What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?

CraigEagle asks: "Mistakes are made every day. The more technical knowledge you have the bigger your mistakes can be. What is the biggest technology related mistake you have ever made?"

"In the interest of full disclosure, this is mine:

I was working at a Fortune 50 bank as a consultant. I was due to go on vacation for a week and the company did not have webmail. I decided that I would try forwarding emails to my corporate account. (I know this was a bad idea, and probably against several corporate policies.) I set it up so that any email that came in would forward to my consulting company's account. My mistake was I also left Delivery Receipt on. This was not Microsoft, it was Lotus Notes. The system began forwarding the incoming mail to my account. But then it would get a Delivery Receipt, which in turn would be forwarded to my account, which would generate another delivery receipt, ad infinitum. When I got back from vacation they claimed I had brought down the email system for 4 hours. This incident caused the bank to stop allowing consultants to set up email rules. What's your story?"

Comments

easy...

[ddeyoung]

staking mine and my family's needs in a technical career!

Re:easy...

[Strange Ranger]

Anybody remember those commercials on TV: "There are 50 thousand ice machines in the US and somebody needs to fix them." And then they'd offer to send you to ice-machine-fixing school. There are others, fixing/ driving the "Big Rigs", learning how to be an X-Ray Technician in 6 months, etc. etc. etc.

Well recently I've seen at least one each for "IT Manager", "Computer Technician", and "Internet Technologist"... "learn in 6 months!"

They might as well be playing "Taps" as far as I'm concerned. Well not quite but those ads are ALWAYS for commodity positions, "anyone can learn", etc etc.

And if there are any ice-machine repair-folks reading this, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that most of us have spent our entire lives deeply involved with technology, and we are used to our compensation reflecting that. Those ads tell us that people think they can learn in 6 months, and schools are filling up with people doing just that.

No they're not going to directly take our jobs if we have 10 years of experience, but all those folks sure will lower the paycheck bar for the entire spectrum of IT workers. It's called Flooding the Market.

Add that to overseas outsourcing... it's so depressing.

I used to console myself with the adage "You get what you pay for.", but way too often the people doing the hiring don't understand what they need or what they're getting anyway, they don't understand the benefits of paying for something better, so they go cheaper, time and time again.

There are 50 million computers in the US and somebody needs to fix them.

[buries face in hands]

Re:rm

[Brian Hatch]

since then ... aliased rm to 'rm -i'

Bad plan. Now, the next time you log into a new machine you'll think that rm will be safe and will wipe out an entire directory tree again.

If you want to have a safe alias, use a different name! For example del would be appropriate. If you're not good enough to use rm correctly, then an old DOS command seems appropriate...

Re:My Commander told me to kill the network

[wayne606]

It sounds like you did exactly what you were supposed to do. Isn't part of the point of a training exercise that the danger is real and freak accidents like that can happen? Maybe the real mistake was not having an emergency backup communication system (and the same would apply for a real conflict situation).

Re:My Commander told me to kill the network

[0x0d0a]

You know, while that had bad consequences, it also isn't something that I'd call your mistake. Your CO asked you to kill the network, you did so. The issue that came up wasn't a technical one specific to the issue, so you weren't in a position where I'd expect you to be able to advise your CO using specialty information. This wasn't something unethical, where you might have taken another course of action, or illegal, where you should have refused to follow an order. You did exactly what your orders stipulated that you do.

Frankly, from the post, I doubt that the person dying could have been saved if the radio had been active.

Furthermore, unless the Army has rules requiring that personnel on training exercises have a comm system always up, I'm not sure that even your CO made a poor decision. There is such a thing as tragedy -- where everyone really did do the right thing, and someone still gets hurt as a result.

It's kind of like deciding to drive down Main Street in a town instead of Lambert Street and hitting and killing a kid that ran out into the street. Yes, had you taken the other road, the kid would have been alive. However, you can't be expected to or be *able* to always make the decision that produces the best outcome, or you'd be the best gambler in the world. The only thing that you can do is what seems the most sensible thing given the information that you have at the time. You did that, and nobody could ask for more.