My first job right out of college was with a small software company that developed systems for medical offices. The company covered every aspect from start to finish, which included developing the network/hardware equipment and software, installation, and support.
Being a small company, the sale of a system was a big thing. In our town, word of mouth helped create sales, which helped us make payroll, so keeping customers happy was very important.
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My primary job was to program, but I also helped out with installation and support. I found myself frequently having to go to a customer site and troubleshoot a network or hardware problem. Additionally, I was called upon to help with installations -- not just the software I was developing, but things like printers and PCs as well. That's the nature of the small business.
Business was booming, and our staff was having a hard time keeping up, so the owner of the company decided to hire some young college students to help out, especially with the basic tasks and, after evaluation of their skills, wherever we could use their assistance. Most were very inexperienced, but some were pretty smart -- the hacker type.
Some of these hacker-type students would accompany me on service calls when I was needed. At the time of this incident, I was loading a lot of patches and software upgrades to make the programs run better and to eliminate bugs.
I headed out one afternoon to do some software loads with one of the students who'd proven himself to be one of the more experienced that was working with us at the time -- or at least he seemed that way. The job involved rebooting the server after loading the patches. We arrived on site, and I asked the office manager if I could load the patches and then let her know when it was time to reboot. With her approval I loaded the software, then asked my young assistant to down the server. To my horror he walked up and just unplugged it from the outlet.
Down went everything. All the employees who were logged in lost their connection, and some even lost the data they were working on. I looked at the young man and asked him what he was thinking. Everyone in the busy office was looking at him, including the office manager. He started shaking, and I started to feel really bad for him.
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Download now »Secondly, no OS can prevent the loss of all data when a system is unplugged. Saving of data is done at intervals while running, and also when a system is going through an orderly shutdown. No disparaging comment about Windows was necessary here.
What I liked about this is that this isn't about some lame new hire. It is about the author relating a mistake that he made and the lesson he learned from it. This article harkens back to the types of articles we got for this column back in the day of the print version.
That being said. How could that guy think that pulling the plug was good for *any* computer, let alone the server?
Also, another lesson to be cleaned from this article: always verify that people are logged out. It reminds me about one case where one person kept logging back in. After the third trip to the file server and seeing her back on, I locked her account and then logged her off. I then let the manager know who was holding up the entire company and that I would only unlock her account after the work was done and the manager had instructed me to do so. After the server work was done and after a long meeting with the manager explaining that no, she wasn't the most important person in the company, I was given the go ahead to let her back in.
I like this article as well because it's not about how stupid anyone in particular is... it's about something that happens all the time in the real world: learning from innocent mistakes and incorrect assumptions!
I always say the best IT people are the ones who've managed to bring down a production system at some point in their lives. ;) It's a lesson that never leaves you. I usually just smile and tell our students the first time they make a big mistake, "welcome to the club". I think most of us have brought down a production system or a server at one point in time... if we're lucky, we recovered before the users noticed! If we're unlucky... then everyone knows about it and you have to grin and take it in stride.
It's easy to forget when you've been working in IT long enough that you didn't come out of the box "fully cooked" either, and that there were a lot of things you had to learn in the experience department before you got to where you are now. I find myself making the same mistakes with some of the students we hire, particularly the ones that are real superstars... I have a tendency to assume because they're bright and motivated and don't need lots of babysitting that they should automatically know what I'm talking about, but I forget that they are learning the hardest thing to learn about a job: the procedures, the culture, and the stuff that you need to know but is never covered in the classroom. There are some things that you only learn by actually being in a job and supporting a real system and *nobody* knows it all right out of school.
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