Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Fired Myself

edu.mkrecny.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 424 posts

Re: How I Fired Myself

#391

Post by silverbax88 »

blablabla123 wrote: post #368
silverbax88 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to chime in and completely agree. Very lucky. Most people who survive for years at companies have learned to either stay out of sight, or navigate the Treacherous Waters of Blame whenever things go wrong. This is actually one of the things most employees who have never been managers don't understand.

Your comment makes me think. Are you implying that this is a good practice? I mean, in fact I do something similar. At our company also a lot of stuff goes wrong. Somehow it surprises me that there was no major fuckup yet. But I do realize that I need to watch out all times that blame never concentrates on me. It is so easy to blame individuals, it just suffices to have participated somehow in a task that fucked up.…

I absolutely do NOT think it is a good practice. I think it is what lazy companies full of people afraid to lose their jobs do. I think it's most companies.

The reality is that fear is a greater motivator than any other emotion - over anger, sorrow, happiness. So companies create cultures of fear which results in productivity (at least a baseline, 'do what I need to do or not get fired' productivity), but little innovation and often at the expense of growth.

Plus, it's just hell. You want to do great things, but know you are stepping into the abyss every time you try.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#392

Post by podperson »

oseibonsu wrote: post #175
potatolicious wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, it's telling that the company threw him under the bus when it happened. I've been through major fuckups before, and in all cases the team presents a united front - the company fucked up, not an individual. Which is, if you think about it, true, given that the series of events leading up to the disaster (the lack of a testing environment, working with prod databases, lack of safeties in the tools used…

I believe the company may be http://www.klicknation.com/games/ Can anyone confirm?

Apparently their logo is ";-)". At first I thought they just had this annoying tendency to overuse the wink emoticon and found it a bit creepy. Then I saw it all over their menus and found it a bit creepy. Then I realized they appeared to be using it as their logo and I found it creepy.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#393

Post by JPKab »

bguthrie wrote: post #205
damm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When things like this happen, you have to realize there is more than one 'truth'. There is the truth that here is someone who truncated the users table and because of that it caused the company great harm. Here's another 'truth'. 1. The company lacked backups 2. The junior developer was on a production database. Note: I'm from the oldschool of sysops who feel that you don't give every employee the keys to your kingdo…

The problem isn't who has the keys , it's how they're used . I don't care as much if a junior developer has the prod password; I care more about building an engineering and ops team that understands that dicking around with the prod database isn't okay . Sysops and DBAs are fallible too--I've seen a lot of old school shops that relied heavily on manual migration and configuration. Automate, test, isolate and expect f…

The fact that the cheap ass idiots at the company had cancelled their backup protection at Rackspace, and lacked any other form of backup is just complete incompetence.

If it hadn't been a junior developer who nobody noticed or cared was using the prod DB for dev work, it would have been an outright failure. DBs fail, and if you don't have backups you are not doing your damn job.

The CEO should be ashamed of himself, but the lead engineers and the people at the company who were nasty to this guy should all be even more ashamed of themselves.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#394

Post by podperson »

Aardwolf wrote: post #386
liquidise wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author makes mention of using a UI to connect to their db. If i was in a position over there i can see myself writing a script to clear out the tables i wanted. This reduces errors, but not the risk.

Arrow up, enter Or ctrl+r enter Can be very dangerous if something other than your routine is in the bash history.

Exactly. It's not like nothing bad ever happened from the command line ;-)

rm * .doc

Re: How I Fired Myself

#395

Post by franze »

potatolicious wrote: post #124
bguthrie wrote: post #86

More than anything else, this describes an appalling failure at every level of the company's technical infrastructure to ensure even a basic degree of engineering rigor and fault tolerance. It's noble of the author to quit, but it's not his fault. I cannot believe they would have the gall to point the blame at a junior developer. You should expect humans to fail: humans are fallible. That's why you automate.

More than that, it's telling that the company threw him under the bus when it happened. I've been through major fuckups before, and in all cases the team presents a united front - the company fucked up, not an individual. Which is, if you think about it, true, given that the series of events leading up to the disaster (the lack of a testing environment, working with prod databases, lack of safeties in the tools used…

    The correct way to respond to disasters like this is "we fucked up", not "someone fucked up".
can't agree more! a company that starts playing the blame game - and even communicates this to the outside a) looks unprofessional b) is unprofessional c) poisons the corporate culture

its a fail on every possible level, the technical part beeing only minor.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#396

Post by michaelt »

MBCook wrote: post #80
petriw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember to always verify it's still read only. Or a coworker will find the login in your scripts, repurpose it, then notice they need more rights and "fix" the account for you.

Plus read-only isn't a guarantee. You can't write data, but you can run a bad select or join that ends up effectively locking the database. SELECT * FROM my_200_GB_table will always be there.

Why should a select or join lock a database? Surely no database lets one query starve another of IO or CPU?

Re: How I Fired Myself

#398

Post by ahoyhere »

blablabla123 wrote: post #368
silverbax88 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to chime in and completely agree. Very lucky. Most people who survive for years at companies have learned to either stay out of sight, or navigate the Treacherous Waters of Blame whenever things go wrong. This is actually one of the things most employees who have never been managers don't understand.

Your comment makes me think. Are you implying that this is a good practice? I mean, in fact I do something similar. At our company also a lot of stuff goes wrong. Somehow it surprises me that there was no major fuckup yet. But I do realize that I need to watch out all times that blame never concentrates on me. It is so easy to blame individuals, it just suffices to have participated somehow in a task that fucked up.…

You (and the other commenters with similar strategies) are wasting productive years of your life at jobs like these. You should go on a serious job hunt for a new position, and leave these toxic wastelands before they permanently affect your ability to work in a good environment.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#399

Post by devicenull »

ptaipale wrote: post #350
juan_juarez wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell - this could have been avoided if they weren't using graphical tools or had a database that used transactions.

Not really. You obviously haven't (yet) done anything like update t1 set status=0; where status=4; when you wanted to release (set status to 0) objects that are stuck in state 4, and let all other objects keep their existing statuses. This is an easy mistake to make on command line. I hate GUIs too but not having one doesn't really help when your fundamental operating model is wrong.

And that's why you use --i-am-a-dummy on the command line :)

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/mysql-command-options...

Re: How I Fired Myself

#400

Post by gnarbarian »

sophacles wrote: post #388
gnarbarian wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in knowing some more details regarding the architectural setup and organizational structure that would allow something like this to happen.

Honestly, you don't. The IT engineering in power and other SCADA systems is downright scary.

sounds like an opportunity to me.
Post reply on HN