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Comment by mewpmewp2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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