Is it though? Engineer can optimize on different manifold. Company can succeed/fail for different reasons. Getting destroyed for legal suit because didn’t place alarm is small peace when you did better engineering.

After all, read any post-mortem comments on HN. Many of those people can be hired as expert if you like. They will say “I would have put an alert on it and had testing”. You will lose the case.

“Oh but we are trying to keep error rate low”. Yes, but now your company is dead when high error rate company is alive.

In revealed preferences, most engineers prefer vendors who have CYA. This is obvious from online comments. This is not because they are engineer. It’s because most people want to believe that event is freak accident.

Building system for error budget is not actually easy. Even for engineer who say they want it. Because when error happens, they immediately say it should not have happened. Counterfactual other errors blocked, and business existing are not considered. Every engineer is genius in hindsight. Every person is genius in hindsight.

Why these genius never make failure proof company? They do not. Who would not pay same price for 100% reliable tech?

> Getting destroyed for legal suit because didn’t place alarm is small peace when you did better engineering.

Indeed it is. That's why I said it's a larger societal problem in how we manage risk and react to failures.

> Why these genius never make failure proof company?

Because this is mostly a matter of unknown unknowns and predicting the future, so even a founder who makes zero mistakes is more likely than not to fail.