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Ask Slashdot: How Much Did Your Biggest Tech Mistake Cost?
NotQuiteReal writes: What is the most expensive piece of hardware you broke (I fried a $2500 disk drive once, back when 400MB was $2500) or what software bug did you let slip that caused damage? (No comment on the details — but about $20K cost to a client.) Did you lose your job over it? If you worked on the Mars probe that crashed, please try not to be the First Post, that would scare off too many people!
But back in the 1960's, I figured we could save a bit of money by only storing the year in our data records. No one would use my program decades later, right? Boy, was I wrong!
About $2 Trillion.
I worked for the Florida Electoral Commission back around 2000.
When I was 12 years old and hanging out on BBSs in 1989, I didn't realize dialing Gilroy from San Jose was long distance (Both were 408 area code). My parents were not pleased at the nearly $500 phone bill.
Now the programmers in the audience could probably think of like 10 different specific things that could be coded into the system to prevent that from happening, but this company didn't. Which really isn't too surprising. I asked one of the devs on the ground systems team if the ground systems was using GMT or UTC. His answer was "What's the difference?" I was able to infer from his answer that it was most likely GMT, and that did appear to be the case. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the system there was presumably some piece of code written by an Indian contractor with a math degree adjusting times for leap seconds, but it wasn't in any code that anyone knew about.
The early history of that company read like a Monty Python sketch. The first satellite exploded on the launch pad. The second satellite fell over and then exploded. The third satellite burned down, fell over, exploded and then sank into the swamp. The forth satellite got into orbit and was promptly bricked by sending the wrong version of Windows(!) to it. To be fair they only had to do that because they launched it with the wrong version of Windows(!!) in the first place. One would think that ANY version of Windows would be the wrong version of Windows to shoot into space, but that's why you're not the head of a billion dollar satellite company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Can't speak for a cost, but I thought this one was funny...
A company I used to work for used Lotus Notes. For some reason, and I don't remember exactly what the reason was, I set up my e-mail to copy my mail to another account. I think it was just a "hey, I can do this" thing, playing with the e-mail system. Unfortunately, I made a typo in the name of the account to forward to.
When I came in the next morning, the e-mail system was running really slowly. Everyone was complaining about it. I logged into my e-mail and, low-and-behold, there's all sorts of e-mails in my account complaining about how it couldn't send this message to the other account and, of course, the contents of the e-mail was a message that it couldn't send this message to the other account, and the contents of that message was a complaint that...you get the idea.
I turned off the script and deleted all the e-mails. And, suddenly, from the office next door, I hear, "Hey! E-mail is working again!"
Shhhhh...