[danity]

A long time ago, after interviewing for months, I finally landed my first job as a developer. It was VERY hard to get your foot in the door back then. On my first day, I was given someone's old computer that had a bunch of junk on it. While cleaning it up, I accidentally deleted all files on the company's file share. Shortly after, I started hearing murmurs of missing files and then, panicking inside, realized what I had done.

The IT guy came by and asked me if I had done it, but I played dumb. He knew it was me but he couldn't prove it, so I survived that one. He gave me dirty looks from that point forward though. I surely would have been fired on the spot if the truth were uncovered.

[vsareto]

Hopefully lots of folks swing by to say that if they didn't have backups, they should have seen it coming.

It's a great example of how you can be made to look bad because of other peoples' decisions.

[amatecha]

Damn, dude. If I nuked stuff on the file server I would have immediately gotten up and talked to my team/manager/whatever. I'd be anxious as hell but I'd still do it. If I actually got fired I'd think they are just a trash employer because there's no possible way someone should get fired for an innocent mistake (that never should have been possible anyways -- systemic failure on the employer's part). I know someone who accidentally published private docs to the open web, because they followed the known process for sharing docs with their team, and the process did not correctly identify how to verify/ensure the docs are internal-access-only. They nearly got in trouble, but I told them to adamantly communicate how they followed the official process using the official tools and there was no information about the security/privacy that indicated it wasn't private. There was no way for this person to have known any better, with what the employer had provided. It was even just weeks after some security/privacy training had taken place at the job, proving just how badly the employer failed to educate their staff.

[afterburner]

If you lied, and they found out, you would have been fired for that reason alone. On the other hand if you told the truth right away, it's hard to say if you would have been fired; where I've worked you wouldn't have been fired for telling the truth and doing that (having seen people fess up to much worse failures). Lying on the other hand is a serious problem since it betrays trust (if caught, of course).

That said, I've also been at a company where people in charge had admitted to not having a backup copy of something rather important. I was flabbergasted.

[AlwaysRock]

Do you really think you would have been fired? It sounds like it was easy for you to fix. Sounds like it would have been easy for them to fix. Rather than fire you they could say, "Oh yeah we should make sure that something like this doesnt happen again. It could happen to anyone."

Firing seems like a big leap here.

[hogrider]

Yeah... People are not rational like this lol I've definitely seen people fired for fucking up in ways that were actually sysstemic issues.