Hacker News Reader

Comment by well_done | Hacker News Reader

Well, let's take a breath and be grateful that even MS can mess something like this up.

One dev or 1000, who cares, whatever they chose did not work particularly well. Are "they" to blame? Yes. Are the engineers to blame? Probably not. Is management the culprit? We don't know.

What's left? Next time your customers bug you about some random downtime caused by an overworked datacenter intern, don't feel stressed. Take the time to remember that even if you would've had billions of dollars, years of experience and thousands of employees, you could've messed up, just like MS did :)

View on HN

"Take the time to remember that even if you would've [sic] had billions of dollars, years of experience and thousands of employees, you could've messed up, just like MS did :)"

When you are the direct, contracted, IT support for a company then you do have responsibilities. You might be considered responsible for timely delivery of patches - a fair argument in court I think. Mitigations might involve helpdesk logs as well as contracts.

well_done: Your tone comes across as BOFH. I'm possibly a simple PHB who owns an electric cattle prod that is wired up to the mains (three phase) but I prefer to get sign off for a project via work committed and not threat done.

>Your tone comes across as BOFH

I didn't read it like that, and I'm usually the first to read things negatively. I read it as motivational: don't feel bad about your own mistakes, even the big guys with tons of money and a lot of really smart people mess up sometimes. So cut yourself some slack and just do the best you can.

"Next time your customers bug you about some random downtime caused by an overworked datacenter intern, don't feel stressed. Take the time to remember that even if you would've had billions of dollars, years of experience and thousands of employees, you could've messed up, just like MS did :)"

I missed the :) which might sound a bit naff now but was probably intended to deflect comments like mine. Hit taken. However I did invoke BOFH which is (I hope) normally seen as an indication that a comment is not to be taken too seriously.

EDIT: BOFH => Negative - nope, not here.

You're correct, I read "BOFH" as a negative. I apologize since you did not mean it in that way. I never thought that BOFH would ever be considered the good guy in the story :)

> an electric cattle prod that is wired up to the mains (three phase)

"Have you seen the boss's new toy?" "Yeah. Coincidentally, I'll be working remotely moving forward. Good luck!"

Coming across as BOFH was not my intention at all, maybe I should refrain from using emojis to convey meaning ;)

I just thought that if you're working in a high pressure environment (and this applies to virtually every coding shop I've ever known) and get trouble from all sides all the time it feels reassuring to know that in fact, not you are the problem, neither is your employer, stuff like this just happens even to the best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com