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Comment by thorax | Hacker News Reader

I agree that process can be a demoralizing effect, but I like to play devil's advocate.

An hour of Google's revenue lost from 14% of their customers costs them about $350,000 (judging roughly by Q109 revenue numbers). Had it been 100% of customers impacted during that hour (i.e. a bigger goof-up) they'd have lost ~$2.55 million.

If you had 9,000 engineers making 100k a year on average, they could each spend an hour every day on paranoid safeguard processes and only cost the company $308,000.

So is it worth investing in processes to avoid that? Absolutely. Even if they can't find a good way to automate this, it's hard to argue against protecting against that sort of loss of revenue however you can.

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It's incredibly myopic to say that an hour of downtime equals an hour of lost revenue. When my favorite takeout place has busy phone lines, I wait 5 minutes and then call back.

I wanted to search for something during the downtime, and I didn't go to Yahoo--I waited. They definitely lost revenue, but it is a ridiculous, baseless claim that everyone went somewhere else during the downtime. You have absolutely no data to make any such claim.

Furthermore, your calculated cost of an engineer's time is simplistic and inaccurate. It doesn't count the lost revenues from delaying the release of their work, and the reduced value of that money by gaining a lower time value for it (getting money earlier means more time to multiply it through investments and reinvestments).

And, even worse, you are comparing the DAILY costs of developer time (which you grossly underestimated) to something that happens, maybe, once or twice per decade.

It could cost them many millions--maybe even hundreds of millions or more--per year to implement such a policy.

That's why these mistakes happen--it is cheaper to fix the rare screw-up than to waste too much time checking everything, except for very few circumstances.

If you had 9,000 engineers making 100k a year on average, they could each spend an hour every day on paranoid safeguard processes and only cost the company $308,000.

Uhm, it's closer to $500k. Per day. So based on today's goof, which is presumably rare, with your batch of added paranoia they'd be still be out $150k for the day, and they'd be out $500k all of the days that there wasn't a colossal screwup.

You're 100% right. I picked a too outlandish number in my devil's advocating and back-of-the-napkin'd the engineering wrong. Sorry about that-- can't correct my comment anymore, unfortunately. You shoulda slammed me sooner. I can't see any rational reason to argue that way with those economics.

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