Hacker News Reader

Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

This. We all mess up, but only the best ones will deal with it professionally and learn from it. Sounds like the OP is in that group. He didn't try to hide it, blame it on anyone else, or make excuses. He just did what he could to fix his mistake.

When people say "making mistakes is unacceptable - imagine if doctors made mistakes" they ignore three facts:

1. Doctors do make mistakes. Lots of them. All the time.

2. Even an average doctor is paid an awful lot more than me.

3. Doctors have other people analysing where things can go wrong, and recommending fixes.

If you want fewer development mistakes, as a company you have to accept it will cost money and take more time. It's for a manager to decide where the optimal tradeoff exists.

View on HN

> If you want fewer development mistakes, as a company you have to accept it will cost money and take more time. It's for a manager to decide where the optimal tradeoff exists.

This is absolutely it, of course it is possible to become so risk averse that you never actually succeed in getting anything done and there are certainly organisations that suffer from that (usually larger ones).

However some people seem to take the view that it is impossible to protect oneself from all risks therefor it is pointless protecting from any of them.

The good news is that usually protecting against risks tends to get exponentially more expensive as you add "nines" therefor having a 99% guarantee against data loss is a lot cheaper than a 99.999% guarantee.

Having a cronjob that does a mysqldump of an entire database, emails some administrator and then does rsync to some other location (even just a dropbox folder) is something that is probably only a couple of hours work.

> We all mess up, but only the best ones will deal with it professionally and learn from it.

This. I don't regret my life's many failures. I regret the times I've flamed out, blamed others, or ran away.

Doing things means making mistakes. You can spot a professional by how they deal with mistakes.

The aviation industry is the same. Most aviation authorities around the world have a no-fault reporting system so that fixes can get implemented without pilots worrying about losing their job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com