Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake?

Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea - especially decisions that shipped and ran in production for several years.

This article also doesn't make a convincing case for this being a huge mistake. Companies like Uber change their architectural decisions while they scale all the time. Provided it didn't kill the company stuff like this becomes part of the story of how they got to where they are.

Related: the classic line commonly attributed to original IBM CEO Thomas John Watson Sr:

“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”

https://blog.4psa.com/quote-day-thomas-john-watson-sr-ibm/

A single engineer should not get fired for an architectural decision that clearly had buy in from many people.

Everything is a good idea until it isn’t. The entire industry was enamoured with microservices for far too long. We can look at these mistakes in hindsight and learn from them but we can’t judge them without the context of the time. Software was very different even just 10 years ago.

Submarine article.

Outside of that, it sounds like the system worked perfectly. They launched, they paid DB costs (the 8M was not a ledger mistake) and then they rebuilt after they wanted more cost savings. Also a bunch of folks got promoted.

The 8M came from VCs lighting money on fire. Honestly this seems like the system worked as planned to me, not a case study in how not to do things.

Spotify was another big proponent of DynamoDB, does anybody know how that went?