Moral Luck and the Postmortem

On the peculiar corporate ritual of grading someone's judgment by consulting the dice they rolled Two FridaysTwo engineers, two Fridays, one identical decision. Devi ships a database migration at 4pm on a Friday. She has a rollback plan, a tested script, a canary, and a colleague on standby. The migration works. Nobody notices. On Monday she is a person who ships fast, and her manager mentions her in a channel with a rocket emoji. Marcus ships a database migration at 4pm on a Friday. He has a rollback plan, a tested script, a canary, and a colleague on standby. A dependency he could not have known about holds a lock, the canary looks healthy for eleven minutes, and then checkout falls over for ninety-four of them. On Monday he is a person who ships recklessly, and there is a meeting about it with a calendar invite that uses the word "learnings." Same reasoning. Same information. Same care. Different draw from the urn. And the organization, which prides itself on being data-driven, has…