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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Is there a word for that feeling of relief when someone else fucked up after initially thinking it was you?

What’s funny is as I get older this feeling of relief turns more like a feeling of dread. The nice thing about problems that you cause is that you have considerable autonomy to fix them. Cloudflare goes down you’re sitting and waiting for a 3 party to fix something.

Why is it dread? I always feel good when big players mess up, as it makes me feel better about my own mess ups in life previously.

Because my customers don’t (and shouldn’t care) it’s a third party. If I caused it there is a chance I can fix it.

If customers expected third party downtime to not affect their thing then you shouldn't have picked a third party provider or spent extra resources on not having a single point of failure? If they were happy with choosing the third party with knowledge of depending on said third party provider, then it was an accepted risk.

So you would rather be incompetent than powerless? Choice of third party vendor on client facing services is still on you, so maybe you prefer your incompetence be more direct and tangible?

Even still, you should have policies in place to mitigate such eventualities, that way you can focus the incompetence into systematic issues instead. The larger the company, the less acceptable these failures become. Lessons learned is a better excuse for a shake and break startup than an established player that can pay to be secure.

At some point, the finger has to be pointed. Personally, I don't dread it pointing elsewhere. Just means I've done my due D and C.

Your priority (in this comment atleast) is about the finger-pointing, while the parent's priority is wanting a fix to the issue at hand.

Can’t speak for GP but ultimately I’d rather it be my fault or my company’s fault so I have something I can directly do for my customers who can’t use our software. The sense of dread isn’t about failure but feeling empathy for others who might not make payroll on time or whatever because my service that they rely on is down. And the second order effects, like some employee of a customer being unable to make rent or be forced to take out a short term loan or whatever. The fallout from something like this can have an unexpected human cost at times. Thankfully it’s Tuesday, not a critical payroll day for most employees.

But why does this case specifically matter? What if their system was down due to their WiFi or other layers beyond your software? Would you feel the same as well?

What about all the other systems and people suffering elsewhere in the World?

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Are you suggesting that if I can't feel empathy for everybody at once, or in every one of their circumstances, that I should not feel anything at all for anyone? That's not how anything works. Life (or, as I believe, God) brings us into contact with all kinds of people experiencing different levels of joy and pain. It's natural to empathize with the people you're around, whatever they're feeling. Don't over-complicate it.

When others cause problems then you can put your feet up and surf the web waiting for resolution. Oh, wait.

The problem is, I still get the wrong end of the stick when AWS or CF go down! Management doesn't care, understandably. They just want the money to keep coming in. It's hard to convince them that this is a pretty big problem. The only thing that will calm them down a bit is to tell them Twitter is also down. If that doesn't get them, I say ChatGPT is also down. Now NOBODY will get any work done! lol.

Who decided to go with AWS of CF? If its a management decision tell them you need the resources to have a fallback if they want their system to be more reliable than AWS or CF.

Haha yeah I just got off the phone and I said, look, either this gets fixed soon or there's going to be news headlines with photographs of giant queues of people milling around in airports.

Every time a major cloud goes down, management tells us why don't we have a backup service that we can switch to. Then I tell them that a bunch of services worth a lot more than us are also down. Do you really want to spend the insane amount of resources to make sure our service stays up when the global internet is down?

Having an alt to Cloudflare isn’t preposterous.

This is why you ALWAYS have a proposal ready. I literally had my ass saved by having tickets with reliability/redundancy work clearly laid out with comments by out of touch product/people managers deprioritizing the work after attempts to pull it off the backlog (in one infamous case for a notoriously poorly conceived and expensive failure of a project that haunted us again with lost opportunity cost).

The hilarious part of the whole story is that the same PMs and product managers were (and I cannot overemphasize this enough) absolutely militant orthodox agile practitioners with jira.

When I'm debugging something, I'm not usually looking for the solution to the problem; I'm looking for sufficient evidence that I didn't cause the problem. Once I have that, the velocity at which I work slows down

My manager once asked if he could have a "quick word". I said "velocity".

phewphoria

Yup, that works.

Well, at least something good came out of this incident.

Perfect.

it has to sound like a german word though

Is there a word for a feeling that there's gotta be a German word for this niche feeling?

Probably Deutschwortsehnsucht (https://www.iamexpat.de/education/education-news/german-word...)

You mean like when the Wortzusammensetzungsverdacht just hits you? (yeah, I just made that up, that's the beauty)

puhphorie

Entlastungvergnugen?

Fremdverfehlungserleichterung?

Maybe this isn’t great, but I get a hint of that feeling when I’m on an airplane and hear a baby crying. For a number of years, if I heard a baby crying, it was probably my baby and I had to deal with it. But now my kids are past that phase, so when I hear the crying, after that initial jolt of panic I realize that it isn’t my problem, and that does give me the warm fuzzies. Even though I do feel bad for the baby and their parents.

Related situation: you're at a family gathering and everyone has young kids running around. You hear a thump, and then some kid starts screaming. Conversation stops and every parent keenly listens to the screams to try and figure out whose kid just got hurt, then some other parent jumps up - it's not your kid! #phewphoria

You're not alone in this feeling. I occasionally smile when it's not my kid.

This is one of the secret joys of being a parent.

The German word “schadenfreude” means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune; enjoyment rather than relief.

since schaden is damage and freude is joy, not sure what it should be - maybe Schadeleichtig hmm...

>maybe Schadeleichtig

Maybe "Erleichterung" (relief)? But as a German "Schadenserleichterung" (also: notice the "s" between both compound word parts) rather sounds like a reduction of damage (since "Erleichterung" also means mitigation or alleviation).

right I thought of that at first and discarded it for that reason. Which the problem really is that the normal story of how Schadenfreude works as a bit of German language how to is that the component that it is other people's damage that is sparking joy is missing from the word itself, that interpretation must be known by the word user, if you were just creating the word and nobody had heard it before in the world it would be pretty reasonable for people to think you had just created a new word for masochism.

Schadenfriend?

You gain relief, but you don't exactly derive pleasure as it's someone you know that's getting the ass end of the deal

It's close enough to Schadenfreude but not really.

Schadenfreude

Not quite, that’s more like taking pleasure in the misfortune of someone else. It’s close, but the specific relief bit that it is not _your_ misfortune is not captured

Internettet er vist ikke så stort :-)

Fætter! Hvor genialt at se dig her. :)

Nah, that's delight in someone else's misfortune. This is delight that the misfortune wasn't yours, which is slightly different.

4 years of German and I still don't quite "get" it :^) TY!

We have a saying:

You know how you measure eternity?

When you finish learning German.

Katastrophenverursachererleichterung

Katastrophenverursacherverlagerungserleichterung

Even better

vindication?

schadenfuckup

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