What's the worst mistake you've done in your field?

Entering it

Visiting /g/.

Being born.

>>62273838

This

>>62273922

Especially this.

>>62273800
minicomputers (mainframe system)
went to site with pc, tape streamer to deploy
had minimal knowledge of system .. in terms of deployment, files
source code contained in linear hashed file with dictionary .. dictionary contains object file pointers. you compile the souce, it updates the object file thru those (catalog) pointers. those pointers are for the machine it was first compiled on .. those pointers do not change. go to a new site/new machine, taking the same file & compile. Well you must recreate the file. Was on site, central for retail (hire purchase), national = all the tills, all the terminals. compiled this source (was software house, installing marketed system). compiled onto live system .. as instructed to do. The pointers of the old machine are random to the new machine. it shot object code into random positions all over their disk. all over the data. automatically, everything stopped. automatically boss of that place in computer room asking op what the hell is going on, what have I done.

co. told me to go down and 'try it again' .. without investigation, or I hadn't found out, was ignorant of the cause. So i was in there again, it all stopped (well really, probably it was 1 hour or so, things down). with the owner shouting at me "what do you want, blood? I said" .. was sat there trying to repair their database by linking frames .. database obliterated. biggest mistake. Have been involved in bigger mistakes, bigger systems issues, repair, consequences. that was the only one I caused. wasn't good was on motorway back to office phoning boss like 'no idea' .. was highly stressed, always .. that day more than any other

>>62273994
desu biggest mistake was working for anyone here (UK) in development

>>62273800
Forgot an alarm was ringing for the building engineers, printed alarm results over 2500 times.

>>62273994
later that place offered me a job (hire purchase, retail) i turned them down

>>62273838
>>62273922
These. I should have stuck it out as a premed, realize now that I'm too much of a fogey to keep up with technology compared with my peers.

>>62273800
Flashing the wrong Management Engine firmware to 2 brand new laptops. HP had no problem replacing them.

>>62273994
that was a fujitsu system, I remember
& remember that the terminal had color .. it was unique .. only one I had seen. I also remember my boss being on the phone while I was in their computer room "they will try to steal the source code" .. so I was (while installing), writing program to check the "master dictionary" for a pointer they would put in (from elsewhere), while I was on there, in the small time I would leave the source code on there (to compile). I found their pointer, deleted it .. then compiled, deleted source. They tried to steal the source code .. It was a big system (that ws deploying) .. it was the only system. Didn't like them really , was down for interview some time later & was thinking that it was just another mundane shop. worked for software houses. thought was progressing (not in the UK)

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I forgot about a big meeting scheduled with my company and another company, I completely forgot and didn't handle what I needed yet. I'm going to be busy for the next few days trying to fix everything and make sure things go well. Really forgot I booked a meeting on my calendar a month ago and this team from the company is flying out to meet me and my company.

I'm an idiot, but I probably just need an assistant or secretary to manage my calendar and tell me a week in advanced what is going on.

I feel like shit and I'm posting about it on /g/
Hopefully everyone else is having a nice night

So far:

- accidentally restarted the only active of a master-master pair of MySQL instances with 1-2TBs worth of data, thankfully I did a restart not a shutdown so it came up within 30s, shutdown and cold start would have taken literally an 1-3 hours. It still fucked up the replication chain for backups because of the weird state for a bit.
- when I was still an intern I was enabling some plugins for one of our larger, semi-customer facing elasticsearch clusters and did a rolling restart, and I naively thought the changes I staged with puppet worked and didn't bother to check that the nodes stayed up after each restart, I got halfway through the cluster before I someone chimed in that half the cluster was down, I repealed my changes and restarted the nodes, everything was fine once it came up but it was down for a few minutes

So far:

Zeroized something that wasn't supposed to be.

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>>62273922

>>62274288
Dude, this shit is kindergarten fuck ups. Come back in a few years

>>62273922
feels bad

>>62274431
Yeah, I know. Though I try my best to double, triple check and clarify before I do anything potentially damaging, especially if I am not familiar with the service.

>>62273994
This sound like a nightmare

>>62274544
I hope these don't keep you up at night. They ain't shit and you already sound good at the profession

>>62274645
Thanks. They don't, I just don't like the idea of making things worse for someone else. I'd rather escalate or ask to double check before I do anything that might cause grief further down.

Got caught screwing a horse

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>build cousins computer for him because he can't
>PSU is dead, head to grab a spare from my place
>Fiddling with the voltage switch in the passenger seat
>Forget its setting
>Install it, cousin leaves
>Turn on the PC
>Start smelling the dreaded smelly smell of hot PCB
>Cap near the CPU blows and flies off down the hallway
>Hits cousin in the head

I've never felt shittier.

>>62273800
getting into training

>>62273800
I once fucked up while writing a SQL update statement and ended up wiping +1 million rows worth of data on my second week at the job. Fortunately I had secretly backed it up beforehand (a big no-no since it had lots of shit like SSNs in it) but it scared the shit out of me when it happened.

>>62275244
>Fortunately I had secretly backed it up beforehand (a big no-no since it had lots of shit like SSNs in it) but it scared the shit out of me when it happened.
Shouldn't they have backups to begin with? At the very least something like the day before?

>>62273800
Accidentally deploying to production multiple times, but nothing nuclear like dropping the database yet. Pretty good so far.

>>62273800
rebooted the wrong server. no one knew so i got away with it

>>62274057
Seconding this. SoftDev in the UK just fucking sucks.

>>62273838
fpbp

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>>62275109

Turned off a pi interface running a 10k degree glass oven, nearly burnt down half of the plant in China. I was later told that lcd screens increased 10cent for 6months in 03' because of it.

I did the old "power supply on wrong voltage setting"

sad thing is I knew about it too, I just forgot when I flicked the switch

>>62273800
None. I never mixed my love and hobby for technology and computing with work.

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>>62275598
No fucking way

Deleted a bunch of CCTV videos, they were using A LOT of space and we didn't have any money to spare on more capacity.
Our superiors found out, they thought we were hiding something, threaten to fire all of us and ended up firing our manager.

>>62275598
Earlier this year I ran a command meant to bring down a few specific machines, but because of shit documentation it ran on a whole bunch of machines I didn't intend, including one handling an absolutely massive index. This brought down a huge number of customers and it took about six hours to get everything back up. That might sound small, but the downtime cost thousands of dollars per second.

Electrician.
I installed several lengths of refridgerators at a food store without installing the thermometer which apparently had its own feed.
To be honest I was an intern though so fuck that company for not teaching me.

>>62275109
smell = "the magic smoke"

Working for a literal sociopathic autist. Not even joking, this guy was on TV for bad trading practices (only found out after I started the job)

>>62273800
Ended up throwing the ball back to the batter instead of first base

Plugging two ends of an Ethernet cord into a hub, by mistake. Network died.

>>62273994
learn how to greentext
your story is barely readable