Ask HN: What was the most embarrassing thing you did early in your career?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239180

by gravy • 8 years ago

2 4 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm talking 0-3 years in!

Java dev at a trucking company. Their IT shop grew organically and stuff wasn't exactly well-engineered at any level. We used Websphere on the AS/400 (system i now). When I arrived I found such fun practices as source control being a shared network directory and 63.5k JSPs (because >64k JSPs bombed).

Anyway, they had no real test environment but relied on a byzantine set of flags, logins, etc. to "test" in production. Being new and not used to the ropes, I nonetheless thought I knew what I was doing.

I was making a change to a Bill of Lading input page. I filled up a load with nonsense stuff like 50 barrels of beer and 10 containers of cats. Hit the button, eyeballed the change, said "yep, done".

Boss comes around the next day asking who had made a shipment request for beer and cats. I guess a truck had actually rolled around to the dist center to pick up this load; I guess the system lacked the "what" and just listed the quantities.

Whoops.

I was infamous for the beer and cats shipment for my entire time there, everyone conveniently forgetting the insanity of their staging environment setup.

TL;DR : Created a real shipment for 50 barrels of beer and 10 containers of cats

gravy• 8 years ago

How many cats are in a container of cats?

DeathRabbit2• 8 years ago

I would guess it depends if they're left whole and in-tact or not.

jxub• 8 years ago

everyone conveniently forgetting the insanity of their staging environment setup.

Same as in the famous "erased the production database" reddit thread, many companies prefer to shift the blame to the individual, failing to see their own faults.

Anyway, that's a pretty good story to tell.

Ask HN: What was the most embarrassing thing you did early in your career?

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