Uncategorized
Web development

Etsy worker recounts the time she really messed up and people didn’t freak out

How a company responds to employee mistakes can tell you a lot about it.

Failure is how we learn. (Image via Attribution Engine user Misterbisson, used under a Creative Commons license)

There’s a deeply wonderful thread making its way around Reddit about a young dev on his or her first day at a new job where they accidentally deleted a database and got fired on the spot.

Redditors came to the defense of the mortified poster, explaining the failure of the company by not having safeguards in place to make sure that such a mistake wouldn’t be disastrous for the company, many of them sharing their own stories of massive fuck ups.

That led one Etsy employee, Katherine Daniels, to share her own story, and it’s a good one. Daniels recounts installing a new software package, which didn’t go as planned. But then, instead of being fired or shunned, her coworkers went all hands on deck to help.

“It was a beautiful scene of empathetic and coordinated chaos,” she writes. “People were using Slack to coordinate, to figure out what the status was and what still needed to be done and to just help do it. People who arrived a few minutes late to the scene didn’t jump into asking who’s ‘fault’ it was, because that’s not how we roll, they just wanted to know what was going on and how they could help.”

It’s neat to hear the inside stories of some of these companies, especially Etsy, where focus on employee wellbeing has been a paramount priority for the company (though change is in the air).

Read the full story
Companies: Etsy
Series: Brooklyn
Engagement

Join the conversation!

Find news, events, jobs and people who share your interests on Technical.ly's open community Slack

Trending
Technically Media