Once upon a time there was a startup, and the president of this startup, like a lot of people in the early part of the 21st century, celebrated failure — as a learning tool and as a precursor to success.
He encouraged employees to celebrate failures on the company Slack channel, using the hashtag #fail.
Legend has it that the president called one employee on the carpet for suggesting on the Slack channel that it doesn’t make sense to celebrate failure without factoring in the cost of failure.
That is simply a truism, is it not? Obviously the value of failure can be swamped out by the cost, e.g.,
Blew up 7 astronauts but learned that O-rings don’t function in sub-freezing temperatures. #fail
You can think of other examples yourself. You can probably also think of people and/or companies for whom failure was merely a precursor to more failure.
Working for startups is risky, but the president of this startup told all the employees that he would give them a six-month heads-up if the company were ever on track to run out of money.
Then one day, due to the failure to retain a key client, the staff was cut to around 15 people (there were close to 100 at one time) with zero notice and a one week’s severance check.
You could make a case that the “six-month” promise didn’t apply because the company didn’t actually “run out of money,” but most people felt that the spirit of the promise, if not the letter, had been violated.
Was this a failure to be celebrated? It probably depends from which side of the exit door you’re looking at it. Sometimes a pivot looks a lot like an implosion.
Was it celebrated with a #fail hashtag in the company Slack channel? I don’t know.
Lost our key client. Laid off all developers but kept the company chef. #fail
This is a fable and like all fables it has a moral: Failure is good, except when it’s bad.
Resemblance to persons or companies living or dead would be a coincidence.
Thus spoke The Programmer.