What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)
The reality was that his boss took the fall for him, which is awesome and terrible. Much of the discussion in this thread has been a tempest in a teapot due to missing context.
His supervisor took the fall to protect him, he was fired on paper, but it was his last day anyway, and he did actually get to work at the embassy again, as it really was a simple innocent mistake.
Though certainly one with serious, long-lasting consequences.
Edit: http://globis.jp/774-2
It seems that the translators could have saved their work more regularly -- perhaps they hold some of the blame. Obviously the poster could have thought a bit before hitting the button -- he holds all the blame for the resetting of all the terminals. How is Itoh "more responsible"?
Mr. Beck wasn't culpable because he didn't understand the full effects of his actions or the tension of the current situation. Ioth should not have let Beck in the door that morning and he should not have given that much power to the intern.
Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then caused an international crisis you're going to get fired too.
Then years later HN will call for Dennis Ritchie to get fired instead.
And even if you don't buy that, if pushing the button's not a big deal it doesn't need all the safeguards everyone's yelling for. (Had such safeguards been in place he might equally well have seen them, thought "oh, nobody's in, this will do what I want anyway" and approved it).
And given that it's right next to a 'single terminal reset' key, it should be immediately obvious to anyone who's ever used a keyboard - mistakes can and do happen, even when you're fluent.
The first thing I do on a new Firefox installation is enable "Restore all tabs on startup".
It is definitely a problem with Unix also.
I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.
And, of course, that should've been the solution to OP's incident with the Korean Airlines flight 007. Backups, surprisingly, are scarcely mentioned at all in this whole thread.
The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"
"rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root
1. You type it into the wrong system (D'oh)
2. You have run `mount --bind / /somewhere/else` then `rm -rf /somewhere` a week later
:(
$ cd dir where there are source files and temp files
$ rm *.tmp # or so you think
'.tmp not found'
# too badPremature enter just results in:
[web@server /]$ rm ~
rm: cannot remove `/home/web': Is a directory
Every few days I remind myself of this.... then I have to delete another directory with a git repository in it, and end up add the -f in again
rmgit()
{
git status
read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
echo
if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
then
rm .git -rf
fi
} rmrf()
{
(echo "The following files are going to be deleted!!!"
for FILE in "$@"; do
echo "<<<" "$FILE" ">>>"
done) | less
read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
echo
if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
then
rm -rf "$@"
fi
}Such as this classic:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...
http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2001/1416.html
Uninstall wipes out your Windows directory.
so of course, I said "I'll just uninstall it from there and install it in the correct folder" and it proceeded to delete C:/Program Files/
$ cp -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
$ (run some commands to verify copy did what I wanted)
$ rm -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
rm -rf *
in their shell history? Now it's just one accidental twitch away.
Fortunately, despite rm's poor choice of options and bash's poor default handling of variable name typos and the obvious PEBKAC, backups saved the day here.
People are human. Policy ought to reflect this.
I imagine that someone wanted someone's head, so whose head should it have been? They guy who wrote the system couldn't be fired, he was in a different company. And maybe a macro has been assigned to that key, so it wasn't his fault anyway.
Unfortunately, most small companies have no-one who fills that role, or if they do, it's the same person who both has the power to fire others, and is unwilling to entertain the notion that they themselves are at fault.
I was enlisted in the Marines, MOS as a programmer (4063), 1989 - 1993. I never really programmed, but spend my time as a small computer support guy.
Computer games were officially forbidden, but unofficially tolerated, provided one was discrete. I suspect the same 'don't ask don't tell' policy applied to EUCE at the embassy in question.
Sea story. My team was once directed by our boss, the Major, to 'sweep' the command for 'games' and remove them from computers. This took the better part of two weeks, and was massively unpopular with our peers. 'A Marine On Duty Has No Friends', we repeated to ourselves. We even got into the spirit of things and deleted games from _our_ computers.
Near the end of this evolution I hand-carried some paper into my Major's office. He was, yes, playing a computer game.
He did at least have the grace to look embarrassed.
you cannot fat finger rm -rf /
# rm -rf /tmp/bla
# rm -rf / tmp/blaFar from perfect - it depended on the order of deletion - but a more general solution than preserve root. Of course it still requires the user to mark things they consider "important".
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Apr 27 17:02 cc -> /etc/alternatives/cc
Guess what happens when you paste a whole list of those into a console as root?
For example:
$ echo "asdf" > foo
$ cat foo
asdf
$ lrwxwrwxrwx 1 root root -> foo
lrwxrwxrwx: command not found
$ cat foo
$
Out of curiosity, what was the solution to fix all that?
To prevent this from happening with me, I've added the following line to my `.Xdefaults`
URxvt.perl-ext: confirm-paste
Responsibility flows upwards, not downwards. Its just unfortunate that the people at the bottom are often carrying the people above far more than they should...
e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that.
In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.
An equally sufficient solution would have been to install a safety switch on any button with that much importance. Something like this but probably smaller, or just a plastic cover that fit over the F7 key: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/
A fireable offense would be lying about the action or trying to cover it up.
Should the lady who asked for the reset be fired for playing a game and asking him to reset the computer?
Should the technician that didn't install some sort of safety be fired for not foreseeing this issue?
He would be much less likely to make the same mistake in the future than the person who would replace him.
If there are terminals that could erase a presidential report and there is no backup available, you send a non-critical staff member to guard every one of those terminals, or at least put a sticky-note in the middle of the monitor.
I'd say several other people deserved to be fired for this, but the intern was not one of them.
Also, whether or not it was appropriate is completely irrelevant to the story being told.
"That Korean announcement and the slow response by the US President—both caused by delayed real information—caused decades of conspiracy theories."
The reality here is that an intern doesn't have civil service protection, so it is quick and easy to dispose of them. Going after the supervisor may take longer, so if rapid action is needed, they'll fire the first person who serves "at the pleasure of" the executive.
Note also that it turns out the OP was "fired" but immediately rehired too...
I have to routinely create and drop databases on my local system. Our production databases, which I also have to connect to, contain hundreds, maybe thousands, of person-months of work. I realized that it would be a good idea, before issuing DROP DATABASE commands, to deliberately stop and double-check what server I'm connected to. Luckily, I haven't screwed that one up yet.
Based solely on the shortened account, it was not appropriate at all to fire him. Convincing him that it was is just doubly inappropriate. There may be more to the story, but as it is, it looks like angry scapegoating against a hapless, lowest-level employee.
Japan, I guess? I've never been there but the story was consistent with my impression of their work culture.
Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.
Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable, which blows my mind.)
Basically you can legally fire a permanent employee in the same sense that a civil servant in most countries can be fired: if the employee does something egregious, like stealing from the company, not showing up for a long period of time with no reason, etc. Certainly not for incompetence, or even if the company has been in the red for several years in a row.
E.g. Japan Airlines went basically bankrupt (technically a restructuring) and even so they had trouble laying off part of the staff.
You even get access to a pool of other soon-to-available engineers to work with if you're stuck with other poor sods in the room.
Definitely another scenario than the being suddendly kicked out of the door by security right before the week-end with a box of your belongings and, if you're lucky, a tiny check to not starve until next week.