Comment by mattsolle
4 years ago
We all make mistakes but rarely at this scale. I hope whoever accidentally sent out the integration email to everyone doesn't get in trouble. I would hate for my dumb mistakes to be put on blast by hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
I often see "this person should be fired" etc in response to legitimate mistakes.. but that's massively undervaluing the mistake.
There's a pretty good chance the person who made such a mistake is less likely to repeat it or other mistakes than someone who hasn't yet had the experience. So at best you're just sending a more valuable employee to one of your competitors.
There's some gray area when it comes to making a poor judgement call to skip a well defined procedure or be lazy.. and some cases this doesn't apply to like intentional malice or a continued series of similar obviously avoidable mistakes.
On a related note im often frustrated when people play a blame game (even if one might be somewhat called for, in a way) instead of considering "human factors" and how to systematically avoid people being able to make such mistakes. Or refuse to accept a human factors style explanation and just say the person "should have known better" etc. The best high profile example was that hawaii missile alert that was supposed to be a test having an incredibly poor UI. But there are countless examples everywhere all the time. I often try to think about this a lot in my work.
How's the anecdote go... "Why would I fire him? I just spend $200,000 training him not to do this thing, he'll never make this mistake again!"
According to one source:
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
– Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM
Wasn’t it, “I just spent 1,000,000 on training there’s no way I could afford to fire you.”
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If someone can make these kinds of mistakes, IMHO it is usually not their fault and instead is the fault of the systems that failed to prevent it from happening.
It is still their fault -- they did something they shouldn't have done. But the mistake exposes a bigger problem in the underlying infra, which is a good thing.
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On the list of screw-ups I've seen, this is pretty benign. I'm sure not long after this happened, they either realized their mistake or a flaw on the system they were working with. No reprimand needed, maybe some joking criticism to ease the stress I'm sure they're feeling knowing some asshat manager might actually think this is terrible and do something stupid like fire them.
The worst side effect of this to HBO is probably the cost of some unnecessary customers calling customer service confused.
The other side effect is a non-trivial number of people probably reported email from HBO Max as SPAM to Gmail etc. Speaking of which--I got this and, while I subscribed to HBO on Comcast for a while, I've never been an HBO Max customer.
"Judge on instances of success, but patterns of failure"
Some successes are obvious luck (e.g. winning the lottery). Some failures are the obvious result of bad choices or are so egregious they don't warrant generosity (e.g. cheating on a spouse).
Surely HBO will be trending on twitter within the hour. The engineer should get a raise :)
A lot of confused users will mark the email as a spam though.
It would be interesting for the marketing team to check the related metrics before and after...
a bonus equivalent to earned media exposure definitely should be considered.
You would think there was some kind of thing in place to prevent an email like this.
There usually is, after you've done this the first time.
Only way there wouldn’t be is if this was a high level engineer who made this mistake (I hope.)”