Mistakes at work
Making mistakes is very common when you start working and doesn’t matter your seniority level. I have 12 years of experience, and I’m still making mistakes and my co-workers do.
Let me share with you some stories about the mistakes I made, my co-worker's mistakes, and how my bosses reacted.
First silly mistake
When I started working, I didn’t know I have to connect through SSH to a server, I thought you have to work with XAMPP to run PHP, MySQL, and other things.
In that job, I discovered two of the best software I still use:
At that time I edited all the development files directly on the server through WinSCP, but one day It lost connection and my file was saved with 0 bytes when It reconnected.
I didn’t know what to do, I was trying to undo this with the famous key combination CTRL + Z trying to recover the file (What an innocent programmer I was).
With great fear I asked my boss for help, he was very understanding, and not only did he restore the backup he also taught me the command to restore it by myself.
What I learned from this experience
- You can ask for help.
- My boss was understanding and also thought about what to do.
- I learned how to use some commands for Linux.
Second mistake
In my second job, I was part of the team in charge of developing a website and a casual game for a very important soccer event.
In this application, people could have the opportunity to win a trip for this event, it was a penalty game. If any player scored three goals, you win the prize.
At that time, I only had developed some small casual games with the same mechanic: people log in to the application, play the game to earn a chance to win a prize, and share their score in their Facebook Feed.
The main problem with this application, the client never told us the date the game was supposed to be in production. One weekend before the launch, we left a configuration where any player will win, this had to be tested by the client, but we never received any feedback.
On Monday after this weekend, the CTO of the company called me to ask what he needed to do to publish the site, so I told him what to do.
After some hours, we received a call from the CEO of the company, he was very furious because there was already a winner, and it wasn’t supposed to be.
When he arrived at the office, he called the team and started yelling at us, and he told us some awful things that scared us a lot. He was not as understanding as my previous boss.
How can you talk to the team like that? We were 22 or 23 years old and nobody monitored us. After that, I felt very unmotivated, sad, and scared because I thought I could have lost my job.
What I learned from this experience
- I learned to double-check what I do.
- Having at least three environments (LOCAL, QAS, and PROD).
- Be compressive and empathic with your team.
- If one member of the team fails, the team fails.
- You have to look for solutions, not yell at people.
My co-worker's mistakes
It’s time to share some stories of my co-workers.
Not shutting down large databases
As my second or third year, as a lead developer, I was in charge of a project where we have to broadcast soccer matches for a very popular soccer team in South America.
The main tasks were:
- Prepare the infrastructure for the mobile API and the website.
- Change the size of the database cluster (there were two because we had a writer and reader cluster).
- Start the server for the streaming.
- Shut down all the extra machines, return to the initial size of the database, and stop the streaming server.
One of my co-workers was in charge of doing this one weekend, he did all the things except reducing the database size, but I forgot to check if he completed all the tasks.
One week later after that match, the CTO was checking the cloud account, and he realized that there were some extra resources running that they weren’t supposed to.
The bill for those days was between 1.5K and 2K, but the main problem was that this account was a client account, so the CTO didn’t know how to tell the client about this situation.
When my co-worker found out about this, he was very scared because he could be fired or thinking about how he could pay this amount using his salary.
After all of this, I talked to him because I remembered the first story I told you before, so I decided to motivate him with these words:
Don’t be afraid I have your back. If the team fails the team will deal with the consequences.
Those words encouraged him, and he was not afraid anymore. There were no consequences, the COO and CMO negotiated with the client to develop an Apple TV for that amount.
In this case, I used my previous experience and chose to be a better person than my previous boss and look for alternatives.
As you can see, I made a lot of mistakes and my co-workers too (there are more stories for a second part), my advice, don’t give up, learn from your mistakes, be empathic, and always tries to be a better person because you can become the mentor you always needed.
