Believing the CFO when he made a point of telling me, "If you ever need anything, let me know."
Gratitude is demonstrated through actions, not vague verbal commitments.
Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
261–270 of 322 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#262I've only cried literal tears once in the last ten years, over business. Due to inattention while coding during an apartment move, I pushed a change to Appointment Reminder which was poorly considered. It didn't cause any immediate problems and passed my test suites, but the upshot is it was a time bomb that would inevitably bring down the site's queue worker processes and keep them down. Lesson #1: Don't code when y…
> Fortuitously, AR didn't have all that many customers at the time, so only 15 or so people were affected. Less than fortuitously, those 15 folks had 10 to 100 messages queued, each. Excuse me for caviling at your post, but "fortuitously" is a synonym for "accidentally", not "fortunately".
I think what he meant was "It just so happened,"
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#263One summer in college, I got an internship at a company that made health information systems. After fixing bugs in PHP scripts for a couple weeks, I was granted access to their production DB. (Hey, they were short on talent.) This database stored all kinds of stuff, including the operating room schedules for various hospitals. It included who was being operated on, when, what operation they were scheduled for, and im…
Uh, has anyone on this thread heard of HIPAA? I'm pretty sure having a summer intern get full access to actual patient data shouldn't be possible under a properly implemented set of HIPAA processes, and the same goes for the accidental UPDATE. The story reminds me of the day I was introduced to "BEGIN TRANS", "COMMIT" and "ROLLBACK" when someone upgraded the Sybase console and helpfully changed the default setting so…
Honestly, as long as he's had HIPAA training, there's no difference between an intern making the changes and a 10-year employee doing so.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#264A local Subway franchise was the very first company that hired me. I was extremely young, shy, and intensely socially awkward, yet excited to join the workforce (as I had my eyes set on a Pentium processor). When I worked at Subway, the bread dough came frozen, but you would put loaves in a proofer, proof it for a certain amount of time, and then bake it. My first shift, however, got busy and I left several trays in…
This reminds me of reject analysis week as a radiography student. People would be hiding their crap films (film and chemistry people!) up their tops, behind shelves, basically anywhere. Now days the clever ones know how to dick with the server. I have never deleted films for this reason, but have deleted films to keep incidents quiet.. (Boss must not know I got a chunk of steel in my hand prior to a shift in MRI etc)
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#265I wrote a piece of code controlling an assembly line machine. These machines require manual operation, and would come with a light curtain, which detects when someone places their hand near the moving parts, and should temporarily stop the machine. A relatively minor bug in the software that I wrote caused the safety curtain to stop triggering when a certain condition was met. We discovered this bug after an operator…
Another lesson your company should have learned is that a safety-critical system like this should not be left to software. Sure, monitor the curtain by software and send errors, but hardware should immediately stop the machine when the light curtain is broken.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#266When I first started my professional career, I was a field engineer in the oilfield, working on drilling rigs around Texas. There was some amount of computer stuff, but a lot of hardware work too. One of the things that we had to do was install a pressure sensor on the drilling mud line, which is normally pressurized to around 2k psi with water or oil-based drilling fluid.
This sounds like a simple task, but it gets complicated by the variety of pipe fittings and adapters available. Our sensors are a particular thread type, and we have to find a free slot to install them, and come up with any pipe connection converters necessary to install them there. Another tricky part is that the rig workers who actually know about all of this stuff are often not particularly eager to help out.
So on one particular job, the only free slot to install the sensor is a male pipe fitting, capped with some sort of female plug. Our sensors are male in that pipe size, so I need a female-female adapter to install it. I go looking around and come up with one, not paying too much attention to it. I install it, and everything seems to go more or less smoothly. We go on drilling with this installed for like a week or two.
One day, the rig manager comes to find me and ask me about this adapter that I used. He tells me that it is meant for drinking water lines, and is only rated to 200 psi. And had been installed on a 2000 psi line for weeks. My jaw dropped in shock - I have no idea how that adapter didn't fail, and it's entirely possible it could have hurt or killed somebody if it did.
They sent one of their guys to find an adapter that was actually rated for the pressure and replace it, and never said much else of it. No telling how much trouble I could have been in there if anything else had happened. It did make me a lot more safety-conscious.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#267Back in my younger days, I once had a project manager who was asking me to make a significant network infrastructure change but refused to tell me why the change was necessary and basically told me to do as I was told. I messaged a coworker to see if he knew what was going on, and dropped in that the PM was being a "fucking cunt." I was unaware, however, that the co-worker and the PM were troubleshooting an issue tog…
Also, I had a friend with a similar (perhaps worse) story. His company sent every employee an e-mail about being on time, to which he pushed Reply to All and typed "FUCK YOU!" He laughed to himself and went to push the Discard button, but accidentally hit Send in the process. He was about to try to ExMerge it out of Exchange when he heard a BlackBerry vibrate and realized that no amount of ExMerge would get it off th…
Damn iMessage is a shocker for this. Coworker sends out group message saying big boss wants xyz and includes big boss in the group. Someone always misses that its a group message and sends an expletive or sarcastic reply. I am also guilty.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, we have a strict no deployments on Fridays or after 3pm on any day at work. Allows us to go home with a clear head and enjoy our weekends.
Never really understood person that do otherwise. What's the point ? ruining a perfectly fine night / week end ?
For essentially all companies whose customers are paying consumers:
The technical staff all talk about the dangers of Friday evening deployments.
The company has ignored/overridden these warnings in the past, and sometimes experienced catastrophic failures because of it.
STILL, sometimes the marketing staff will have weekend promotions that are considered more important than these concerns.
In particular, a weekend promotion will be implemented, tested on Wednesday, and ready to go. And only after it's active, is a bug found in it on Friday at 5pm. And the promo is more important than the risk of failure.
I'm not saying this as a "bitter techie"... I'm just explaining that this is how it happens.
I think that the "it's more important" argument is often correct. Not running the promo costs the company $X of opportunity cost, and X is often very well known, from past promotions. Balance "losing $X" against "well, there's only a small chance of something going wrong", and that's why the risk is often taken.
Take the risk enough times, and eventually something goes wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#269easy: me: "unix definitely won't just let me cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda" other: "sure it will" me: what I learned? unix will absolutely let you hang yourself. 1998, production server for a fortune 5 company.
Professional suicide.
I respectfully disagree. I was a junior person who was given root level privileges on a production server. There were many layers of process and management that weren't in place. Today, I am a senior person at a multi-billion dollar company. I would never call "professional suicide" at a junior person who made a genuine mistake. I would scold them, and then I would try to figure out how we got into the situation where someone unqualified could cause us such a bad thing to happen.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
"People who are shipping actual products instead of talking about them on message boards", perhaps. Running someone else's product company from a message board is a little like playing Jeopardy! from your couch, right?
Yeah. This was... my biggest takeaway from running my own company. I struck out on my own because I thought the business people who ran the companies I worked for were unethical idiots, and being not-an-idiot, I could do better. Turns out? Nope. I also find that the arguments I had with my bosses come around again, from my employees. I still don't really understand how business works - but I've learned enough to unde…
All true, but that still doesn't answer what possesses someone to pack their cell phone in a box.