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Comment by thefreeman | Hacker News Reader

Personally I agree. Mistakes happen, everyone has accidentally hit the wrong key at one point or another in their life. I was pretty surprised how seemingly fine he was with being fired. At the same time, I guess the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response, and it has been about 30 years since it happened.

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IMHO, firing someone who owns up to a keystroke mistake like that is wrong. Good managers fix the problem, weak managers fix blame.

Root cause analysis + countermeasure might have boiled down to "operator error due to shitty interface" + "we will tape a guard over F7 key, since it will never ever get fixed in software"

> the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response

That's a dangerous way of thinking. 9/11 was big enough that it required a response. Not sure if we'll ever reverse the airport security stupidity that was such a response.

This is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment may be entirely appropriate - one of your responsibilities is not to make such mistakes, you failed at it, you're fired.

I never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.

> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again.

Personal experience tells me this is not always true.

You're right, I shouldn't've used "never". But that mistake is an experience and people learn from mistakes. Now that person is less likely to make the mistake again.

I mean, the goal of the business is to create value / profit and find people who add value to your organization. Not to judge and suss out people who you discover are capable of making a mistake and saying "AHA! I FOUND YOU! You were an imposter all along not worthy of paying! Time to start from scratch again!"

>>> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again

This is a far-reaching conclusion. That assumes that a) no mistakes can be prevented before they happen for the first time and b) every mistake can be prevented after making it. The truth of either far from obvious. Moreover, it is routine in our culture that sever mistakes are punished - e.g. if you make a mistake of driving drunk and cause harm, you'd probably be punished, not lauded as model citizen since you'd never make the mistake again.

Moreover, if no punishment follows the mistake, why the mistake would not be repeated? What would be the motivation to avoid the repetition of the mistake - do you assume the sympathy for the co-workers would be enough? It is not always a sufficient motivator.

>>> It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.

That assumes employees are a fungible commodity, and if you pay the same money you always get the same one. This is not true - you can find employee which would be more attentive, or one with more experience.

If you believe that you can find an employee that is more attentive or with more experience, and you are not laying off your employees right now to find those better employees, what the hell is going on? Are you just hanging out, basically sitting there knowing you have suboptimal employees, and eagerly waiting for them to fuck up so you have an excuse to axe them? You know your employees are (dun dun dun) capable of mistakes but it's expensive to lay them off so you're watching like a hawk for when you get to upgrade them?

The key difference here to me is mistakes vs negligence. Employee makes a typo -> It's a mistake. Not severe, negligent incompetence. It's a learning experience. The company is worse off by firing that person who has experience

If someone is slacking off? Yeah, fire them, that's not a mistake, that's negligence. You email a colleague in another time zone asking for help and they ignore you because you didn't CC their manager? Yeah, fucking fire that person.

I mean, in fact we have an industry based around the fact that people make mistakes: it's called software testing. Should we be firing developers when they make a mistake (i.e. their code has more than zero bugs)? That would be ridiculous. You're not even punishing them in that case - they're going to use their current salary at your shop to leverage a higher salary at the new place they (effortlessly) land at, whereas you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire that mythical developer that you should have fired this guy for a year ago?

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