[mulmen]

Eh, that’s a really strange way to phrase it. Singling out the engineer isn’t blameless. Sure it’s a learning opportunity but it’s a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn’t be able to take the site down. I have always thought of those situations as “failing together.”

[bheadmaster]

> Singling out the engineer isn't blameless.

Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do.

> Sure it's a learning opportunity but it's a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn't be able to take the site down.

The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerberg said.

[latexr]

> Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do.

What you’re describing isn’t blamlessness, it’s forgiveness. It’s still putting the blame on someone but not punishing them for it (except making them feel worse by pointing it out). Blamelessness would be not singling them out in any way, treating the event as if no one person had caused it.

> The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerberg said.

Allegedly. Let’s also keep in mind we only have a rumour as the source of this story. It’s more likely that it never happened and this is a recounting of the Thomas Watson quote in other comments.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

> But we don’t assign blame during these sorts of events, so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again.

It's the latter half of the sentence that makes it blameless. Zuckerberg is very clearly saying the problem is that it was allowed at all.

sometimes the root cause is someone fucking up, if you're not willing to attribute the root cause to someone making a mistake then being blameless is far less useful.

[mulmen]

In a blameless culture there is no one person responsible.

It should not have been possible for one person to take the site down. There should have been controls in place to prevent it.

There shouldn’t even be someone that “everyone knows” is responsible, because by definition that’s impossible.

[manojlds]

What part of "so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again" doesn't mean that it's happened, but let's see how we get there.

"It should not have been possible for one person to take the site down" - yes, and that's exactly what Zuck is addressing here? May be such controls are there across the development teams and some SRE did something to bring it down and now there needs to be even better controls in that department as well?

[mulmen]

As told this is clearly not a Zuck quote because it’s shitty leadership. There’s no way Facebook got where it is with such incompetence. This is clearly a mistelling of older more coherent anecdotes.

[jacquesm]

Not really. If you single someone out as CEO that's a punishment. Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again. He should have left it with the engineer's line manager to make that comment, if at all because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already.

You did something well, but we made mistakes.

[DiggyJohnson]

> because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already.

The employee did not know that the CEO would be so forgiving. And it helps set that culture as other's here about the incidence and response.

Also, why is this so important? If your punishment for bringing down Facebook is your boss' boss telling you "Hey even if this is a serious mistake, I don't want you to worry that you're going to be out of a job. Consider this a learning opportunity," than that seems more than fair to me.

Why worry about being so sensitive?

[bheadmaster]

> Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again.

The person being told that may feel that way, but IMO nothing from his phrasing implies that:

    "let's just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can't happen again"

Note the "can't" in the "can't happen again" - he isn't telling the employee "don't you dare do that again!" as you seem to be saying, he's saying "let's all figure out how to protect our systems from such mistakes".

[manojlds]

Strange way to describe the same situation and Zuck's thrust there in different words. Zuck is literally saying "failing together" and "learning together".

[hkon]

It's typically said to everyone at an all-hands meeting or similar, not to a single person.

Delivering such a message personally to an individual is also sending another message.

[manojlds]

It depends on the culture of the company.

[hkon]

No

[DiggyJohnson]

Please abide by the HN guidelines, as well as common sense.