meta comment and completely feeling based : sometimes it really seems like companies, politicians, bureaucracies, don't have a process for acknowledging mistakes and/or lack of knowledge (and/or are seemingly not allowed to).
Ah that's because at many companies if you make a mistake you are a mistake.
Which is BS tbh. Everyone makes mistakes.
I think with politicians and political appointees, it's a little different because that's very much a public trust. Nobody deserves to hold political office, they should instead be deserving of it by being ethical and having integrity.
Amen. And avoiding a culture of blame (taking inspiration from the NTSB) makes it much more straightforward to put systemic measures in place which reduce the impact of those mistakes. People still make mistakes at the same rate, but more mistakes get trapped and more negative outcomes can be avoided.
The vitriol of this discussion shows just how difficult it is to establish such a culture. People really want to see mistakes as evidence of moral inferiority.
This is very insightful. If you make a mistake = shameful, you probably aren't going to meaningfully decrease the number of mistakes made, but you will ensure that no one wants to admit they've made one.
And I guarantee anyone who's written code long enough has written plenty of footguns of their own.
I'd say that by talking about mistakes without blame, I think we actually avoid people making mistakes because folks can learn from other's mistakes, and see them as something they could just as easily do, and so internalize the lesson.
> Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize.
Yeah, it's always a tradeoff.
I worked at a non-tech fortune 500 for a few years and was able to see the inside of repair/warranty/disputes. These were very high ticket items and the brand was/is very highly regarded for after sales support.
In the employee handbook for repair support staff (the people communicating with clients about the status of their repair/claim) there was a passage similar to the below:
"Apologies MUST NOT acknowledge anything other than the customer's explicit feelings without written acknowledgment of fault from $MANAGER".
I asked a member of that team to decipher WTF that meant, and they showed me an example email. They were only allowed to apologise in the below way:
"Hi bob, we're sorry you feel our product is faulty".
I always found these weasel apologies infuriating in my personal life.
Yep that’s awful. The reason for that rule is probably legal. If your company is taken to court over damages resulting from a faulty product, a written acknowledgment of blame will probably make that worse for the company.
It’s still awful though. I would hesitate to do business with a company that doesn’t take any responsibility for their own products.
Right, so the company is saying "I will never acknowledge our mistakes because if I do we might have to fix them." or "I am trying to trick you into thinking I am apologizing even though I'm not".
That's more offensive and insulting and time-wasting than saying nothing.
More charitably, people have an instinctive tendency to bend over backwards to apologize for things they're not responsible for in the interest of cordial relations. This is good if you're casually trying to make friends, but bad if the other party might take you to court. Companies therefore very reasonably explicitly correct for this behaviour.
You're right about it being a tricky attempt at faking an apology.
But the below isn't correct:
> Right, so the company is saying "I will never acknowledge our mistakes because if I do we might have to fix them."
I probably didn't word it perfectly in my original comment, but the company did acknowledge mistakes quite often after assessments of the claimed faulty/broken/whatever product (roughly 30% of faulty claims were approved and either repaired or reimbursed from memory). The rejected claims were often taken to court (like 15%) due to the value of products.
I was mostly commenting on the deception of only allowing pseudo-apologies.
Well, this HN hate fest of a discussion certainly bears out that saying! The internet is a terrible place. You will get dragged mercilessly no matter what you do. The incentives are all towards sweeping mistakes under the rug.
There are at least some examples of startups choosing to apologize, and try to make things better in the future.
I think the real advice is “don’t say sorry unless you actually mean it.” People see right through that, because your actions and follow through won’t match your words. But people seem to appreciate sincere apologies that come with substantive corrective action.
