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by jacquesm 879 days ago
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.

2 comments

> 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?

> 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".