 Hi, I'm Michael Gatt and I'm a failure and if you're in this room, you probably are too Hence how many people have blown up production? Okay. Yeah, we're all failures It's endemic to our industry If you're in tech you fail you fail every day if you're a big company you fail thousands of times a day This is fine so long as we keep it to ourselves But it becomes a problem when we interact with the rest of the world Because the rest of the world has slightly different standards of professionalism and they tend to think of us as sort of clownish Individuals who really don't get it Boeing can't tell you that they can't duplicate your crash Because it must be your environment do something different Our standards as I said are different and this needs to advance Sometimes our mistakes cause real problems for people and These are the mistakes. These are the failures that can be Career destroying they can be life destroying Mostly if you don't know how to handle them and what I'm going to talk about here very briefly is What you should do because we are all failures. We're all going to fail Well, of course, you're going to do what you have to do which is fix it You're going to put in the hours days weeks, whatever it takes to make it right But beyond fixing the immediate problem assuming they don't walk you straight to the door is How do you plan for that failure? How do you make sure it doesn't happen or if it does happen? How do you make sure you can handle it best? First of all think about what you really want to do What are the failures that you will do best at as mark Manson asks? What flavor? Sandwich Do you like to eat the most because you're going to eat it a lot? So if your favorite flavor of failure is in dev ops do dev ops if your favorite flavor of Failure is in straight development. That's what you should do if your favorite flavor of failure is in networking go there Beyond that choice think about where you're working Ask the company you're working for or you want to work for how do they handle failure? They tell you to ask questions in an interview. Have you ever asked them? Well, what happened to the last guy who blew up production? Hopefully your interviewer will laugh and give you a great story if they don't worry because Those are companies like this one those of you who never saw this reddit look it up Guy showed up for a stay of work. They handed him an onboarding document This is how you set up your environment. He copied and pasted. He didn't realize that in that onboarding document. They had Root production access and the first thing it did was delete the database Surprise surprise this company also never tested their backups the CTO blamed him This is another great one sometimes you don't need to ask sorry, this is really blurry, but Sometimes you don't need to ask this is a company that says on their website They believe winners have always won. Thanks to Corey Quinn for pointing this one out by the way They don't believe that a startup should have Devils advocates This is a company that deals with personal health data Sounds like a great security Approach to dealing with data no Devils advocates, but beyond that have a plan B Not just for your career for your life Failure is a lot easier to deal with if you have six months in the bank. Do you? Because it's a lot tougher if you're worrying about living in your car next week If you haven't thought about those things, please do But beyond that think about the people around you as I said, we're all failures. It's part of our business So when you fall flat on your face Ask for help someone will give you help because we've been there and When you're the or and when you're running along and you hear someone behind you fall flat on their face Stop you got the time Turn around give them a hand up Because that's how we all move forward together Tech is a team sport Surviving failures a team sport. Thank you