Well, utter incompetence is different from making a single honest mistake,
no matter how large. And managing utter incompetence is also a management
task; one that it sounds like your current org is not good at.


On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Michael Tiernan <[email protected]>
wrote:

> 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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