
My Most Embarrassing Mistakes as a Programmer (So Far) - BerislavLopac
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/29/my-most-embarrassing-mistakes-as-a-programmer-so-far/
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reallydontask
I once made a bad design decision that led through a chain of errors to ~
£120K in contract penalties (That was the profit on that contract for the
first quarter wiped out, allegedly)

From them on I always asked at interviews how would such a issue be dealt
with.

Most interviewers would go on about how it's never only the fault of the
developer, etc .. but one basically said: Well, we might need to reevaluate
your position at the company.

Turns out that the guy was a totally incompetent manager who was sacked so I
dodged a bullet there (Evaluation of his skills by three different people, not
me obviously)

~~~
rbanffy
We were once testing a new concurrent SMS sending service that we ran
performance tests against our mock infrastructure and we accidentally deployed
it to production without the throttling enabled.

A large telco had an SMS blackout for about an hour.

------
db48x
Best quote ever: "I heard years later that the person who inherited my code
hated me."

~~~
BerislavLopac
There is a reason for the old Kathy Sierra's quote: "Code as if the next guy
to maintain your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live."

