Fuckup Nights – Series of events where stories of failure are shared | Hacker News Reader

Fuckup Nights – Series of events where stories of failure are shared

en.fuckupnights.com

78 pointscapableweb38 comments

i used to run a session at foo camp called “that sucked” back in the day. people would share stories, and i’d try to do a root cause analysis and tally all the problems. often the root cause leaders were “databases”, “unicode” and “that guy”

a quick article i wrote at the time: http://joshua.schachter.org/2006/08/that-sucked

and here’s someone else’s recollection of one, starring PG. https://scottberkun.com/2006/report-from-foo-camp-06-foocamp...

Yeah... I'll pass on paying $480/year to fuckup my own city; we've been doing it for free for years.

But there are: "*Payment options available" :-D

Looks like a great series. The sweary branding is an interesting choice. I run a few email newsletters for different professional audiences, and I’ve been surprised how many people don’t like swear words in business content.

People have reacted negatively when we include any strong “effing and jeffing”, as my grandmother used to put it.

As I get older (I’m 40) it certainly makes me cringe a bit.

I wonder what the pros and cons are of a sweary brand.

I, probably like a lot of people, will curse under my breath when figuring out a problem, or coding in general.

I try to keep it clean for professional discussions. Definitely customer facing, but still mostly so for internal discussion.

Probably a lot of people curse under their breath at work during problem triage. Thus, it comes off to me as being more legitimate being sweary.

Sharing failures is going against the grain. Not generally seen as professionally acceptable.

Maybe that’s why this particular event series has a swear word in its name. That is going against the grain too.

idk it feels like a boss sitting on a chair backwards. it is such a superficial signal.

It can easily turn into that. I also don't like it when the CEO of a well-known spacecraft manufacturer does it for a cheap laugh.

In the case of Fuckup Nights, to me it feels like it is just inviting friendly banter. To share something that's generally seen as shameful requires us to let our guard down and be less serious about ourselves.

totally reasonable

I have never liked profanity in any context. Like I don't care about how anyone else talks, but it has always seemed like a lazy choice. There are better ways to get surprise or anger or rebellion across IMO than just using the same 7 words you're not "supposed" to say.

Profanity IME is usually in-group signalling.

Have there not been studies that show that use of strong language in professional contexts is a successful of reducing work stress and increasing trust?

It's weird to make a list of words that are banned simply because they succintly convey honest strong emotions.

But some companies won't hire because of lower class accents (like what historically has occurred in the UK.), so it's not surprising that people have disqualifiers around language that signal status outside of the persons merit and work.

The policy seems arbitrary and in need of first principle justification, it seems like this word policing has an external agenda/root cause that is seperate from being passionate about solving a companies core problem.

It needs a proper defense in the face of research indicating it has a net positive impact.

... and as if posh people don't swear!

It can be useful when you want to turn it up to 11

I wonder if the branding is inspired by existing sites such as https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/ or https://thedailywtf.com/

1) Reminds me of fuckedcompany.com and the proprietor, pud

2) I think they're carving out signing up for this from your work account... you should sign up for it from your personal account. Also, if you're that conservative about it, you're probably not the audience for participation or attending.

3) Loosen up, get radically honest, have a laugh.

Alone with my crush as a teenager when she wanted to show me her brand new underwear. She did and I said it looked nice and left it at that.

I didn't take the hint until 5 years later when she verbally berated me for being daft.

I do consider that a significant failure in my life.

If you're sad about the missed opportunity for sex, console yourself in that it's never as good as your imagination, unless your imagination is pretty poor. (Insert obvious "then you're doing it wrong" retort.)

On the other hand, missed opportunities for long-term relationships are tough.

I think the “shock factor” of the name can be good branding, but I would guess it eventually limits reach in general.

There may be some inherent filtering of the audience intended there. I suspect there's a correlation between someone's inability to deal with the word "fuck" being used in branding with their unlikely acceptance and support of other people's mistakes.

Or more widely, how they would treat an alcohol filed night out of casual chatting about fuckups. Branding might actually help improve the product.

If the cost of a more colorful world is alienating some who prefer a beige, padded room, then I think that it's absolutely worth it.

Must everything be subject to such extremes these days?

I wonder how to find a list of all cities where these events are running, not just upcoming ones. There's a distinct lack of live events and tech culture here in the Bay Area. I'm not fucked-up/well-connected enough to organize one of these, but would gladly help with one.

They should add geolocation to the fuckups. That is not where either Montreal or Gatineau are haha

I suspect it's the conflict between where the actual even organizer is, and the "region" they're covering (the 'license' from the site means that there can only be one 'fuckupper' per city).

Yes, that map is something else -- apparently, London is now somewhere in the North Sea off Norwich, while Amsterdam has relocated to a suburb of Hamburg.

Continuing the weirdness, neither of those locations actually seems to have any events nor any semblance of a 'local team' associated with it.

So, impressive dedication to the 'fuckup' theme, or speculative spam? Tune in for next week's episode...

I tried to sign up to the newsletter. I was reading the site in English, but it offered me two(mandatory) choices of email language, Spanish or Espanol!

Oof. That full page carousel is HARSH. Having a time limit to read the page that I'm on? No thanks.

At least it's on-brand.

Has this been a thing for years and is just returning, or something? Could swear I went to one of these in Tokyo some years ago.

Was fun, I definitely miss these kinds of events.

Yep

The intro (video) says it started in 2012.

Minor point, but I looked at the map to see if my city (London) was there, saw a pin around York, and moused over it to see that it was in-fact London.

saw that too. It's a fuckup.

looks like all the pins are shifted east a hundred ish miles to me

Oh, I have a lot of fun stories from the trenches. Too bad nothing near me. Would love to do this remotely.

I want this as a social media platform - in the same vein as BeReal

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