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Comment by _nickwhite | Hacker News Reader

An entry-level admin is now unemployed, just before the holidays.

> An entry-level admin is now unemployed, just before the holidays.

I highly doubt that entry-level admins at Microsoft have access to DNS for their primary domain. My guess is that this incident is a lot more interesting than that.

Yep, this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you can just toss a couple approvals on and change at a company as big as Microsoft. How this made it through the review process would be very interesting

Nah, if it's already reverted, they're good to go. A post-mortem with how something like that got through will definitely be on the table though.

I'm wondering how such a change would get "merged" in to begin with. I imagine even non-network engineers would get this huge itch having a large corporate contain a private IP in the changelist (I'm the non network engineer and can't really explain why it's bad. But it FEELS wrong and sometimes you at least need to use instinct to get another pair of eyes on something).

I hope not. Failures are on a spectrum and this was unfortunate but probably not malicious. All things considered this should be a lesson learned. There should be more failsafe mechanisms in place so juniors can fail safely and learn from them. The absolute worst thing we can do is shame an individual so they don’t attempt to try new things in fear of ridicule.

> There should be more failsafe mechanisms in place so juniors can fail safely and learn from them.

And if not, whoever put the junior in that role is the person responsible for the problem.

well theoretically you could argue the structure of this task should have 'dual control' / multiple people should be involved in the process checking each others work. preferably even split it up people who do not know or interact with each other on a regular basis. yes it would be slower but its important to get it correct.

might as well throw in some automated poke-yoke or whatever too.

in that case there is no fault in any of the juniors or operators, the fault is in management for failing to implement infrastructure to force a critical process to have more than one control

The seniors all go on leave and the interns are left to run the place. If they fired the juniors the seniors would have to come back from holiday!

This is most likely a honest mistake. Smart managers don't fire employees for such mistakes unless their behavior regarding that mistake is inappropriate.

As the story goes, after a junior admin wiped a production database. The boss was asked if he should be fired. To what he answered: "Fire him? No way! Not after such an expensive training." Now, he knows.

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