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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Only with a healthy dose of cynicism I can understand where he's going. While the topic of accountability sinks is quite interesting, I'm searching for the author's reflection of their own accountability.

They worked at google, made a boatload of money for the advertising company and himself, and now philosophically lectures others how to detect and/or design accountability sinks.

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So the author gives what, 10 examples, and one of them is about himself and his own experiences, and one of them is from a hospital.

And from that you convey that the author must have some kind of ego? I don't think that's justified critique.

The word "hero" is mentioned twice in the whole article. Once in the section before he talks about his own work, and once in the section directly following it.

> As one of the commenters noted: "Amazing! The guy broke every possible rule. If he wasn't a fucking hero, he would be fired on the spot."

> **

> Once, I used to work as an SRE for Gmail. SREs are people responsible for the site being up and running. If there's a problem, you get alerted and it's up to you to fix it, whatever it takes.

I only know Mr. Sustrik from this one article but had to mention this because it was just a too low hanging fruit in terms of criticism.

Not to mention, he has awareness of the ways people absolved themselves of responsibility during the holocaust, but fails to take accountability for his work at a company supporting an ongoing genocide (whether or not he had any involvement with Project Lavender)

Frankly, if the author has Google-style FU money and can find no better way than this to spend that and his time alike, ego isn't the first of his faculties I see cause to question.

Doesn't surprise me to learn he's big on LW, though. A bloodless, passionless dork who mistakes dollars for IQ points and of whom it's not obvious he ever had an original thought? He might have been made in a lab for those sad nerd wannabes to identify with.

> The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems

That's a horrible take. He did nothing of that sort. He didn't say anything about his skills, nor did he say anything about improving Gmail postmortems. You made everything up. He was just mentioning the fact that in this case, limited accountability when handling emergencies has strong benefits.

> he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Isn’t this the practice we do to sell ourselves during interview about quantifying our work and value?

I firmly believe that the author is the perfect interview candidate who will pass an engineering interview with flying colors. For rest of us, “so erm… I fixed a bug which allowed my employer to scale quicker globally during natural disasters and erm… allow emergency response teams to coordinate. My manager tells me it saves billions of life but I do not have access to actual numbers but the number of promotion each of my managers get when I fix a bug tells me, my contribution has good values”.

P.S. Off-topic.

I think it's firmly on-topic as the author clearly suffers from delusions of grandeur which causes them to greatly overestimate the impact of their actions, leading them to flawed conclusions about accountability.

Maybe he thinks it's too early to get sued over a blog-- he's only just got to the HN frontpage for the first time this year?

Subtext of his previous blogpost:

Capitalism is powered by greed.

https://250bpm.substack.com/p/per-tribalismum-ad-astra

EDIT: another post of his that got traction ~5 yrs ago was about the Swiss political system (Swiss are a pragmatic culture though afaik he's Slovak so we might have to account for some Iron Curtain baggage)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881309

Maybe he quit google after 6 months, I don't know. It's easy to talk about greedy capitalism once you've made it. It's a bit harder to live by these kind of ideals for the whole duration of your career.

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