361–370 of 409 posts
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Love to hear the story how you took down Google for six minutes? Was this a long time ago?
This was in 2012. Let's just say that a router config only getting partially applied (because of a software bug) can cause a LOT of traffic to suddenly go places it's not supposed to go.
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> http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf That is classic cold war stuff. Before you even get to the foreward by Edward Teller you get a preface stressing (among other things) that low doses of radiation are "healthful."
It's just an attempt to defuse the sort of kneejerk reaction which thinks that all radiation is harmful.
small doses of radioactivity are hormetic, healthful because they stimulate the immune system. This was proven in laboratories as far back as the 1920's. With the advent of the A-bomb almost all the hormetic research stopped. And only in the last decade has it resumed on a serious scale.
I wonder who they experimented on and whether that stuff is written up somewhere. Ionizing radiation is okay in my book, how about yours? is not exactly a common theme in modern medicine.
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A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center. This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at…
> but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not. This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their larg…
Having grown up during the cold war, I'd say that people thought "duck and cover" was ridiculous not because of some misunderstanding about its usefulness in protecting one from blast, though that misunderstanding might have existed. The reason everyone thought it was ridiculous was that everyone realized that surviving and having to deal with a completely smashed infrastructure and radioactive fallout was an extremely terrible, shitty outcome that you were not going to save yourself from by hiding under a desk or something.
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I'm always a bit shocked at the number of people here calling for someone's head in this sort of situation. I imagine the same people would downvote to oblivion anyone who came on here and wrote something like: "The only way we're going to get better software is by firing people who write bugs and make sure they never work in the industry again."
I would argue that someone probably deserves to be fired for this. It's obviously not the guy that pushed the button nor the guy that wrote the software. However, there was, probably, a guy that several years ago didn't do his job well - his job was to make sure that this kind of errors cannot happen, unless there is an intentional malicious action of course. We see it all the time in IT - people totally misjudge the…
From what I understand, we were told the record would never get removed, and we relied upon that. Could our error handling been better? Yes. Could the customer's procedures been better to prevent the record from being deleted? Yes. It was a mistake on both parties.
Who should have gotten fired?
[1] Very scary SLAs with the Oligarchist Phone Company.
[2] It's actually a DNS query. NAPTR records to be precise. Search on that if you are interested.
[3] It was also important because that was the only record we could query and not get charged for it. Everything in the telephony world cross-company (and even cross-department) gets charged. Somebody makes money; somebody pays money.
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A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
BINGO. If someone makes a mistake like this, unless it was deliberate or negligent (e.g. he/she didn't follow established procedures), you don't fire them! You fix the technical or procedural failures that allowed them to make the mistake in the first place. Heck, you should probably THANK them for making the system better by uncovering a bug! When I was still mostly a Noogler, I took a large portion of Google comple…
When is appropriate to fire someone for making a mistake?
Some ideas:
- gross negligence / malice
- ethics
- publicity damage / internet pitchforks
Additionally, it doesn't seem like the forgive mistakes approach meshes well with the startup advice of "it's never too early to fire."
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Putting the button behind glass.
At a military communications center I once worked at we had the EPO button positioned near the door so you knew where it was, and you could hit it on the way out as you evacuated. One day someone had a toolbag in their hand as they were leaving and it swung and hit that big red button ... and it did what it was supposed to do - cutting all the power to the room. Which ended up being a big hassle - they had to reload…
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Thinking prepping is silly is not synonymous with believing "when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting rules." I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.) It's also ridiculous to think this particular incident has anything to do with, well, anything...
>I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.) Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
One is entirely realistic and logical and one in crazy pants.
Yes, one should be reasonable, but that's not how "prepping" is use colloquially, and words have meaning.
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A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
Just to play devil's advocate, in some cases the point of firing an employee in a situation like this isn't about that one employee but more pour encourager les autres . So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously and they need to be diligent about following procedures. In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.
Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
I wonder what those procedural changes could be Could they do it so say, two people have to input a code or something from different machines, or something more physical like turning two keys, hitting a button etc