Stop Saying “Fail”

The biggest problem I have with a typical use of "fail" today is when it's applied to some software or startup that A) effectively solved a problem and B) had many, many customers, but just didn't make enough money, or didn't become astoundingly popular.

Using "fail" in those cases totally discounts the engineering work which was definitely successful.

But more generally, it's just completely the wrong mindset. How far could you go with web development, for example, if you declared a failure any time your CSS made a really weird layout and you had to type some more into your editor?

Problem solvers like programmers are constantly running into things that don't work. You don't say "I failed, but that's okay, I will pick myself up tomorrow and fail forward. This will be a learning moment. Let me call my mom and tell her about it". Instead, you immediately start diagnosing the problem without a second thought.

This is literally an article espousing the joke "when at first you don't succeed, redefine failure."

This is well across the threshold for toxic positivity and into "participation trophy" territory. We're supposed to distance ourselves from things that don't work. We use harsh language to demonize it for a reason.

Here's another concept: shit. Fecal matter is unsanitary. We don't use "positive" words like "nutrient log" or "brown paint" to describe it; we refer to it using the nastiest verbiage imaginable so people don't think to paint with it or eat it-- it's unclean, it's dirty, stay away from it, bury it, leave it behind. We don't celebrate our own shit. It is waste, to be discarded. Can you do analysis on it? Sure. Should you dwell on it? Maybe, if there's blood. Reframing it as anything other than shit leads down a very lonely road.

Same with failures. They are a byproduct. They are a neon sign that says "GO A DIFFERENT WAY." It signals "this is shit." It's great that you're still alive enough to learn from your unit test, but it still failed. The expected conditions were not met. There is no "spectrum," you either solved the problem or you didn't-- anything else is a con-artist trying to mask a failure by questioning what success means ("well, I didn't really fail, I'm just reimagining the problem").

In some cases the final aspect of "fail" can be useful to prevent further investment in a dead-end. e.g. failing to make a perpetual motion machine. I would not use it to describe people but rather the specific solution/method being investigated.

I think the most important thing is one's own mindset. I don't know how much 'fail' is in my vocabulary, but it's very hard to recall times when I completely ran out of options when working on a problem--usually I run out of time, start working on something more pressing, or the problem becomes less of a concern.

If you're not failing you're not trying hard enough.

Personally I don't associate it with the negative connotations you do. I associate it with the word trying.

terminology like this is retained to keep the working person down