Reminds me of a story (which I've heard in slightly varying versions) that happened in the early days of IBM. A man had made a costly mistake, but Thomas Watson didn't fire him, saying "we just spent all that money educating you!"
People learn by screwing up, and those can be the best lessons.
In one of my early jobs, I spammed a bunch of the company customers, trying to promote my music. This was before the Internet (1987 or so), and before spam, so I was a “proto-spammer.”
It became a watershed in my life, and I took my work and career, very, very seriously, after that.
> Reminds me of a story (which I've heard in slightly varying versions) that happened in the early days of IBM. A man had made a costly mistake, but Thomas Watson didn't fire him, saying "we just spent all that money educating you!"
> People learn by screwing up, and those can be the best lessons.
Precisely.
Had the author been fired for his actions, the only people who could learn from the situation would be those employed at that time. As each cycled out of the company, this lesson would be lost.
By addressing the error in judgement while retaining the author, the organization ensured the lesson would be passed on to each new generation of engineers without having to prescribe the policy dictatorially.
This is also a much better way of handling the problem than OP's blunder on the article.
Berating in an office might teach one person. Not berating and admitting process failure in public can be educational for the whole company.
Reminds me of Gitlab's database deletion thing a few years ago. Not only they spent money educating the one engineer, by making the story public they also educated their other employees, and dare I say the whole industry. I still hear people referring to that story from time to time.
It does sound like the classic sunk cost fallacy. But it also implies that the would-be-fired person has become better after being "educated", and probably better than the average newly-hired person replacing them if they are fired...
When a generally smart person makes a humiliating million-dollar mistake, then you can trust that person, more than any of their coworkers, to never make that specific mistake again. That's the "expensive education" here.
Depending on the mistake it could also mean that they are more likely to make the same mistake. Especially after the memory of the event fades, they may regress to the old way they acted.
You may want to refresh yourself on the definition. Sunk cost is resources already spent, which cannot be recovered - the inability to recover it is what drives the reluctance in the case of the fallacy.
People learn by screwing up, and those can be the best lessons.