
In Silicon Valley, stories about failure are a form of social currency - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-era-of-the-fumblebrag-e5ceddaa77dc
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Red_Tarsius
Fake failures aside, I didn't really appreciate the article.

Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. In my home country,
if you fuck up it's over. People will laugh at your _totally unrealistic_
attempt to strive for more. Everyone must fall to the lowest denominator.

Italians don't see failure as a short-term result, but as a lesson about life
itself.

~~~
bitcrusher
It's not just Italy. Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the
same outlook.

Personally, I think this 'failure as a badge of wisdom' is one of the 'secret'
ingredients for the 'Silicon Valley' recipe.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
I think this attitude is part of what Thiel calls _indefinite pessimism_.

~~~
harpastum
For anyone else unfamiliar with the term, I just found this blog post that
explains Zak Slayback's understanding of Thiel's _indefinite pessimism_ :
[http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-
definit...](http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definite-
indefinite-societies-according-to-peter-thiel/)

It's a pretty good read. The relevant section regarding Italy: "Thiel’s
identification of the indefinite pessimists: modern-day Europeans. 'The world
is going to hell in a hand basket, so we might as well as drink and be
merry,'"

------
littletimmy
I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley. Something
like... "I started this company with my entire life's worth of savings, but it
blew up. So now I have no income and my wife left me along with the kids. My
life isn't worth living anymore and I am seeing a therapist thrice a week to
stop blowing my brains out."

THAT would be failure. That's real, with real consequences. That is hard to
get out of, and when someone does that person usually has a valuable lesson to
share. I have no doubt there are some failures like that out there, but they
almost never share their story.

What we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few
hiccups on their path to success. The current way the word failure is used is
like "awesome" or "incredible" or any of these other top-shelf words used for
rather mundane occurances. It cheapens our language for no reason.

~~~
alwaysdoit
If this is your standard for failure, you're going to experience quite a bit
of selection bias:

\- Anyone who actually is driven to the point of actually committing suicide
will not be around to tell stories for obvious reasons.

\- Anyone who is driven to the point of bankruptcy is unlikely to stick around
the Valley with its incredibly high cost of living, (unless you are talking to
the homeless, which it sounds like you aren't because there are plenty of
stories of failures to hear).

\- He or she also probably doesn't have money for a therapist.

Realistically, the reason people like failure stories is because it is
encouraging when you are in the midst of one to see examples of cases where
"it gets better". It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way
any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole.

~~~
forgottenpass
_It doesn 't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it
cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole._

That's cold comfort in a world where "literally" now also means
"figuratively."

~~~
alwaysdoit
The problem of words having different magnitudes of potency depending on
context is different from words being used to mean the exact opposite of their
meaning in a non-ironic way.

------
polynomial
Article starts off with a key element of the #fumblebrag: It was always
ultimately someone else's fault. It was always some other loser that effed up.
Your only flaw was not seeing in time what a loser that other guy was who
caused you to fail.

But now you're wiser, so that won't happen again. You won't "allow access" so
carelessly. Because you're really important. And now you know the importance
of that.

------
normloman
It's good we have a culture of accepting failure. The fumblebrag comes from a
different aspect of the culture: The culture of being a complete douchebag,
pretending you're always "crushing it," creating the appearance of success,
and taking yourself way too seriously. This tension is present in everything I
read on HN.

~~~
themagician
There are only two people I know who ever actually "crushed" anything and
who's success was a result of their own actions.

The hundreds of others I've met it was either dumb luck, they started already
having been successful, or they just fake the entire thing.

The number of success stories in the Bay Area that are not a result of
nepotism are few and far between. I don't say that with a sense of disdain,
just reality. Because the majority of my own success can be attributed to
nepotism.

------
j_baker
Being accepting of failure is a good thing, but you have to wonder about the
moral hazard that's being set up here. A person should be able to pick
themselves up after a failure, but failure should not be _rewarded_. You
should not be able to go to a conference and brag about your failures. You
should not be rewarded for failure with an acquihire and a cushy job at a
BigCo. This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your
startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for
failure.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Under the assumption that success and failure reveals something about your
skill, you are right.

Under the assumption that success or failure are basically independent of
innate skill and the only thing that determines one's ability is number and
length of prior attempts (experience), bragging with failures can make sense.
The message is not "I have failed four times", it's "I have tried four times
(failed, but that's almost secondary)".

~~~
j_baker
Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I'm making the assumption that people
should be rewarded for actual accomplishments. Failure is a learning
experience, but it is not an accomplishment.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
We pay people all the time for sharing the benefit of their learning
experiences, why is failure any different?

If I'm entering a particular industry, it may be worth real money to me to
hear the details of someone's failed startup in that industry.

------
eldude
The sad thing about the author's core anecdote is that he doesn't even
understand what about his actions made him a failure. (He alludes to it at the
end.) If your app/server is vulnerable to a single person taking it down with
no recourse to where you "felt the grim reaper clasp [your] neck," then you
have built a house of cards unable to withstand a gentle breeze. The issue
isn't that your trust or lack of vetting, it's your dependency on others to
build your idea; You're an idea person. It's true, he has no one to blame but
himself, but not for trusting a stranger, but for want of software deployment
skill.

------
zBard
For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two
different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute
ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural
strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall
short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we
know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy':
that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in
judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and
weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.

\- The Letters of JRR Tolkien

------
feintruled
A culture that is accepting of failure is a good thing on balance, I think,
but failure does have consequences beyond the personal ones of having to dust
yourself off and steel yourself to try again. A Silicon Valley company I
worked for "failed" by going bankrupt as a means to wriggle out of their
various debts, only to be reborn phoenix like in a new guise. Some of these
debts were to banks and investors who no doubt half expect any given
investment to fail, but others were to people like office fitters who were
left in the hole for many thousands of dollars. I doubt that they move in
circles so accepting of failure..

------
stevejones
Ironically this article is a fumblebrag for Silicon Valley itself.

------
michaelochurch
The ideal of Silicon Valley (and of the U.S. in general) is that _good-faith_
business failure shouldn't carry a lasting punishment. I like that. The last
thing that I want is for us to become like many European and Asian societies
where failure is shameful and often treated as permanent.

That said, the Valley's true attitude toward failure is _deeply_ classist. If
you're well-connected because your daddy golfs with VCs, then you can take big
risks with your startup knowing that, even if it fails, they'll just have it
acqui-hired and give you another one. If you tire out in the pilot seat,
they'll make you a VP at Facebook or Google and it's up to you whether you
actually do any work for the next 3 years. This isn't some general policy of
tolerating good-faith failure by talented people. It's protecting a social
class. (Oh, and they excuse a lot of bad-faith failure, as well.)

On the other hand, if you're from middle-class or lower origins, the results
of failure in the Valley are very much Old World. I worked at Google 3 years
ago, drew the manager with a 5-year history of using phony performance issues
to tease out subordinates' health issues and then fucking with them. (I have
cyclothymia, which sometimes produces hypergraphia.) Between that, and a
quixotic attempt to save a major component of Google+ from complete failure
(with a suggestion that had a lot of engineer support, and would have worked)
I... ended up with more of a mailing-list presence than I should have had. You
could say that this was a fuck-up on my part and you wouldn't be wrong. And
here's the thing... 3 years later, I _still_ get shit for it: job offers shot
down, ill-informed comments about me on Hacker News, etc.

So excuse me when I say this, but fuck this classist double standard about
failure. I had to fight through mountains of shit over a bunch of stupid
mailing-list posts, most of which were dead-to-rights accurate, and that
failed more because of their tone rather than content... but if you're rich
and well-connected and cause a company to melt down, ending 150 jobs, through
mismanagement and reckless risk-taking, you're a hero? How the fuck does that
make any sense? And why do we excuse people who do things that are actually
unethical as if slimy behavior were the same thing as first-iteration
roughness of a new product, when it's clearly not?

The actual Silicon Valley is one where if you're well-connected, you can fail
all over the place in ways that actually hurt people, and that's OK. If you're
perceived as an outsider (see: Ellen Pao) then even the slightest mistakes
will give people cause to destroy your reputation. Let's get rid of all this
nonsense-- the clubby VCs, the slimy back-channeling-- and figure out a way to
start fresh. I absolutely agree that the stigma on good-faith business failure
out to go away. I'd love to see a world where small-business bank loans didn't
require personal liability (defeating the purpose of limited-liability
protections) and where mid-risk/mid-growth ("lifestyle") businesses (instead
of get-big-or-die gambits) could find funding. But there's a classist,
duplicitous edifice that we may have to take down first.

~~~
Blackthorn
Hey Michael, I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on this. I just wanted to say
that I think the way you were treated (and continue to be treated by some) is
abominable. I never had the opportunity to tell you since our time didn't
overlap at Google. Even though you don't know me, I'll have your back.

I love reading your blog btw, even if I don't always agree with you. As far as
the G+ component, well, I think the proof is in how it ended up :-/

~~~
michaelochurch
Thanks!

 _I just wanted to say that I think the way you were treated (and continue to
be treated by some) is abominable._

It was a learning experience. It made for some challenging years, but I think
I'll come out on top of all this.

 _As far as the G+ component, well, I think the proof is in how it ended up :-
/_

Well said. Google's problem is that it views engineering (well, specifically,
C++ engineering) as "smart people work" and everything else-- product
development, HR and people management, aesthetics-- as "stupid people work".
Thus, Google ends up with some top-flight C++ engineers whom I couldn't
possibly compete with, but... guess what kind of person ends up designing its
performance reviews, or deciding how to direct your products?

