On 5/30/14 1:11 AM, David Lang wrote:
> One of the most corrosive things you can do to a team of sysadmins is
> to start playing the blame game and punishing people for making
> mistakes. I've seen it happen.
There's another side of the equation too and that is not punishing for
mistakes at all.

I worked with a [character] who was worse than a bull in a china shop.
At one point he was "cleaning" the racks (good idea and did a fair part
of it well and yes I told him) but he got overly enthusiastic and *cut*,
with wire cutters, the connecting cable to a big Sun storage array for
our most important customer. When he saw what he'd done, he pulled the
power connection to the rack.

Either one of those actions could have been dealt with but both caused
massive disk corruption.

Okay, massive screwup. Took me and another person 18 hours to return the
system to the land of the living. I've done stuff probably close to as
bad. Learn from the mistake and move on and don't do it again.

However, when he *did* do it again, three weeks later to a different
storage array in a different rack and didn't learn from the previous
mistake, it is a disaster and should not have been permitted to continue
but it did. No ramifications.

So, we all learned that make a mistake, you're forgiven. Keep making
mistakes and no one cares.

Give out a root password to an outside contractor who called on behalf
(supposedly) of one of the corporate branches. No ramifications. Zero. I
quickly changed the password on the specific machine and told the boss.
No ramifications. Found out an hour later he also gave the password to
our divisions Root CA. No ramifications.


Wow, look how short this message is. So *that's* what a delete key is
for.... Hmmm....

-- 
  << MCT >> Michael C Tiernan. http://www.linkedin.com/in/mtiernan    
  Non Impediti Ratione Cogatationis
  Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs
   should relax and get used to the idea. -Robert A. Heinlein

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