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!

Comments

I'm retired now

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:I'm retired now

[Rei]

I don't have anything nearly that bad - my worst only cost me data. A friend taught me (while I was still learning Linux) a trick, how you could play music with dd by outputting the sound to /dev/dsp. But as I said, I was still learning Linux and hadn't quite gotten all of the device names into my head, and I mixed /dev/dsp up with /dev/sda...

Re:I'm retired now

[JaredOfEuropa]

I over-promised on a time estimate once, or rather: I let myself be convinced to pad the estimate. Not by a vendor but by the client! One of the client's systems was due for an upgrade, and between myself and the support guys in India I figured it would be a 19 man-day job. I would run it as a "small project" meaning that I could run it any way I wanted. However, the client asked me: "Can you make the estimate 21 days?" That meant it would be a "proper" project run according to the client's methodology, which the client preferred for budgetary reasons. I had nothing to worry about according to the manager, a PM would be assigned to me to take care of the project formalities. So I agreed.

At the time I was not aware of the unbelievable bureaucracy of large multinationals, and what this would do to my project. Normally I estimate the amount of real work, and add 20% for project management overhead. Maybe another 20% for red tape. But in this case, the PM was more or less forced to involve an ever increasing legion of other teams from various Centers of Excellence in the client's organization. A simple upgrade turned into a project that ran for over half a year. And by agreeing to this approach, I probably cost the client around $300,000. Of course it was mostly their own organization that ran up the cost, and they asked for this in the first place, so they never gave me any grief.

Re:Well...

[drinkypoo]

Definitely partially my fault for not disabling the cron job,

Or pulling the network cable. You have to plan for idiots, because there will be idiots. And odds are, they will outrank you.

Re:Multiple multi-million dollar satellites.

[Greyfox]

Funnily enough at the satellite company I worked for that one time, one of the older guys there mentioned how he almost lost a satellite once by logging in to his own account and issuing a maneuver command to the satellite. Problem was the satellite was expecting times in GMT and got them in MST. Took them days to get it oriented correctly again.

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.