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I’m confused by the last part of your post. Sounds like you appreciated that your boss gave you space to learn, and understood that you made an honest mistake,
by mansoon 5y ago
I’m confused by the last part of your post.
Sounds like you appreciated that your boss gave you space to learn, and understood that you made an honest mistake, but you’d fire someone who made this mistake if they were working for you?
How do you square those two things internally?
- notatoad 5y agoIt's not good to punish people for making mistakes in the course of their work (especially if that work is meant to be educational) It is good to punish people who give access to production databases to people who shouldn't have it. And the guy learning MySQL should not be given that access. Taking down prod is always a symptom of a systemic failure. The person responsible for the systemic failure should see the consequences, not the person responsible for the symptom.
- quacked 5y agoWait, but if you choose the guy giving access as the mistake made in the course of his work, then what's the new plan?
- lnjarroyo 5y agoWell, one could argue that "giving access to production databases to people who shouldn't have it" was just "making mistakes in the course of their work" for this dude.
- peeters 5y ago> The person responsible for the systemic failure should see the consequences You don't see the contradiction of terms there? A systemic failure is by definition not the responsibility of one person. You're saying people should be able to make mistakes. But not those people.
- andrewstuart2 5y agoHaving worked in a very large, bureaucratic company I can say that I strongly suspect that just ignoring systemic failures as learning opportunities is also not a sustainable. Too many times I’ve had to yield on something and say “I guess they’ll learn when this fails” only to see them easily move on or get promoted before the failure occurs. They don’t learn their lessons. I suspect the solution is to find a way to make sure the consequences of the decision are fed back properly into the system directed at the right person. How to do that, I have no idea.
- jfrunyon 5y agoIt's not that you ignore them. But your first step if someone makes a mistake should not be to fire them. Maybe they need some coaching, maybe they have too much access or authority, but everyone makes mistakes. The key is whether or not they learn from them, or keep making them.
- ketzo 5y agoA piece of the system (a junior developer) is allowed to make mistakes. The person responsible for architecting and protecting the system (the CTO)... less so.
- d1str0 5y agoThat depends, this might have been this CTO’s first time as CTO. Without knowing the story, they could so have been pretty far out of their element and just lucky to be a founder or something. Even C-level people always have to have their first day as C-level and of course they will make mistakes. The important thing is learning from them of course.
- maxk42 5y ago> The important thing is learning from them of course. Which is why I find it unacceptable that he repeated the mistake.
- helmsb 5y agoI’ve never understood the logic of firing someone over a mistake like that. They’re now the person least likely to make a similar mistake and they will maintain the institutional knowledge to help ensure it doesn’t happen again.
- lenova 5y agoIt's a poetic way of saying the boss was/is a better person than the OP.
- puchatek 5y agoI think the hint is in "after the second time I did this". I would also wonder if to keep them on at that point.
- maxk42 5y ago> How do you square those two things internally? Easy: (1) He wasn't my boss. (2) He allowed a person not associated his team or even the tech department to conduct potentially harmful operations on the production database without supervision. (3) Those actions resulted in millions of dollars of lost revenue and make-goods. (4) He did not coach the person who brought the database down. (5) He repeated the mistake.