Then we agree, because we both know that people often do things that seem irresponsible in hindsight. It is especially common in business situations that require a lot of diverse expertise, in which case having any redundancy at all could mean doubling the size of your workforce. It is easier when you're talking about pure software, but even then a nontechnical founder could allow two programmers to segregate their responsibilities without realizing it was happening.
The thing about advice is it's easy to say, "don't get in to that situation," but every day managers wake up in that situation. If your startup grows enough, some of your own managers might find themselves waking up in that situation.
We do not agree because this is a matter of assigning causal relevance to a company failure and my position is that the causal relevance you're assigning is irresponsible and results in bad decision making and hence is wrong/invalid. If you are in charge of a business, it is invalid to assign causal relevance to a business failure over a single individual who does not work overtime.
A similar situation would be assigning causal relevance to an intern deleting the production database on a company failure. Based on how you're viewing the situation, it seems like you think that would be a plausible explanation to hold; certainly interns have deleted production databases by accident before and so certainly it would seem like such an action would cause a company to fail.
My argument is that the intern deleting the database is not the cause of the company failure and has no relevance in understanding the cause of a company failure. It is simply not possible to attribute a corporate failure to an intern deleting a database. The causal reason for the failure would be a failure to protect the production database from an intern.
Similarly it is simply not possible to see a company as failing because someone decided not to work overtime. That is never a criteria that a company failure can be attributed to.
I am confident based on my experience running a successful company that my assignment of causal relevance has stronger explanatory power and results in better judgement than the causal relevance you're assigning.
I would encourage other people looking to run a business to adopt my assignment over the one you're arguing in favor of. The company did not fail because someone didn't work overtime just like the company did not fail because of the intern. The company failed because someone in a position of authority failed to properly allocate resources, failed to have good policies in place to protect production databases, failed to have security policies in place, failed to properly incentivize work, overpromised beyond what could be delivered, or a host of other reasons that have nothing to do with blaming a small group of individuals. This assignment of causal relevance will yield greater insight into how to properly prepare for a vast array of scenarios and also appreciate the risks involved in running a business and strategies to mitigate those risks.
What you say about the ultimate root cause analysis of a company failure is spot-on.
However, if production is down regardless of root cause, having engineers work overtime to bring it back up is probably overwhelmingly the right thing for the situation.
If they don’t and the company fails, it’s not because they didn’t work overtime (agreeing with you), but it would have been better if the downtime was 8 hours rather than 3.5 days (what I think whatshisface is saying).
Then we agree, because we both know that people often do things that seem irresponsible in hindsight. It is especially common in business situations that require a lot of diverse expertise, in which case having any redundancy at all could mean doubling the size of your workforce. It is easier when you're talking about pure software, but even then a nontechnical founder could allow two programmers to segregate their responsibilities without realizing it was happening.
The thing about advice is it's easy to say, "don't get in to that situation," but every day managers wake up in that situation. If your startup grows enough, some of your own managers might find themselves waking up in that situation.