261–270 of 361 posts
This really resonates with my experience. Working at a major airline, I was the one who would pick the most difficult and risky projects. One was a quick implementation of a new payment provider for their website. That website sold millions of euros worth of tickets every day. Seconds after deployment, it turned out that I had failed to recognize the differences between the test and live environments as one of the cr…
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At a major brokerage firm I accidentally hit prod with a testing script that did several millions of dollars of fake FX test trades. The first thing mentioned in the post mortem call was “No one is going to blame the guy who did those trades. It was an honest mistake. What we are going by to do is discuss why a developer can hit the production trading API without any authentication at all”.
Were the trades any good though?
Really well written story. As a software engineer, I have a couple stories like this from earlier in my career that still haunt me to this very day. Here’s a short version of one of them: Like 10 years ago, I was doing consulting work for a client. We worked together for months to build a new version of their web service. On launch day, I was asked to do the deployment. The development and deployment process they had…
Having worked in enough of these though, I am aware that even they (the "seniors") are seldom entirely responsible for all the issues. It's mostly business constraints that forces cutting of corners and that ends up jeopardizing the business in the long run.
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And then it turns out that the order of the parameters was mixed up... just kidding.
Just yesterday, I did C# Regex.Match with a supersimple regex: ^\d+ And it seemed not to work. I asked ChatGTP and he noted that I had subtle mistake: the parameters were other way around... :facepalm:
Unrelated to the content of the article, but is the cover image AI generated? Looks kind of like DALL-E style output to me but it's hard to be sure. (Also, I know I'm breaking the rule "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread." My defense is this is less of a complaint and more just plain curiosity!)
The videos were recorded because they were legal/financial related and also autotranscripted for text search. I would watch them to trace how the problem occured (I know there are many ways to log).
I was the only developer so it was my fault ha. The app had so many parts and I just used an E2E test to make sure everything generally worked. It's cool Chrome has a fake video feed (spinning green circle/beeping).
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-01-mn-17288...
> NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements
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Were the trades any good though?
Plot twist: It made so much money that that’s now their strategy.
I was chatting with him when he noticed the stock the strategy was trading (KLAC) was gradually declining linearly. He looked at the L2 quotes and saw that someone using his brokerage was repeatedly putting out small orders, and then he realized they were his orders.
The fund got a margin call and had to shift some funds between accounts to make margin, and they had to contact regulators and inform them of the bug, and they had to manually trade their way out of the massive short position they traded. However, they ended up making $60,000 that day off of his mistake.
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Surely this is a variation of this anecdote attributed to IBM's Watson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419313 "> A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, “I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me.” Watson was said to ha…
A variant is in From the Earth to the Moon , where a junior engineer at Grumman confesses messing up vital calculations for the Lunar Lander to his boss, and finishes with "So… I guess I'll go clean out my desk." "What for?" "I figure you're gonna fire me now." The boss's response makes a lot more sense than the usual fluff, though: "If I fire you now, the next guy to make a mistake won't admit it and we won't find o…