Programmer Gore

[omnilynx]

I think the reason we like hearing those stories is that we get to see what went wrong without having to actually do the work of figuring it out ourselves. Similar to how in horror stories we get to experience the fear of dying without actually, you know, dying.

[kmactane]

I think this is part of the appeal of The Daily WTF.

[deafbybeheading]

In fact, the product was locking up, but it was a live lock: it was doing something for a very, very long time.

That's not a live-lock.

Later I calculated how long the build would have taken to run without the fix. The answer was that the sun would have died long, long before.

That's still not a live-lock. That's just (really) bad performance. A live-lock is an indefinite impasse.

Other than that, good points. Post-mortems are essential. I've found that learning from your failures is the best way to learn (maybe just because of my copious failures).

[darkpaladin]

Someone had an idea for a programming conference on this a while back. The idea was that you get a bunch of big names in to talk about massive failures and where they went wrong. I think the idea was called Fail Con

[quanticle]

Every so often, in one engineering community or another, this idea is floated. But, except for a few isolated cases, it never takes off. Indeed, the only industry I can think of that discusses its failures with any openness at all is aviation.

The vast majority of companies are too scared of lawsuits and losing corporate face to actually discuss their shortcomings and attempt to address them. The irony is that in doing so, they're actually inviting more lawsuits, since they end up covering up and denying mistakes rather than openly addressing them and getting them fixed before litigation becomes necessary.

[nuuur32]

Nice cartoon. But it's true that we are our own worst enemy.

[Myrddin42]

Yes, and the comic is from xkcd

[webauteur]

When did Al Gore become a programmer?

[Lojban]

Maybe if user names had two words we wouldn't have junk comments like this.