Just curious to see what type of goofs everyone has made in the workplace. Were you new? What was the impact? How was it handled?
I'll start... First few months out of undergrad and working for a large aerospace/defense company, I'm for some reason immediately given the keys to the kingdom (r00t) without hesitation. I'm very tired this day, having been out the night before celebrating St Patty's day, and am writing a bash script on one of the large dev ERP servers. I intend to create a sleep/pause function in the script, but for some reason use the command 'halt' instead. I test my work and guess what? Boom, server goes down.
It took me a second to realize what I had done... It was immediately confirmed as my ssh session was terminated and the server was no longer responding to pings. While my team, team lead and manager worked in a different state, I rushed over to an on-site UNIX manager of another team and let him know what I believe happened.
I ended up notifying my team lead of what happened -- pretty sure I received the idiot of the month award for that one. It was well taken, though he let me know they had noticed and were investigating the cause of the shutdown as I messaged them. My mistake was never forgotten though; when I eventually got to take a trip up to their office and meet the team, a nameplate has been created for the cube where I would be working with the label "Halt" printed on it.
That's about it for big mistakes in my last 4-5 years. I've seen others make big mistakes (taking down networks), and I've seen people fired over mistakes. At my last company, I was quite literally in charge of an AIX-based casino gaming system that required uptime to take in guest money (100+ million a year). At large global companies, I've certainly been in charge of systems as important, though I'm pretty sure an oops at the casino would have been a no warning, you're fired. That's just how it went there.
