burying issues

How many of you do this at work. Like make a mistake. It gets corrected. Nobody's breathing down your throat about it, so you let it go. I heard this term in the movie inside man with Denzel Washington. I thought about it at work recently, because sometimes we have small outages and our proactive response keeps customers from knowing something even went wrong because services are restored so quickly. I know this goes against stuff in the SLA's that we may make with companies, but sometimes even management says "bury it" Just wanted to hear some experiences so I could have a good laugh this afternoon, I know y'all got some stories.

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

undomiel

Unless the problem hit more than a few people, generally we wouldn't mention something had happen. What they don't notice we shouldn't alarm them with was the attitude.

dtlokee

Keep in mind the phrase "bury it" does not just apply to mistakes made in IT. Do you think you are going to hear about all of the mistakes made in other departments? It just happens that due to the interactive nature if networks, when there is an issue everyone will feel it. Routing table convergence, server adds and migrations, the list goes on. They are all going to be noticed by the end users. On the other hand the manager that does a poor job during the hiring process causes a company hire an employee who is then let somone go after 2 months of training and mentoring will never be held accountable for the time and money the company just lost on the employee.

I have see more engineers have problems by giving the end users too much information, because from that day forward any time something doesn't work they will blame it on whatever the last issue was.

UnixGuy

if the users or the customer is not aware that a problem happened, I see no reason why we should inform him !

skrpune

UnixGuy wrote: »

if the users or the customer is not aware that a problem happened, I see no reason why we should inform him !

I can completely get this point of view, but one thing to keep in mind...if a customer/user/boss doesn't know that they actually need you & your services, then it might be detrimental to bury things. You can end up being seen as a non-essential employee or department if you consistently fix things behind the scenes & don't let anyone know that there was a problem that cropped up. Unless the mistake is totally your fault and unless revealing it means career suicide, I say clue folks in on the miraculous fixes that go on before they even know they have a problem. Otherwise, when someone's looking at reducing their expenses, you &/or your department may not make the cut...

UnixGuy

skrpune wrote: »

I can completely get this point of view, but one thing to keep in mind...if a customer/user/boss doesn't know that they actually need you & your services, then it might be detrimental to bury things. You can end up being seen as a non-essential employee or department if you consistently fix things behind the scenes & don't let anyone know that there was a problem that cropped up. Unless the mistake is totally your fault and unless revealing it means career suicide, I say clue folks in on the miraculous fixes that go on before they even know they have a problem. Otherwise, when someone's looking at reducing their expenses, you &/or your department may not make the cut...

well that's true and I agree, but I think I had different type of "problems" in my mind when I wrote it.

for example, I once rebooted a server at a customer site by mistake, I was just fixing other problem and rebooted the wrong machine, causing inconsistencies in the hard disk. I immediately fixed the problem and I don't think the "administrators" there even noticed, this kind of problem they don't need to know about

but yes, usually anything we do at any site, we write a service report and give them a copy of it, so they know what they're paying for. And in IT, problems will always happen.

skrpune

UnixGuy wrote: »

well that's true and I agree, but I think I had different type of "problems" in my mind when I wrote it.

for example, I once rebooted a server at a customer site by mistake, I was just fixing other problem and rebooted the wrong machine, causing inconsistencies in the hard disk. I immediately fixed the problem and I don't think the "administrators" there even noticed, this kind of problem they don't need to know about

In that case, I totally agree with you - that's one thing you kinda want to sweep under the rug! It's not like you have anything to gain by saying "um, yeah...hi...you may not have noticed but I uh totally borked up, but I fixed it, no harm no foul!"

royal

I was at a client doing some Exchange stuff while one of our other Exchange engineers was shadowing me. The other engineer was next to me (client was in another room) and the other engineer said she just got a warning saying her machine just got infected and she immediately pulled the network cable. She asked me whether or not she should tell the client. I told her it was her call. She told the client. Most people wouldn't have.

JDMurray

If I'm at a customer's site and I cause any changes that are a violation of the customer's security policy--which includes the unscheduled rebooting of a server--I've got an ethical obligation to report it. If it's something that is expected to occur during normal maintenance (e.g., unplugging a network cable for a few seconds), then that's nothing to report.

When in doubt, ask yourself, "Was what I just did written to a log file somewhere?" If the answer is "yes," you'd better mention it to someone.

msteinhilber

If we buried all of our issues, we'd be working with a lot less peop....... err not those issues, oh.

Yea, it happens quite a bit in our shop. I work with somebody who does this all the time where something fairly significant is noticed but they don't mention it because it would mean they would probably have to start fixing the issue. Instead, they'll say nothing about it I suppose in hopes that once it crosses the threshold and becomes apparent, that maybe they won't be the one dealing with it. Incredibly frustrating, especially when it's something that if addressed earlier would have potentially eliminated any downtime and could have been tackled more in a structured manner rather than blowing up in the middle of an already busy day so you had to drop what you're doing to deal with it AND deal with upset users at the same time since it's now causing a disruption.

dynamik

It's Saturday night, so I'm burying my issues as well

Oh wait, I'm off-topic too. Man, a lot of us missed the point. Oh well, at least Issues wasn't your dog...

royal

JDMurray wrote: »

When in doubt, ask yourself, "Was what I just did written to a log file somewhere?" If the answer is "yes," you'd better mention it to someone.

I love how you went from looking at it from an ethical perspective to avoiding being caught due to your actions being possibly tracked.

I know what you mean though. I'm just giving ya a hard time!

JDMurray

royal wrote: »

I love how you went from looking at it from an ethical perspective to avoiding being caught due to your actions being possibly tracked.

Being ethical and virtuous are two different things.