Firing people for bad architectural
decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years.
This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to where they are.
Related: the classic line commonly attributed to original IBM CEO Thomas John Watson Sr:
“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?”
I agree. It is a lot of money, but that's the hope from paying engineers well: to make the chances of very expensive mistakes unlikely.
One thing I did think about was how this could have been architected without sufficient reference to costs, which might have been a process or structure improvement.
colinbartlett•1m ago
A single engineer should not get fired for an architectural decision that clearly had buy in from many people.
simonw•4m ago
This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to where they are.
Related: the classic line commonly attributed to original IBM CEO Thomas John Watson Sr:
“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?”
https://blog.4psa.com/quote-day-thomas-john-watson-sr-ibm/
robertlagrant•1m ago
One thing I did think about was how this could have been architected without sufficient reference to costs, which might have been a process or structure improvement.