Comment by chadash
4 years ago
Thanks for sharing this. I hope that the person who made the mistake (or better yet, their manager) sees these types of stories and realizes how common this sort of thing is, even for good engineers.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's never an engineer's fault, but this sort of thing usually relates more to faulty processes than people.
I'm reminded of the engineer at AWS who was writing a bash script about 5 years ago and unwittingly took down a good chunk of AWS's main east coast region, causing outages for tens of thousands of websites. I remember admiring that their response wasn't to fire the engineer, but rather to say that any system that large that allows a single non-malicious engineer to take it down must need some beefing up to make that sort of mistake impossible.
Thank you for the appreciation, it was in part my goal to normalize mistakes and to treat them in a light manner.
I in particular object to kicking a man when already down, which is a common behavior these days.
I think spreading awareness of the error, pointing out the stupidity of it, or taking entertainment value from it is really cruel. I'm sure the person involved is aware they screwed up and is embarrassed, so all these piled up messages only hurt.
And I still think it was incredibly harmless. Any individual would get at most one useless email, which contained nothing inappropriate.
As said, this intern must professionalize in their errors, as this is not a pro level screwup.