Failure gets a bad rep. We treat it like something to avoid, when in reality, it’s the best teacher we’ve got. Every successful person I’ve met or read about says the same thing: real growth doesn’t come from success; it comes from the accumulated lessons of failure.
Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to shows like 1000 Ways to Die. It’s not because we want to see disaster; it’s because we’re wired to learn from it. We want to understand what went wrong so we can build systems, habits, and lives that don’t collapse the same way.
In engineering, studying failure is a core skill. It’s how we learn to anticipate breakdowns, plan for recovery, and design resilience into everything we build.
Hardware Failure
During my undergrad years, I worked on several small projects with electronic components like transistors, capacitors, and resistors. That’s where I first learned that failure has a smell. The sharp, chemical scent of a burning resistor is something you never forget.
What fascinated me was that electronic components don’t just stop working they die in characteristic ways.
Capacitors
They dry out and bulge after too much heat. Sometimes it’s caused by dielectric breakdown from overvoltage, or simply the aging of the dielectric material.
Resistors
They rarely fail suddenly, but they can drift from their rated value after long exposure to high current.
The burnt smell, the cracked package, the swollen casing are all clues about what went wrong and why. Learning to read those signs was my first real introduction to the idea that every failure leaves behind information
Software Failure
When I transitioned from working with circuits to writing code, I quickly realized that software fails too, just differently. It doesn’t emit smoke or smell like burnt plastic, but it leaves behind its own kind of residue: broken logs, error traces, and confusing behaviors that don’t make sense at first glance.
Bugs
These are the logical equivalent of microfractures in hardware. Sometimes it’s a missing condition, an unhandled exception, or a race condition that only appears when timing is just right (or wrong).
Crashes
This happens too often, you see it in your phones, laptops and other electronics. It's the software version of a component shorting out. A memory leak, infinite recursion, or stack overflow builds up quietly until the system collapses.
Scalability limits
This is a common system design term. For electronics a resistor can fail when you exceed its power rating. In software, functions fail when you exceed their assumptions. Code that runs perfectly with 100 users can choke at 10,000. The root cause might be inefficient loops, poor caching, or database contention, but at its heart, it’s the same idea: exceeding design limits.
I remember debugging my first production issue and realizing how similar it felt to probing a faulty circuit. You form a hypothesis, trace the flow, look for signals (or logs), and test each point until you find where the energy or where data stops flowing.
Parallels between Hardware and Software Failure
Whether it’s a burnt resistor or a crashed service, I’ve noticed the same principles apply across hardware and software:
Redundancy – A backup power supply in a circuit, or a backup server in a system.
Fail-safes – Fuses and circuit breakers in hardware are like try/catch blocks and input validation in software.
Graceful degradation – A dimming display when voltage drops mirrors a website serving cached data when the database is offline.
Failure Scenarios: Hardware & Software
I still remember the first time I saw a redundant power supply during an undergrad lab. I deliberately disconnected one of the power input, expecting the system to flicker or shut down. Instead, it kept running as if nothing happened. The backup seamlessly took over.
Years later, on the software side, I was reading a lot on system design for example, when a server in a distributed application crashes under intensive load. The system is meant to reroute traffic automatically, and the users are not meant to notice it.
My takeaway
Nothing lasts forever. Not silicon, not code. Everything we build eventually faces its limits.
Top comments (0)