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The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

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Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#2
This feels incredibly negligent. It seems obvious that generating thousands of random phone numbers and locking them without any other checks would lock some real phones. I'm puzzled that the author did not consider this when writing the script, let alone testing it or running it on live prod servers.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#4
post #3

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

Shouldn't a company that has a process where a recently hired contractor can lock any phone in the world get some share of the blame?

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#5
post #3

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

Obviously he contributed the most to the problem, but doesn't a manager have some responsibility for the work they are managing?

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#8
post #3

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

I would say he is sharing the reward.

Anybody that has been dealing with deployments in critical systems has been in similar situations, specially being a vendor. When you are there it all depends on your risk appetite.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#9
post #4
post #3

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

Shouldn't a company that has a process where a recently hired contractor can lock any phone in the world get some share of the blame?

Exactly! There seemed to be a severe lack of any production control processes at this place. That's the fault of management and senior developers/architects. Contractors should never be given the keys to the kingdom like that. And if they are, then there should be some checks and balances to make sure they don't do something foolish like this. But I've worked at places like this where we coded "close to the wire" so to speak and it's just get the job done and who cares about quality. Management should absolutely get the blame when a screw-up happens.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#10
post #5
post #3

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

Obviously he contributed the most to the problem, but doesn't a manager have some responsibility for the work they are managing?

More specifically for the deadline they are imposing without asking for feedback about feasibility and associated risks.
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