Count to ten when a plane goes down

Post by Scuttles » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

dimitar wrote: post #153

mikegreco wrote: post #4

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

According to his next post: What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)

Post by billmalarky » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:57 PM UTC

wildpeaks wrote: post #170

jpatokal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the American Embassy, which follows American work culture. Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.

The Japanese way is good in the sense that, as long as you have Internet, you could make your startup without worrying about putting a roof over your head or finding an office space to work from, and you get a still-full salary to bootstrap it without having to put the time. You even get access to a pool of other soon-to-available engineers to work with if you're stuck with other poor sods in the room. Definitely ano…

Post by smwht » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:59 PM UTC

talmand wrote: post #225

kstenerud wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst unix disaster I ever saw happened to one of my co-workers. He was working on a client machine, logged in as root because he needed to compile and install some complicated software. As he was working, he did an ls -l /bin and copy-pasted it to a text editor so he could make sure everything was installed correctly. Unfortunately, after returning to his console, he accidentally hit paste. Most of /bin was actu…

The worst unix disaster ever? Could you elaborate for non-unix people such as myself?

  $ echo "asdf" > foo
  $ cat foo
  asdf
  $ lrwxwrwxrwx 1 root root -> foo
  lrwxrwxrwx: command not found
  $ cat foo
  $

Post by colanderman » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

anon4 wrote: post #202

couchand wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run into this all the time, too. Now my -rf usage is almost always wrapped by this: rmgit() { git status read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r echo if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]] then rm .git -rf fi }

I think this would be a bit better for interactive cases. Note: written just now, I haven't actually felt the need for this safeguard... yet. rmrf() { (echo "The following files are going to be deleted!!!" for FILE in "$@"; do echo " >>" done) | less read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r echo if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]] then rm -rf "$@" fi }

Post by vehementi » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #167

vehementi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping th…

>>> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again This is a far-reaching conclusion. That assumes that a) no mistakes can be prevented before they happen for the first time and b) every mistake can be prevented after making it. The truth of either far from obvious. Moreover, it is routine in our culture that sever mistakes are punished - e.g. if you make a mi…