What if...? CrowdStrike

Hi,

What if…? I must have read this sentence hundreds of times in the last few days regarding the CrowdStrike outage. Everywhere, people are looking for someone to blame. And that is wrong!

We are witnessing the classic blame game. It is more important to find someone to blame than to solve the problem. This only fosters fear.

An employee of Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, once made a mistake that cost the company ten million dollars. When the man was called into Watson’s office, he was sure he would be fired. To his surprise, his boss said: “Fire you? Not after I just invested ten million dollars in your education.” ~ The Winners Laws by Bodo Schäfer (translated from German edition)

Mistakes help us learn. And we should not be afraid of them. Our task is to create an environment that makes it easy to correct mistakes.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Resilience, Test Automation, Agile Software Development. These are the buzzwords that have been recited for years. And it is precisely with these that we achieve such an environment.

We cannot prevent mistakes anyway. So why don’t we make it easy to correct them?

P.S. The Winners Laws by Bodo Schäfer is great to listen to as an audiobook while jogging 😉

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus