when you’re the one who fucked up, also how parent claims to be a “top performer” and “I made my company lose millions” at the same time) makes me think this comment was written by an LLM, or at least a fabrication.

[hutzlibu]

The suspicious part for me would be the CEO laughing like it was nothing. Also yes, one would expect it goes the other way around, when you messed up big, someone will come to you. But the world is big and maybe it happened like this.

[mango7283]

Surely this is a variation of this anecdote attributed to IBM's Watson

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419313

"> A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, “I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me.” Watson was said to have replied,

> “Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.” [1]"

[creshal]

A variant is in From the Earth to the Moon, where a junior engineer at Grumman confesses messing up vital calculations for the Lunar Lander to his boss, and finishes with "So… I guess I'll go clean out my desk." "What for?" "I figure you're gonna fire me now."

The boss's response makes a lot more sense than the usual fluff, though: "If I fire you now, the next guy to make a mistake won't admit it and we won't find out about it until it's too late."

[hutzlibu]

I wonder how much of those stories are rather wishful thinking of how it should work and not how it does work, when a major screw up happened and some heads need to roll for the sake of it.

[numpad0]

I wonder how would the boss explain it to his bosses/shareholders. Was that totally a known possible outcome that merely surfaced by chance and subsequently handled without issues under his leadership, or...?

[creshal]

Apollo was very much pushing the envelope of bleeding edge technology, while the bosses were probably not too happy, it was far from the only occurrence, and didn't threaten the contract.

[hutzlibu]

Thanks, I knew I heard that story somewhere before. (but I would not rule it out, that recent CEOs heard and learned from that episode as well)

[xp84]

In the context of “suspected AI” I at first thought you meant a different Watson!

[me_me_me]

Story is real or not aside, why would you not laugh it off? At that stage nothing can be changed, money was lost and bug was fixed. You can only look forward and plan for the future and the guy is going to be paranoid in the future deployments to make sure not to fuck up again.

[hutzlibu]

In general yes, and people with enough Zen can do this. But if also the CEO is looking forward to hear from the board and the investors to explain the incident, he might not be in the mood to laugh.

[Thorrez]

Has it been edited? I don't see "top performer".

[chrz]

Also airlines doesnt sell millions of $ in tickets every day

[defrost]

The quote was:

> That website sold millions of euros worth of tickets every day.

The claim wasn't that a single airline sold a million dollars per day, but that a third party on seller sold a million euros worth of tickets a day.

Is that plausible?

Consider The City in the Sky:

    Every day 100,000 flights criss-cross the globe with more than 1 million people in the air at any one time. Dallas Campbell and Dr Hannah Fry explore the world of aviation.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5820022/

At any instance there are one million people aloft.

At any instance there's at least 50 million dollars worth of ticket sales in play - how much during a 24 hour day would you estimate?

Is it possible for a single third party seller to capture a million euro per day?

[belter]

A CEO at the office and not in the golf course...that gives it away....

[Salgat]

That story has been repeated in some form for as long as I was alive.