Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?

A long time ago while working on a *nix box logged in as root, I executed a simple "!find". Basically execute the last find. In root's history, the last find command was something like "find ... -exec rm ...". The command was run at the root of the content directory of a CMS, deleting all the content (major media website). CMS was down while backups were restored.

I now never execute ! commands as root. Actually, nowadays I simply use CTRL-r.

Around 2000 my team was responsible for installing and maintaining a larger amount of servers in 19" racks in a data centre.

Most servers had those hot swap drive bays for convenient access from the front while the server was running. You only had to make sure no write operation occurred while you pulled the drive out of the bay.

So, I had to exchange a backup disk on a database server running quite a few rather large forums. The server had two disk bays: One for the live hard disk and one for the backup disk. I was absolutely sure at that time which one was the backup disk so I didn't bother to shut down the database server and incur a minimal downtime. Of course, I was wrong and blithely yanked the live disk from the drive bay.

I spent the rest of the night and most of the following day running various MySQL database table repair magic. It worked out surprisingly well but having to admit this error to our forum users was embarrassing, nonetheless.

Lesson: Appropriately label your servers and devices.

Two screw ups come to mind.

1. First day at a job. I need to get familiar with a legacy system and get a SQL dump from it to create a local copy of the database. After some SSHing and MySQLing, I confuse my two split terminal panes and end up importing my local dump to production server. Of course database names and users were the same so I end up dropping the database. No biggie. Backups were available from previous day.

2. Similar story to the first one. I got a new shiny Zend Studio IDE. Want to set up sync with remote server (just a static company website with no version control). Fill all the settings, press the sync button - and what happens? Zend Studio somehow figured that I want to force sync my local folder, which is empty, to the remote site, and it just deletes everything on the web root and uploads my empty folder. Wat. Should have read the settings twice.

I dropped two units of equipment, ~$1.5Mil a piece. Each unit was dropped in separate incidents. No damage at all, but management didn't care. I blamed myself despite mitigating factors such as impossible schedules, vicious multi-tasking "to compensate", and less-than-ideal support equipment. At the time, I didn't handle it very well but I ended up living through it -- first job//assignment ever in the worst environment I've ever had before or since with the worst coworker I've ever had before or since, and I mess up in the millions of dollars. "Lasting Impressions", tonight at 8/7 Central.

I left that job about 3 years later when the metaphorical train stopped at a nicer place. My name is still known in certain circles for this ["Oh bah, how could I forget?" one former manager recently stated], but I don't plan to go back there at this time.

I learned that life's too short for assholes and working in an environment you don't like. If you don't screw up, your soul will die and you'll become that former coworker you hated so much and who hated you in return. It's worth picking and choosing where you work.

Can't agree more with Patrick, mine is formulated a bit differently:

Lesson #1: Don't push code on Friday afternoon.

Lesson #2: Beer, Code and Commit is totally fine. Just don't push! Wait until next day to review and push/deploy it..