97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 33. It’s Okay Not to Know, and It’s Okay to Be Wrong

Todd Palino

LinkedIn

At LinkedIn, one of our core values is “Take intelligent risks.”

At the heart of this is that we will be wrong sometimes, but as long as we go into our decisions with the best information available at the time, it is not just okay to fail, it’s required to happen from time to time. If we never fail, we are not pushing ourselves far enough. A corollary is that it is impossible to learn if we do not first accept that we don’t know everything.

Let’s tackle first the unfortunate pressure on people to feel like they have all the answers. All too often in meetings we see someone tap dancing nervously around an answer that they don’t have—which often happens when asked a question by someone higher up the management chain. We’ve all been there, afraid to look underprepared or inadequate.

It invariably results in one of two outcomes. The questioner can request the person to find the answer and follow up later, which encourages the behavior we want to see and makes it okay not to know. A worse alternative is if they just accept the given answer as correct, which frequently ends up propagating bad information that might be found out later.

Why can’t someone just flat out say they don’t have the answer? Because they feel those present will often lose confidence in the person answering this honestly. But what ...