8 ms·

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy t

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

endtime 12y ago
> In what world Japan, I guess? I've never been there but the story was consistent with my impression of their work culture.
- HillRat 12y ago
  It was the AMEMB in Tokyo, though the basic principles apply to ay bureaucracy answering to political masters. Interns don't get AFSA (or, at the time, AFGE) union representation, and somebody's head was going to roll for that mistake, even though the company that programmed a non-confirmed global reset into a single keypress was truly at fault. Fair? Nope. Inevitable? Yep.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  This was the American Embassy, which follows American work culture. Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.
  - patio11 12y ago
    c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il... Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable, which blows my mind.)
    - eru 12y ago
      Not true. See correction to article.
      - nandemo 12y ago
        The correction is unclear... Since there are always exceptions, of course it's not the case that "dismissing a permanent employee (正社員) is always illegal". But there's in fact a (somewhat vague but broad) provision in labour law and also　precedents that make it very difficult to legally fire a permanent employee in normal circunstances. Basically you can legally fire a permanent employee in the same sense that a civil servant in most countries can be fired: if the employee does something egregious, like stealing from the company, not showing up for a long period of time with no reason, etc. Certainly not for incompetence, or even　if the company has been in the red for several years in a row. E.g. Japan Airlines went basically bankrupt (technically a restructuring) and even so they had trouble laying off part of the staff.
  - wildpeaks 12y ago
    The Japanese way is good in the sense that, as long as you have Internet, you could make your startup without worrying about putting a roof over your head or finding an office space to work from, and you get a still-full salary to bootstrap it without having to put the time. You even get access to a pool of other soon-to-available engineers to work with if you're stuck with other poor sods in the room. Definitely another scenario than the being suddendly kicked out of the door by security right before the week-end with a box of your belongings and, if you're lucky, a tiny check to not starve until next week.
    - billmalarky 12y ago
      I highly doubt you are allowed to retain ownership of anything you create on the job though.
pfisch 12y ago
He was probably fired because they realized they couldn't put a summer intern in control of such a critical system. I would make the same call.
- mikegreco 12y ago
  If you go with this line of reasoning, whoever put him in that position should also be fired, and their boss should be fired for putting someone in charge who made such a poor decision in the first place.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    That may have happened.
  - toyg 12y ago
    They might have been, we just don't know.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Only part of that makes sense. The person putting an intern in such a position of control should be reprimanded, but it wouldn't make much sense for the next level higher because there isn't a blatant mistake. Hiring someone that turns out to make a mistake isn't as blatant as giving an intern the power to shut down a mission critical system.
  - jasonwocky 12y ago
    The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss. e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that. In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.
sergiotapia 12y ago
Insane, but somebody had to pay for that screw up and you can bet your ass it wasn't going to be the guy managing the newbie 23 year old. It'll be the newbie 23 year old himself.
bonaldi 12y ago
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then caused an international crisis you're going to get fired too. Then years later HN will call for Dennis Ritchie to get fired instead.
- canjobear 12y ago
  Are you trying to say it's OK because Unix behaves analogously? It is definitely a problem with Unix also.
  - bonaldi 12y ago
    It is. Which is why everyone in Unix who types "rm -rf " then types their next character _very carefully_ and reads the line before committing. I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.
    - graylights 12y ago
      The proper answer is to type "rm <dir> -rf" otherwise you're risking a stray strike on enter.
      - gatehouse 12y ago
        The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system.
        goblin89 12y ago
        > The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system. And, of course, that should've been the solution to OP's incident with the Korean Airlines flight 007. Backups, surprisingly, are scarcely mentioned at all in this whole thread.
njharman 12y ago
In the world of bureaucratic need for scapegoats.
dm2 12y ago
I do agree with you. An equally sufficient solution would have been to install a safety switch on any button with that much importance. Something like this but probably smaller, or just a plastic cover that fit over the F7 key: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/ A fireable offense would be lying about the action or trying to cover it up. Should the lady who asked for the reset be fired for playing a game and asking him to reset the computer? Should the technician that didn't install some sort of safety be fired for not foreseeing this issue? He would be much less likely to make the same mistake in the future than the person who would replace him. If there are terminals that could erase a presidential report and there is no backup available, you send a non-critical staff member to guard every one of those terminals, or at least put a sticky-note in the middle of the monitor. I'd say several other people deserved to be fired for this, but the intern was not one of them.
chengiz 12y ago
IMO cleary he is not telling us the entire story.
mseebach 12y ago
Appropriate or not, it's probably what was to be expected in what I imagine even in 1981 was not the most enlightened HR management regime (the US foreign service). Also, 32 years is a lot of time to wash away the bitterness of having been unfairly fired from a summer job, especially if you, as the author, ended up doing pretty well for yourself. Also, whether or not it was appropriate is completely irrelevant to the story being told.
- emn13 12y ago
  I expect the HR management back then was more enlightened than it is now - the quick-to-pounce media and politically instigated witch hunts (terrorism, save-the-kids, etc.) have ensured that cover-your-ass is more and more a necessity.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    That sounds like rose colored glasses. The cold war had its fair share of witch hunts. Granted this was the 80's not the 50's but lets not forget McCarthyism was based around democracy vs communism. "That Korean announcement and the slow response by the US President—both caused by delayed real information—caused decades of conspiracy theories."
    - Spooky23 12y ago
      HR was called "Personnel" in those days. It was different. The reality here is that an intern doesn't have civil service protection, so it is quick and easy to dispose of them. Going after the supervisor may take longer, so if rapid action is needed, they'll fire the first person who serves "at the pleasure of" the executive.
    - emn13 12y ago
      Oh, I don't think people are any worse - I just think there's more adherence to the letter of whatever regulations there are now. The principles of zero-tolerance (three strikes...) have been widely applied, regardless of the nuance of some situation. Note also that it turns out the OP was "fired" but immediately rehired too...
mathattack 12y ago
Lots of fields are like that. You generally get paid better because of the risk. (I hope he was!)
nerfhammer 12y ago
He publicly embarrassed USG, POTUS and a major US ally. SK is going to call up the state dept and demand an explanation. Someone has to be fired. This isn't some startup in California where everyone just plays it cool. The termination of his boss and his boss's boss and his boss's boss's boss all the way up were probably considered as well.
- jheriko 12y ago
  I think you will find they embarssed themselves. Responsibility flows upwards, not downwards. Its just unfortunate that the people at the bottom are often carrying the people above far more than they should...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
dimitar 12y ago
According to his next post: What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)
- basicallydan 12y ago
  Well, that clears it up - and it's quite a clever way to tick the arbitrary "someone took the fall" box.
  - apples2apples 12y ago
    Itoh should have been fired.
    - nathanb 12y ago
      Why? How did Itoh demonstrate that the company would be better without him than with him?
      - apples2apples 12y ago
        He was the one who was more responsible for the incident than the intern.
        HCIdivision17 12y ago
        As acdha above notes, he was. But the author incredulously blurted out that he himself had hit the button when he was told his supervisor had been fired over the event (maybe ten minutes later). The reality was that his boss took the fall for him, which is awesome and terrible. Much of the discussion in this thread has been a tempest in a teapot due to missing context. His supervisor took the fall to protect him, he was fired on paper, but it was his last day anyway, and he did actually get to work at the embassy again, as it really was a simple innocent mistake. Though certainly one with serious, long-lasting consequences. Edit: http://globis.jp/774-2 http://globis.jp/774-2
ProAm 12y ago
attention to detail is a more valuable skill than people realize
rrss1122 12y ago
When so many people higher up are given incomplete information or even downright embarrassed on the world stage because of one simple mistake, I feel it is appropriate. It is still, however, doubly insane that one person's stray keystroke can do all of that.
logfromblammo 12y ago
I sure am glad that I never accidentally pushed an unlabeled and unprotected "get fired immediately" button. If it is important to not have all the workstations on site shut down at once, go to the control terminal and disconnect the keyboard before the system startup employee comes in without any clue as to what is going on and starts his ordinary daily routine. Maybe write a note and wedge it into his keys? Based solely on the shortened account, it was not appropriate at all to fire him. Convincing him that it was is just doubly inappropriate. There may be more to the story, but as it is, it looks like angry scapegoating against a hapless, lowest-level employee.
ufmace 12y ago
On the other hand, they're hiring people to do these things, not computer programs. Shouldn't we expect them to notice that when doing routine-thing-x, it's awfully easy to accidentally do catastrophically-dangerous-thing-y, and thus it would be a very good idea to be extremely slow and deliberate when doing routine-thing-x? I have to routinely create and drop databases on my local system. Our production databases, which I also have to connect to, contain hundreds, maybe thousands, of person-months of work. I realized that it would be a good idea, before issuing DROP DATABASE commands, to deliberately stop and double-check what server I'm connected to. Luckily, I haven't screwed that one up yet.

endtime 12y ago

> In what world Japan, I guess? I've never been there but the story was consistent with my impression of their work culture.

HillRat 12y ago
It was the AMEMB in Tokyo, though the basic principles apply to ay bureaucracy answering to political masters. Interns don't get AFSA (or, at the time, AFGE) union representation, and somebody's head was going to roll for that mistake, even though the company that programmed a non-confirmed global reset into a single keypress was truly at fault. Fair? Nope. Inevitable? Yep.
jpatokal 12y ago
This was the American Embassy, which follows American work culture. Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.
- patio11 12y ago
  c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il... Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable, which blows my mind.)
  - eru 12y ago
    Not true. See correction to article.
    - nandemo 12y ago
      The correction is unclear... Since there are always exceptions, of course it's not the case that "dismissing a permanent employee (正社員) is always illegal". But there's in fact a (somewhat vague but broad) provision in labour law and also　precedents that make it very difficult to legally fire a permanent employee in normal circunstances. Basically you can legally fire a permanent employee in the same sense that a civil servant in most countries can be fired: if the employee does something egregious, like stealing from the company, not showing up for a long period of time with no reason, etc. Certainly not for incompetence, or even　if the company has been in the red for several years in a row. E.g. Japan Airlines went basically bankrupt (technically a restructuring) and even so they had trouble laying off part of the staff.
- wildpeaks 12y ago
  The Japanese way is good in the sense that, as long as you have Internet, you could make your startup without worrying about putting a roof over your head or finding an office space to work from, and you get a still-full salary to bootstrap it without having to put the time. You even get access to a pool of other soon-to-available engineers to work with if you're stuck with other poor sods in the room. Definitely another scenario than the being suddendly kicked out of the door by security right before the week-end with a box of your belongings and, if you're lucky, a tiny check to not starve until next week.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    I highly doubt you are allowed to retain ownership of anything you create on the job though.

pfisch 12y ago

He was probably fired because they realized they couldn't put a summer intern in control of such a critical system. I would make the same call.

mikegreco 12y ago
If you go with this line of reasoning, whoever put him in that position should also be fired, and their boss should be fired for putting someone in charge who made such a poor decision in the first place.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  That may have happened.
- toyg 12y ago
  They might have been, we just don't know.
- hueving 12y ago
  Only part of that makes sense. The person putting an intern in such a position of control should be reprimanded, but it wouldn't make much sense for the next level higher because there isn't a blatant mistake. Hiring someone that turns out to make a mistake isn't as blatant as giving an intern the power to shut down a mission critical system.
- jasonwocky 12y ago
  The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss. e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that. In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.

sergiotapia 12y ago

Insane, but somebody had to pay for that screw up and you can bet your ass it wasn't going to be the guy managing the newbie 23 year old. It'll be the newbie 23 year old himself.

bonaldi 12y ago

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then caused an international crisis you're going to get fired too. Then years later HN will call for Dennis Ritchie to get fired instead.

canjobear 12y ago
Are you trying to say it's OK because Unix behaves analogously? It is definitely a problem with Unix also.
- bonaldi 12y ago
  It is. Which is why everyone in Unix who types "rm -rf " then types their next character _very carefully_ and reads the line before committing. I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.
  - graylights 12y ago
    The proper answer is to type "rm <dir> -rf" otherwise you're risking a stray strike on enter.
    - gatehouse 12y ago
      The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system.
      - goblin89 12y ago
        > The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system. And, of course, that should've been the solution to OP's incident with the Korean Airlines flight 007. Backups, surprisingly, are scarcely mentioned at all in this whole thread.

njharman 12y ago

In the world of bureaucratic need for scapegoats.

dm2 12y ago

I do agree with you. An equally sufficient solution would have been to install a safety switch on any button with that much importance. Something like this but probably smaller, or just a plastic cover that fit over the F7 key: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/ A fireable offense would be lying about the action or trying to cover it up. Should the lady who asked for the reset be fired for playing a game and asking him to reset the computer? Should the technician that didn't install some sort of safety be fired for not foreseeing this issue? He would be much less likely to make the same mistake in the future than the person who would replace him. If there are terminals that could erase a presidential report and there is no backup available, you send a non-critical staff member to guard every one of those terminals, or at least put a sticky-note in the middle of the monitor. I'd say several other people deserved to be fired for this, but the intern was not one of them.

chengiz 12y ago

IMO cleary he is not telling us the entire story.

mseebach 12y ago

Appropriate or not, it's probably what was to be expected in what I imagine even in 1981 was not the most enlightened HR management regime (the US foreign service). Also, 32 years is a lot of time to wash away the bitterness of having been unfairly fired from a summer job, especially if you, as the author, ended up doing pretty well for yourself. Also, whether or not it was appropriate is completely irrelevant to the story being told.

emn13 12y ago
I expect the HR management back then was more enlightened than it is now - the quick-to-pounce media and politically instigated witch hunts (terrorism, save-the-kids, etc.) have ensured that cover-your-ass is more and more a necessity.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  That sounds like rose colored glasses. The cold war had its fair share of witch hunts. Granted this was the 80's not the 50's but lets not forget McCarthyism was based around democracy vs communism. "That Korean announcement and the slow response by the US President—both caused by delayed real information—caused decades of conspiracy theories."
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    HR was called "Personnel" in those days. It was different. The reality here is that an intern doesn't have civil service protection, so it is quick and easy to dispose of them. Going after the supervisor may take longer, so if rapid action is needed, they'll fire the first person who serves "at the pleasure of" the executive.
  - emn13 12y ago
    Oh, I don't think people are any worse - I just think there's more adherence to the letter of whatever regulations there are now. The principles of zero-tolerance (three strikes...) have been widely applied, regardless of the nuance of some situation. Note also that it turns out the OP was "fired" but immediately rehired too...

mathattack 12y ago

Lots of fields are like that. You generally get paid better because of the risk. (I hope he was!)

nerfhammer 12y ago

He publicly embarrassed USG, POTUS and a major US ally. SK is going to call up the state dept and demand an explanation. Someone has to be fired. This isn't some startup in California where everyone just plays it cool. The termination of his boss and his boss's boss and his boss's boss's boss all the way up were probably considered as well.

jheriko 12y ago
I think you will find they embarssed themselves. Responsibility flows upwards, not downwards. Its just unfortunate that the people at the bottom are often carrying the people above far more than they should...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

dimitar 12y ago

According to his next post: What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)

basicallydan 12y ago
Well, that clears it up - and it's quite a clever way to tick the arbitrary "someone took the fall" box.
- apples2apples 12y ago
  Itoh should have been fired.
  - nathanb 12y ago
    Why? How did Itoh demonstrate that the company would be better without him than with him?
    - apples2apples 12y ago
      He was the one who was more responsible for the incident than the intern.
      - HCIdivision17 12y ago
        As acdha above notes, he was. But the author incredulously blurted out that he himself had hit the button when he was told his supervisor had been fired over the event (maybe ten minutes later). The reality was that his boss took the fall for him, which is awesome and terrible. Much of the discussion in this thread has been a tempest in a teapot due to missing context. His supervisor took the fall to protect him, he was fired on paper, but it was his last day anyway, and he did actually get to work at the embassy again, as it really was a simple innocent mistake. Though certainly one with serious, long-lasting consequences. Edit: http://globis.jp/774-2 http://globis.jp/774-2

ProAm 12y ago

attention to detail is a more valuable skill than people realize

rrss1122 12y ago

When so many people higher up are given incomplete information or even downright embarrassed on the world stage because of one simple mistake, I feel it is appropriate. It is still, however, doubly insane that one person's stray keystroke can do all of that.

logfromblammo 12y ago

I sure am glad that I never accidentally pushed an unlabeled and unprotected "get fired immediately" button. If it is important to not have all the workstations on site shut down at once, go to the control terminal and disconnect the keyboard before the system startup employee comes in without any clue as to what is going on and starts his ordinary daily routine. Maybe write a note and wedge it into his keys? Based solely on the shortened account, it was not appropriate at all to fire him. Convincing him that it was is just doubly inappropriate. There may be more to the story, but as it is, it looks like angry scapegoating against a hapless, lowest-level employee.

ufmace 12y ago

On the other hand, they're hiring people to do these things, not computer programs. Shouldn't we expect them to notice that when doing routine-thing-x, it's awfully easy to accidentally do catastrophically-dangerous-thing-y, and thus it would be a very good idea to be extremely slow and deliberate when doing routine-thing-x? I have to routinely create and drop databases on my local system. Our production databases, which I also have to connect to, contain hundreds, maybe thousands, of person-months of work. I realized that it would be a good idea, before issuing DROP DATABASE commands, to deliberately stop and double-check what server I'm connected to. Luckily, I haven't screwed that one up yet.