Regardless of whether or not Miso is right to evade their promise of a bonus, I'm not so quick to heap sympathy upon rremoncake.
This certainly isn't the kind of dirty laundry that belongs on HN.
Regardless of whether or not Miso is right to evade their promise of a bonus, I'm not so quick to heap sympathy upon rremoncake.
You hire a plumber to do a major job. You're in a hurry. You tell the plumber, I'll pay you a bonus if you finish this by (date). The plumber accidentally floods a downstairs room in the process of doing the job, but he finishes the work by the date you asked for. The flooding costs you an amount equal to or greater than his bonus. Weeks after the job is over, he asks for the bonus.
How excited are you to give it to him?
Clearly Miso owes him the money. Clearly it would be right for them to just pay him and move on. But if I were rremoncake, I would have been so embarrassed by my screw-up that I wouldn't have ever even asked for it in the first place.
The scenario implies that the impact of the production db nuke was equal or greater than the bonus. Depending on the context, the impact could range from trivial to catastrophic.
The fact that it wasn't backed up only makes it worse. Sometimes I joke that correctly working yet poorly-written code is "conceptually broken". Similarly, any important data that isn't backed up is already "conceptually lost".
If you're about to touch the production database in a way that could potentially end catastrophically, and there aren't backups, you really should stop and consider the meaning of life before proceeding. Preferably, you decide that backups are the meaning of life, and even if it's an imperfect backup, you decide to manually export the table(s) you're working on. Or something.
He didn't do that. It's a rookie mistake. It cost the company two to three days of development team time to recover from it.
For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff, I am super surprised that the response here wasn't, "You touched prod without a backup first?! Are you daft?", but was instead, "Miso is a bad company, you need to lawyer up and get what they owe you."
Or, to put it another way: if there were any justice at all, this story would follow rremoncake around for just as long as it follows Miso around.
It's a mistake I've seen people with 20 years of experience make. If you haven't done it already, you will eventually. When that day comes, I hope, but don't expect, you'll remember to apologize to this guy.
> For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff
How you get from "Hacker News" to "infallible operations engineers" is beyond me. Operations is a rare skill to begin with, and even those who are best at it will make these mistakes.
The difference between me and this guy is that I wouldn't've turned around and asked the company for a bunch of money afterward.
And what, exactly, do you think I owe him an apology for?
That you wouldn't ask for the money is irrelevant. We're not required by any law, moral, or ethic to go through life as a doormat. At this point, money has been stolen from him, just as if they'd taken it from his bank account. He is owed that money, and entitled to ask for it without you attacking him for it.
Whatever. This thread has been an idiotic waste of time. I do think I'll be saving it for future reference though.
This case is more like the plumber rear-ending you on the highway in a freakishly coincidental accident, then you refusing to pay him the bonus after he finishes on time because you're still upset that he screwed up your car.
If you can find any comment of mine in this thread where I told someone "they were wrong for feeling a certain way", I will pay you $100.
I am not kidding.