Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

It has nothing to do with the relatedness of those incidents. Again, since apparently people missed it:

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.

View on HN

How excited are you to give it to him?

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".

Sure, but it doesn't take a development team two to three days to recover "conceptually lost" data (as according to the post).

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 rookie mistake.

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.

Of course it's a mistake I've made.

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?

Insulting him and telling him he shouldn't ask for money he is clearly owed because of a mistake we've all made. Actually, that second part is an insult, too. So, really, just being incredibly insulting.

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.

Well, now I think you owe me an apology for telling me that I'm being insulting. Not that I expect to get one.

Whatever. This thread has been an idiotic waste of time. I do think I'll be saving it for future reference though.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes rremoncake was solely responsible for the decision to not back up prod. I think that responsibility falls on the CTO/CEO, and so yeah, Miso is a bad company for that, and that whole incident should have no relevance to the bonus debacle.

Everybody screws up something sometime. It is embarrassing and bad, but the fact of life is that nobody is perfect, and everybody can and will screw up sometimes. To own what you have done, however bad it is, is not shameful (however shameful was the original screwup by itself) and is not the reason to abandon all your rights and not get what you are due.

I'm kind of amazed that most of your contributions to this thread have been about telling people that they're wrong for feeling a certain way. That's like me telling you you're wrong for liking code. You agreed that Miso clearly owes him money. That is why people are sympathetic to this guy. He is owed a lot of money.

Alright. Since people keep arguing to things I haven't actually said, I am going to start posting a "Comment Bounty" (working title). After all, money seems to be the one thing that everyone on HN can understand.

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.

The two events in this case aren't linked like your plumber events are. A disaster in the course of doing the job the bonus was promised for is substantially different.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com