The price of an error and its consequences on Google

    I heard this story in the first week of my summer internship in Google, when I became acquainted with the company. One experienced engineer told her whose name I now will not remember, nor will I remember the small details of history, for example, specific numbers. However, the message of this story is very important, and shows how “non-traditional” management methods can be quite productive. We are talking about a mistake worth several hundred thousand dollars, and its consequences.
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    An engineer (let's call him Mike) worked in Google for about ten years. This story happened to him a long time ago when he was at the origins of his career in the search giant. Now he often tells this story to recruits, like me, when they only come to the company.
    Without going into details and details, let’s say that it all started when Mike launched his code in production. Suddenly, analytical triggers sounded the alarm: Google (or rather, some of its departments) lost $ 70,000 every five minutes. Soon they reacted to the leak, and rolled back to the previous stable version. However, by that time several hundred thousand dollars had been lost. They began to find out what was the matter with the whole department. Mike checked his code and realized that the error was in it. His frustration knew no bounds: Mike knew that he would be fired, and perhaps they would demand compensation for negligence. Perhaps somewhere else they would have done so, but not in Google. Mike was not fired, Mike was not fined, Mike was asked to write a post-mortem - a statement of his mistake in order to save it for future generations, in the form of a warning: do not do it!

    Many of us, especially people with the Soviet mentality, would try to punish a negligent employee. However, there are a lot of advantages to Google’s unintuitive act:
    1. Expensive training
    Yes, Google lost under a million dollars. But look at it as the cost of training this employee. We have just given a million for his studies, for his mistake, which he, as an adequate and rational person, will never make again! This waste was an investment in his studies, and it would be foolish to dismiss this person, to give him to another company, after such an expensive training.
    2. Increasing loyalty
    Mike was really sorry that he made such an expensive oversight, and he was getting ready to be fired. The condescension of leadership could not but affect him to the core. By forgiving him and leaving him in Google, the company increased his loyalty and devotion. In Silicon Valley, where the turnover of good engineers is high, increasing loyalty is an important expense item.
    3. Internal marketing
    Mike every year from a high rostrum tells this story to Google recruits. And, since I write it here, many do not remain indifferent to it, and value the wisdom and generosity of their new employer even more.
    4. Correction of errors, instead of hiding them
    At the end of the story, Mike urges not to hide his mistakes, because this can only do harm. If one of us would make a mistake worth a million dollars, most of all we would like that no one would ever know that it was we who were guilty. However, Mike said: better say that you blundered, beat the bell, escalate this problem to the highest levels as quickly as possible - in order to quickly fix it. You will not be punished for a mistake - but they can be for falsehood, concealment and incompetence. The moral of this part of the story prompts Google’s new employees, indeed, not to hide their mistakes, but to solve and correct them together, if necessary.

    At the time of fixing the error, Google had already lost a large amount of money. It was probably no longer possible to return them. Instead of looking for the perpetrators and punishing, the management of the search giant did really Solomon. Take note.

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