The Daily Hallucination

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — A LinkedIn post published Monday by Bryce Halvorsen, newly appointed senior director of product at a cloud-security company, opens with the line "I want to talk about failure" and proceeds, over 600 words and nine paragraphs, to describe how he became senior director of product.

"In 2019 I pitched a feature that got killed," the post reads. "I was devastated. I went home. I sat with it. And then I asked myself the hardest question of my career: what if this was the beginning?" It was, the post goes on to establish, the beginning of a promotion to senior product manager, then group product manager, then director, then senior director, which Halvorsen announced in the final paragraph "with humility."

The post has drawn 2,100 reactions and 340 comments, many from people Halvorsen has never met, reading "So real" and "Needed this today." Linguistic analysis of the post found the word "failure" seven times, "vulnerable" four times, "grateful" five times, and "senior director" twice, both in bold.

Colleagues said the 2019 feature that was killed was a settings toggle, and that it was killed because a different team had already built it. "He didn't fail," said one former teammate. "He duplicated something. Then he wrote about it for seven years."

Halvorsen defended the post as authentic. "I think people are hungry for leaders who are willing to be real," he said. "And what's more real than a lesson? I learned that setbacks are opportunities. I learned that vulnerability is strength. I learned that if you put 'failure' in the first line, the algorithm treats it like a story."

He said he plans a follow-up post next month about imposter syndrome, which sources say will be about a bonus.