SA Tenets – Mistakes Are OK

This is a continuation of the “SA Tenets” series of posts in which I discuss my beliefs about System Administration and work in general

What Makes Me Nervous

It’s not layoff rumors, or a superior that is too busy for me. It’s not the budget or the outages. It’s not the latest bit of busy work or the next rash of hackers.

That’s not what makes me really nervous.

What makes me really nervous is when the entire team goes long stretches – months – without making a single mistake.

Don’t Be “Hook-ish”

Years ago I had a boss who used to chide me for being “hook-ish”. When I finally asked him what he meant, he picked up a wooden pointer (for chalk boards and such – I said it was a long time ago) and described the parts. A meter-long wooden shaft about a centimeter thick. On one end was a foam point. On the other was a metal screw-in eye-hook. He explained that the point end is the end that got the hard work done, and the hook was used to store the pointer. Picking up and using the pointer was “dangerous” and hanging it up was “safe”.

He told me that I was being too safe – that most of the time I would pick the safe thing to do when given a choice. Which is not terrible, but also not what he wanted me to do. I explained that I was afraid of failing so bad that I’d be fired. He explained that I was not going to get fired for failing or for being hook-ish, but that I being too conservative was worse than being fired.

Fail Spectacularly

I would rather see an employee fail spectacularly – auger-in in a ball of flames – because she is attempting something new, difficult, and dangerous, than succeeding at doing the status quo.

New, difficult and dangerous tasks tend to be the ones with the largest payoff. I’m not saying you should start editing a running binary because that’s risky. I’m saying don’t shy away from the hard stuff just because you may fail.

Winning BIG means risking BIG – and I want my employees to win BIG. Sometimes that means BIG mistakes, and I’m OK with that.