Ask HN: What was your worst screw-up at work?

Early in my career (software engineer) I was debugging an issue in our application that was causing some funky data to be written to the DB (turned out to be double encoding of UTF8 strings). While validating the issue locally, I decided the best course of action was to drop the table and recreate it. I did just that, except I still saw the issue. Well, turns out that I was connected to not to my local DB, but instead the production DB.

My manager was very understanding, and walked me through the procedure to restore the DB from backup.

I learned an extremely important lesson that day, and have always remembered it when I see others screw up.

First job out of college working at a healthcare organization, our healthcare system db was mssql. There was a column in one of the tables called `recordDeleted` which basically controlled whether or not the document would show up on the front end. I ran an update statement and forgot a where clause (specifying which records I needed to modify), setting thousands of records in prod to 'record delete' status, causing a whirlwind of confusion as to what was happening while workers were servicing clients.

Wrote a mail address in source code thinking that no developer ever would test the app configuring a real smtp server.

We ended up sending emails to the board of a multi-billion company containing "bad words" as the dev were filling text fields with insults and whatever during their tests. I didn't get fired but I still think I was very close.

Wasted about 20k ad budget in 6 hours by targeting too generic of an audience by accident.

Burned myself really bad on a flattop grill. Still have the scar 10 years later

Leaving the s3 keys open on a public GitHub account. Rookie mistake.