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It looks like I'm the only one here that's stunned by the chutzpah of asking for a referral bonus after accidentally nuking the production DB, and costing the c

It looks like I'm the only one here that's stunned by the chutzpah of asking for a referral bonus after accidentally nuking the production DB, and costing the company a lot of time and effort to recover it, while on your way out the door for a better opportunity. Regardless of whether or not Miso is right to evade their promise of a bonus, I'm not so quick to heap sympathy upon rremoncake. This certainly isn't the kind of dirty laundry that belongs on HN.

zasz 15y ago
Aren't these separate incidents? Miso is benefiting from this employee referral, after all.
- MartinCron 15y ago
  Exactly, coupling those incidents is, if not intellectually dishonest, at least intellectually sloppy.
  - thaumaturgy 15y ago
    It has nothing to do with the relatedness of those incidents. Again, since apparently people missed it: Regardless of whether or not Miso is right to evade their promise of a bonus, I'm not so quick to heap sympathy upon rremoncake. You hire a plumber to do a major job. You're in a hurry. You tell the plumber, I'll pay you a bonus if you finish this by (date). The plumber accidentally floods a downstairs room in the process of doing the job, but he finishes the work by the date you asked for. The flooding costs you an amount equal to or greater than his bonus. Weeks after the job is over, he asks for the bonus. How excited are you to give it to him? Clearly Miso owes him the money. Clearly it would be right for them to just pay him and move on. But if I were rremoncake, I would have been so embarrassed by my screw-up that I wouldn't have ever even asked for it in the first place.
    - MartinCron 15y ago
      How excited are you to give it to him? The scenario implies that the impact of the production db nuke was equal or greater than the bonus. Depending on the context, the impact could range from trivial to catastrophic. The fact that it wasn't backed up only makes it worse. Sometimes I joke that correctly working yet poorly-written code is "conceptually broken". Similarly, any important data that isn't backed up is already "conceptually lost".
      - thaumaturgy 15y ago
        Sure, but it doesn't take a development team two to three days to recover "conceptually lost" data (as according to the post). If you're about to touch the production database in a way that could potentially end catastrophically, and there aren't backups, you really should stop and consider the meaning of life before proceeding. Preferably, you decide that backups are the meaning of life, and even if it's an imperfect backup, you decide to manually export the table(s) you're working on. Or something. He didn't do that. It's a rookie mistake. It cost the company two to three days of development team time to recover from it. For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff, I am super surprised that the response here wasn't, "You touched prod without a backup first?! Are you daft?", but was instead, "Miso is a bad company, you need to lawyer up and get what they owe you." Or, to put it another way: if there were any justice at all, this story would follow rremoncake around for just as long as it follows Miso around.
        nknight 15y ago
        > It's a rookie mistake. It's a mistake I've seen people with 20 years of experience make. If you haven't done it already, you will eventually. When that day comes, I hope, but don't expect, you'll remember to apologize to this guy. > For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff How you get from "Hacker News" to "infallible operations engineers" is beyond me. Operations is a rare skill to begin with, and even those who are best at it will make these mistakes.

zasz 15y ago

Aren't these separate incidents? Miso is benefiting from this employee referral, after all.

MartinCron 15y ago
Exactly, coupling those incidents is, if not intellectually dishonest, at least intellectually sloppy.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  It has nothing to do with the relatedness of those incidents. Again, since apparently people missed it: Regardless of whether or not Miso is right to evade their promise of a bonus, I'm not so quick to heap sympathy upon rremoncake. You hire a plumber to do a major job. You're in a hurry. You tell the plumber, I'll pay you a bonus if you finish this by (date). The plumber accidentally floods a downstairs room in the process of doing the job, but he finishes the work by the date you asked for. The flooding costs you an amount equal to or greater than his bonus. Weeks after the job is over, he asks for the bonus. How excited are you to give it to him? Clearly Miso owes him the money. Clearly it would be right for them to just pay him and move on. But if I were rremoncake, I would have been so embarrassed by my screw-up that I wouldn't have ever even asked for it in the first place.
  - MartinCron 15y ago
    How excited are you to give it to him? The scenario implies that the impact of the production db nuke was equal or greater than the bonus. Depending on the context, the impact could range from trivial to catastrophic. The fact that it wasn't backed up only makes it worse. Sometimes I joke that correctly working yet poorly-written code is "conceptually broken". Similarly, any important data that isn't backed up is already "conceptually lost".
    - thaumaturgy 15y ago
      Sure, but it doesn't take a development team two to three days to recover "conceptually lost" data (as according to the post). If you're about to touch the production database in a way that could potentially end catastrophically, and there aren't backups, you really should stop and consider the meaning of life before proceeding. Preferably, you decide that backups are the meaning of life, and even if it's an imperfect backup, you decide to manually export the table(s) you're working on. Or something. He didn't do that. It's a rookie mistake. It cost the company two to three days of development team time to recover from it. For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff, I am super surprised that the response here wasn't, "You touched prod without a backup first?! Are you daft?", but was instead, "Miso is a bad company, you need to lawyer up and get what they owe you." Or, to put it another way: if there were any justice at all, this story would follow rremoncake around for just as long as it follows Miso around.
      - nknight 15y ago
        > It's a rookie mistake. It's a mistake I've seen people with 20 years of experience make. If you haven't done it already, you will eventually. When that day comes, I hope, but don't expect, you'll remember to apologize to this guy. > For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff How you get from "Hacker News" to "infallible operations engineers" is beyond me. Operations is a rare skill to begin with, and even those who are best at it will make these mistakes.