Let there be more biographies of failures

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure).

They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (Allan McDonald).

I'd argue that all of these have immense value. The Allan McDonald story can be seen as both success/failure (failure to stop the launch, success for being right and standing firm on that belief). And while "pure failure biographies" related to engineering failures probably exist, I was able to come up with a number of examples while writing this comment for every other form of engineering failure that doesn't qualify, but couldn't think of a good example that does which I have seen/read. Many on business failures that focus on a CEO (and sometimes those CEOs are the engineer, but, again, nothing that wouldn't require reaching out to Google).

Thinking about it -- I'm glad about that. The kinds of "excellent essays and books about engineering failures" that you mention are the kinds of things I love to read. I wish there were more of them.

What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories: "I pulled up to the diner at 8:00 PM, the paint on the door was clearly done in another era; when this small part of (nowhereville) was an up-and-coming metropolis, and the place that Bob Thomas grew up and learned that hard work and determination can do anything. The "O" in the "Open" sign had failed long ago, leaving only "pen". It was a sign from the universe as I was here to write about the startup-to-empire-to-bankrupcy of ePens Custom Pens. Though I was a half-hour early, Bob was waiting for me, his hair and beard flowing together not knowing where one begins and the other ends. One can't help but being reminded of the race condition that would ultimately lead to the unraveling of the machine he'd spent his life building".

No thanks. Tell me what went wrong. Tell me what led up to the failure -- include technical details and process/technical/decision-making that led to the failure. I don't know the engineer and my interest is in the idea/technology, not the person. And I care even less about the guy writing about the person... :)

> and why each new generation will forget past lessons.

This is also a reason why open source is such a useful concept

The Brady Heywood podcast (https://www.bradyheywood.com.au/podcasts/) is great. It analyzes engineering failures, and is produced by a guy who's part of a forensic engineering consultancy.

The Apollo 13 series of episodes was gripping, and they're some of my favorite podcast episodes I've ever listened to. Way more technical detail about Apollo 13 than I had been exposed to before, along with amazing story telling. (Those episodes start here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/apollo-13-teaser/id115...)

I think the counter-point to this (Which you kind of bring up, "what to watch out for") is that success is often more about not losing than winning. So reading about other people's failures can be very helpful in ensuring you don't lose.

The other thing is that although a failure may be unique overall, there are undoubtedly common aspects among failures. So I feel like you can sift through a lot of failures relatively quickly once you find some of the common patterns.

For example, one of the most common failures of startups is no market for the product. Therefore, if you're researching a failed company and it seems like this is the case you can assume there will be little value in this failure and skip ahead.

Another possible technique following this line of thinking is to apply filters. If they failed before they reached x point, you can skip ahead.

Yes, it's right. Still, in some form, these should be valuable because they would help understanding what actually made a difference for the ones who did succeed. Because most of the time we just ask them (or they tell us without asking) how they did it. But they may have no idea whether what they think was the key actually was the key.

In short: it could help with removing (some of) the survivorship bias.

> it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it

I think the better way to look at it would be to look at ways that it could've been done better. Everyone's a genius and mastermind that knows exactly why a certain product fails ("if they only had know this") or that the "bubble was there all along". Learning what could've been done better is much better than success stories where people knew what to do from some divine inspiration.

This sounds adjacent to the Anna Karenina principle: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Biographies of failures are not the same as negative results in science. A negative result has value and it may not be as sexy as a positive result but should be published if not for anything more than to prevent other people from going down the same path or to add more data in meta studies. Also, negative or positive depends on how the original hypothesis is framed. One person could claim that X has no effect on Y as the null hypothesis, and another could claim that X has an effect on Y, and the same results would give a positive result for one, and negative for another.

> Was Nikola Tesla a failure?

He was a brilliant innovator that added value to the world. He was a failed entrepreneur that did not recapture part of the value he created. That makes him a huge success in my books but I wish he was more comfortable and content in his final years.

  > So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice.

Both are useful, yes. With no evidence, what-so-ever, my gut is that both are a lot less useful than we give them credit for. My Dad is a success by most of societies measures (and all of my own). A biography of his life couldn't possibly share enough advice to teach someone else to be successful. I could do it pretty easily: Work harder than you are capable of, then harder than that, and do so without a paycheck (but with a very large mortgage) for a few years while still managing to pay your employees. You'll be driving over to your office every 2.5 hours to change paper in your color printer to print paper catalogues (at 2:00 AM, 4:30 AM ...) so you won't be sleeping a lot the first few years, and you'll do so on the family-room floor because getting up and down all night long isn't going to work for Mom.

Meanwhile, once a month or so, have some crisis happen that threatens to shut the place down. Do this for several years until your customers -- all of whom have far less faith in your company continuing to exist (in a space where that's really important) -- are finally willing to send orders big enough your way for you to get any financial benefit from the work you're doing (and give most of it to your tireless staff who -- while paid on time every month -- went without raises for a long time and barely complained[0]). It was 90% struggle, 90% problems, solving one at a time, moving on to the next, and never getting overwhelmed. Unsurprisingly, he was also a very good small plane pilot (IFR/Weather and a mess of others; he flew multiple times/week often cross-country with a breathing mask hooked up to a tank due to the altitude and lack of pressurization on a Cherokee).

So basically my lesson was that in order to be successful, you have to suffer for a long time, work harder than you're capable of at the peek of your health, and if you can figure out all of the problems while still providing something your customers want, you'll be successful. The first two parts are almost always "minimum requirements" -- there is the occasional "lazy genius" and the more frequent "trust-fund successful", but if you're starting at 19 years old, newly married out of high school (no kids) doing construction, you're very unlikely to become wealthy without a lot of hard work (outside of the lottery/similar luck-related ventures that don't serve any educational value to the consumer). As irony would have it, the story of my Dad's life is one of the (smaller) reasons I chose to work for someone rather than run a business[1].

I think most of us watch/read these things more for the entertainment value. Perhaps I tell myself it's learning, but it's a mix of curiosity and voyeurism. But nobody has to tell me watching a biography about a successful person means "success is easy" or more common than failure. I've watched, participated in, read about or seen on TV nearly every form of failure there is. Thankfully the "participated in" category isn't as bad as it could be.

[0] It's hard to complain when the owner will pull crap out of a toilet with his bare hands before asking an employee to find a plunger, can and does do any job on the factory floor and seemingly lives at the place. There wasn't a menial task below him and he'd take it if someone could do the more important job better ... he was always a humble guy.

[1] I'm not afraid of hard work -- it was mostly about what he had to work on and knowledge (from a brief stint running my own business) that if I had to do that with the majority of my time, I'd be miserable. The products/services my Dad's business sold weren't "his life's passion" even though what he provided was extremely important to his customers and ultimately, anyone who drives a car. Running the business, managing the finances, and making "the machine" operate were his life's passions, so spending almost all of his time on finances/growing the business was what drove him.

On top of the survivorship bias I would add the fundamental attribution error, or a close cousin to it. Our stories about successful people tend to attribute their success to inherent qualities and under-emphasize the role of their environment, especially just getting lucky.

I think the important bit is to pay attention to what the successful do differently from common sense advice, not the bits that everyone follows. For example, Elon Musk's housing choices when traveling, Steve Jobs' higher education, Tesla's approaches to thinking.

Uh, you..failed at providing a clickable link. (Don't put spaces in front!)

If I understand, we are talking about a very narrow definition of success and failure here, professional success which is recognition, fame and riches? That seems to be a rare product of being lucky; where what you like doing and what you have an aptitude for, is exactly what's needed by the society in the field you're working in. Then you need to know the right people and be in the right place to get the recognition for it. All these things need to align, so it doesn't surprise me that these are rare events. And if you do happen to be one of the successful people it often deludes you to think it had something to do with YOU, rather than it mostly being a product of all the circumstantial things beyond you.

Not so many ways to _recover_ from failure and go on, though.

Reminds me of a quote from Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

There are categories of failure though. Those not only tell you where to look but give you starting points and substitutions.

Substitute one set of problems for a better known set, and go from there. When engineering figures out how to solve the less known set, then you can do something “new”.

Today you might solve liquefaction by running pillars to bedrock and then design for earthquake damage caused by being anchored to bedrock.

Some day you might use the Dutch trick of building houses that can float instead.

You can derive pattern though. You can learn about recuring weak links. And you can learn about solutions. Those are nice.

>The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail

Do you mean infinite ways in life? I’m trying to reconcile your statement as it would apply to a specific domain rather than something as broad as the scope of ones life.

Reliability engineering would tend to disagree with the above quote. For a specific engineering application there are a certain number of fault modes that can be ideally mitigated and quantified as a reliability risk. Good engineering practice documents these in the form of fault trees, failure mode effects analysis etc. Sure, unknown failure modes still may pop up, but to the point of the article, if they get discussed and documented they can be mitigated in future iterations. While maybe never reaching zero, over time the remaining unknown risks become smaller and smaller probability events.

You also need to read about failure to account for survivorship bias.

Eg, did some entity fail even though they were doing the same things as the successful entities?

If you detect that, then it's evidence that the techniques of the successful entities are no guarantee of success. That some other technique or factor or luck was the actual differentiator.

That's useful information when you're trying to decide what techniques of successful entities may be worth repurposing to your situation or not.

Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity"

Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail.

The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.

If you read these 13 stories of failed software products that I collected you'll see that they have quite a lot in common: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...

Also, hanging out on forums for software entrepreneurs, I see people making the same standard mistakes again and again.

I loved that show and think it finished rather than was cancelled.

But many of the folks I recommended it to, didn’t like it. Various reasons provided but I remember stuff like “depressing” and “failure” coming up a lot.

How is HACF bad entertainment? Greatest show ever IMO

That's honestly a heart wrenching story. Your bravery to write it as straight as you have is testament to you. You obviously cared a lot about the film and the people you worked with. That will go with you.

"The funniest book of the year." - Irish Times

Pile, Stephen. The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. 1980.

..I see he has a newer book published too:

Pile, Stephen. The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures. 2011.

Yes, the small treasure here is the story of Paul Otlet's ideas and work. The 'lessons learned', not so much.

It's a sound concept to learn lessons from the failures of others, even, and perhaps especially those others who otherwise excel in their field. However, as this piece shows, it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from singular biographies.

A better approach might be how failures are investigated, analyzed, and cataloged in various fields such as aviation and rock climbing. Those seemingly dry failure reports can make surprisingly fascinating reading, and the collections that bring them closer to data than anecdotes can provide powerful insights.

So, maybe some kind of Institute For The Study of Career Disasters? Not entirely joking, it'd be genuinely helpful to, for example, go beyond just the "90% of all small businesses fail in X years", and provide actual analyzed insight (not just more anecdotes) into what makes the difference between success and failure, and what failures have good prospects of successful restarting (i.e., their death was more likely just bad luck /Force Majeure vs pilot error)...

> "Do we need to be told that wild success is an outlier just because a few adults need instructions to operate Shampoo?).</rant>"

No, we need to be told that wild success is an outlier because there's a huge push for people to work ever-longer hours with the wild success stories dangled in front of them as the carrot. There's a huge chunk of people arguing and voting that suffering poor humans shouldn't be helped based on the simplistic idea that work -> success, therefore !sucess means !work, and !success is inherently shameful. Your father clearly worked hard to provide for his family, you also say that his passion was solving problems and organising the system, a passion you don't have - is "being born the right kind of person" not a kind of luck? Another commenter says their mother was an incredibly hardworking person until she got ill and couldn't. Is there no luck in your father's health staying good enough that he could do those sleep-interrupted-nights for years on end? You say in another comment "as if saying so implies that people who are unsuccessful /don't/ work hard" but if people who are unsuccessful also work hard, what is it that distinguishes them from Bezos if not luck? You could say it's the /type of hard work/ they do, and I'd partly agree and say that's a good reason to push back on the meme "work harder, work harder!". Would you say that Jeff Bezos worked 170x harder than your father, for example? Why does pointing out the role that luck plays diminish your father's life in your eyes so much that you're posting multiple times about it? Elon Musk didn't "luck-in" to running SpaceX by sitting around playing video games waiting for the world to discover him, but if you try and follow in his hard work footsteps by setting up an online bank you'll be somewhat stumped by it not being 1999 and you not having a father who owned an Emerald mine.[1]

I am someone who often does your "growing trend with hating on people who are successfull by dismissing their success as luck", but it's not hating on Bezos with a claim that he didn't work hard, it's hating on the idea that if everyone worked hard they could be Bezos. It's hating on the idea that Bezos is a superior person to all the people who worked hard and got nothing from it, more deserving of being in the spotlight. It's hating on the idea that Bezos earned all the money he controls through his hard work and dismissing the contribution of all the other Amazon employees to that wealth. It's hating on the way the media puts the materially successful person because it's easier to make a "top 100 richest people" list than a "top 100 contented people" list. It's hating on the implication that everyone should strive for material success and the way to achieve that is by working harder, even though for almost all employees working harder will not get them much more than burnout - even people who want to improve at something need to focus their practise on improving, not just churning harder and harder. Would you not say that your father's life would have been better if he'd achieved the same success with less work? Would you say he was less respectable if he'd achieved the same with less work?

I don't exactly encourage "not working hard" when I say these things, I more encourage that hard work should be on your own terms, for something you love the process of working on - as you describe your father was passionate about organising and solving problems. Hard work that you are forced into by circumstance and necessity is a worse kind of work than hard work you choose to do of your own free will, and is different again from that which society pressures you to do. Donald Knuth works hard on TAOCP, it's not done for vast financial success, it's very respectable nevertheless. A hospital pushes an ICU nurse into another 12 hour shift with too-few coworkers, while cutting back on staff to increase profits; that's respectable that the nurse endures it, but objectionable for the system to be exploiting in that way. Jiro Oni from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi - a lifetime of searching and striving hard for perfect sushi got him 3 Michelin stars and a family run restaurant which could seat a dozen people, and that's a far better kind of hard work and success than a 90 hour weeks striving to make partner at a law firm doing work you hate, because society told you that you don't matter unless you're visily suffering long-hours and own a McMansion. And society is telling us that, that the poor don't matter, that the rich and famous do matter, that the way to get higher social status is to sleep less and work more, that it's more respectable to stay 10 hours at work than to leave early to walk by the river. That it's intensely shameful to be unemployed. That your contribution at work isn't measured by the customers you please, but by the much easier to measure time you spent in the office. That it's awful to be part of a union which pushes for more pay for less work.

HN is a place of generally more educated people than average, doing work that's paid higher than average, and having more range of places to work than average, and there's still a continual trickle of comments saying "I could do much better work in less time if I could change ___ but the company doesn't want that, they want longer hours and people looking like they're suffering at crunch time". It's the orientation of life around work, the systemic pressure to treat employees as resources to extracted wealth from by working them harder and the corresponding messages for employees to align with that by seeing it as the only thing which is virtuous, which is objectionable. Not because of some "instructions to operate Shampoo"(???)

If working hard at a job you hate provides for your family, that's good on you, but it's not praiseworthy that that's how society is. It's the sacrifice for others which is respectable, not the lack of sleep or the Calories burned in themselves. If working less hard at something else brings you more money, that's not inherently bad because you aren't chasing material success and aren't working as hard as you can, there are other things than work.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came...

A good life is often a fine balance between pleasure risk taking, size of risk, and increase of good outcome/experiences.

If you work on things with a 5% chance of success but 1000x potential return, it absolutely makes sense to keep trying if you have the capacity to take on that much risk.

  > but it's a bad fetish

Thanks for that -- I couldn't agree more.

I read comments talking about how awful it is that there are success biographies and I can't help but feel pity half the time. Like it or not, if you go into something expecting failure, you might as well skip it. For a lot of folks, the "failure fetish" serves only to reinforce an attitude that "the reason they're (insert desire here) and I'm not is luck. The vast majority fail, so I shouldn't bother.". My Dad's attitude, to us kids, was to finish that of with ", but they're not me." But he had many, many failures along the way, he just addressed each problem and landed on the right decisions enough that his company continued to grow/establish itself until the scariest of those problems started to vanish.

Inwardly, my Dad's attitude was less certain, but still landed somewhere at "It's just another problem, I've solved the last several successfully, I can solve this one", but ultimately, he knew the totality of the risk he was taking -- outright bankruptcy, losing a really, really nice house, not to mention the emotional effects such a catastrophic failure to provide for your family would be. He didn't focus on the "worst-case scenario" (partly because every one of his problems had the same worst-case scenario), because your options are rarely that binary -- while it might be "fail to pay the bill and they cut off service" it's often "if I call before the bill is due, I can get another month or a partial payment will cover us" -- another problem created, but an improvement to having the lights shut off. When the engine fails in-flight, the choice is one of many, many bad options, but "an emergency landing at a different, nearby, airport" beats "setting her down in the clearing just after those trees". As much has he flew, there are tens of stories that should have ended with the plane creating a burning crater, but even when the engine cut out over Lake Michigan in the "you're swimming" zone, he managed to problem solve his way to an airport.

It really feels sometimes there's a plague of jealousy-masquerading-as-concern (or worse, Nanny-ism) -- it hasn't gotten terrible here compared to other forums, but it's everywhere these days. It's almost shun-worthy to imply that someone achieved success through hard work[0]. As if saying so implies that people who are unsuccessful don't work hard, or that working hard, alone, will only guarantee you'll be tired, that knowing your market/product and being a really good problem solver are as important and that even then, you're going to put up with a lot of external BS for the privilege of choosing how you want to make money. And if you want the privilege of offering work to someone, there's a whole lot more you're going to enjoy. If you ever make the mistake of implying that the person who worked so hard for said money deserves the money they took such risks/worked so hard for, well, good luck with that (oops).

[0] I even feel the need to bullet-point-out that "obviously that's not the only factor, it's just the only one that's going to work for you since Mom/Dad aren't paying your paycheck".

There’s bad failure and good failure. I try to find the “validated learning” in a failure and that helps me distinguish good from bad.

It’s funny when people talking about how great failing is and fetishizing it without getting the point that lots of failures are good because it gets you to success faster.

But big, stupid, so if failures that are repeated over and over should be a bad sign (eg, “I failed because all my co-workers are idiots” x10 is a really bad failure because it probably means I’m the idiot and aren’t getting better)

The very obvious answer is no, nobody should ever work so hard as to hurt their health.

I used to play a particular game of code golf with my co-workers. Basically write the most awful code you could. We would usually pick some rule for the start of the game that week to have a theme. Something like 'write a loop that finds a string' or 'make a case statement'. There were no real rules other than every language construct and library is on the table to do it and it had to fit on the whiteboard with everyone else. So for example you may be a C++ shop that avoids throw in all cases that you can. In this game you could use them.

It had a really interesting side effect. The code in the office that was checked in went up dramatically in quality. As we learned first hand what was 'bad code' and why.

We basically forced bad things just to have a bit of fun but accidently learned something while doing it.

It's out of print, but if you can get your hands on a used copy, Rob Trucks' Cup of Coffee might be right up your alley. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/476455.Cup_of_Coffee

as a basketball fan, i'm fascinated by the players barely hanging on to a roster spot on any given team. the storylines vary widely, from veteran there to teach the youngsters, to scrappy upstart who barely made the cut, to the sibling of a star player.

in the nba, these are guys who are literally better than 99.9999% of the planet, and yet, they often seem to be treated like hangers-on rather than some of the best.

You might really like this documentary on Netflix called "Losers" [1][2]

"Storyline

In a "winning is everything" society, how do we handle failure? This series profiles athletes who have turned the agony of defeat into human triumph."

[1] https://www.netflix.com/title/80198306

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9817218/

"Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." — Emerson, Self-Reliance

I think a lot of literature is normal people writing about their normal lives—except that they happen to be particularly good at writing. A Dutch example is the writer J.J. Voskuil who wrote 5000 pages about his live as an office employee—and quite a few people read it too! But there must be many more examples.

  > How about biographies of mediocre people?

I hear this from time to time and my own response to it is "that'd work about as well as a reality show based on your life".

I think it's the best way to put it: A biography and reality TV cherry pick the most interesting parts of a person's life. I have had some interesting things happen to me -- some would fit well in a Reality TV show, others would fit well in a biography of successes (the failures fitting into the Reality TV space). We're not interested in biographies about average people -- yes, average people always have a few stories that are worth hearing/sharing, but rarely have a life that is so filled with stories as to warrant someone else to want to catalogue them. Much like if you put a bunch of cameras in my house and filmed for a year you might end up with minutes of Reality TV worthy entertainment, if you did a biography of a mediocre person, you'd have no market (itself, mediocre). Heck, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the time spent awake in the most interesting peoples' lives ends up being pretty mediocre, so it's something everyone has knowledge of/experience with and probably not something worthy of "fun time".

Aside from nobody wanting to buy it, it'd be hard to give away. Of the various reasons I have for reading and writing, using that skill to "do something I experience with the vast majority of my existence -- reading mail, preparing food, writing boier-plate, fixing various broken thing around the house -- and something, at that, which I don't particularly enjoy" is going to land very low on a long to-do list :) My house will become self-aware before I get to that task.

Most startups fail because they are too early.