Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?
(Thomas J. Watson, IBM CEO)
(Thomas J. Watson, IBM CEO)
We launched a product with a wonderful new element in it, which had the capacity to clean clothes better than anything that had ever been seen. Unfortunately, if it wasn’t used in exactly the right spec, it cleaned so well that it cleaned away the clothes as well...I was personally responsible for Unilever’s largest marketing disaster.
He quoted his Chairman’s response to this at the time:
We’ve just invested £350m in your education. If you think you’re going to take that somewhere else, forget it.
He managed to keep his job.. just with no more prod access. :)
Would love to hear more about that :)
Another story from the same place (won't confirm nor deny if it was the same sysadmin) - someone accidentally pushed a puppet config out that changed all hosts' timezones to CDT. A bit later, I received a random and kinda joking text from a buddy from a past job - who couldn't get an answer from my company's tech support - asking why all of their clearing reports had the wrong times.
He was the only person outside of three other sysadmins who ever mentioned anything was wrong. Not even my boss brought it up! It was odd.
You have to expect people to make mistakes. I’m not saying he didn’t fuck up, but if a company is down a billion dollars the story should be of multiple people making multiple mistakes.
For what it's worth, a billion dollars for this company, while still a lot, isn't world ending. It was probably insured, too.
Inflation-adjusted, that's like $10 million.
Then blame is irrelevant. It happened, they learned from it, they now have that experience under their belt.
"What happens if we don't spend a million training him, and he stays?"