[philderbeast]

"All of your colleagues have done something dumb. Don't be afraid to tell us when you make a mistake. We all remember our first screw up and will be happy to help."

Never have truer words been spoken.

As I tell all the new juniors at work doing sysadmin type tasks, everyone has deleted the production database at least once. Mistakes will always happen, it's how you deal with them that defines how good you are at the end of the day.

[russfink]

It’s also a measure of how well management does in response. We were transferring a software production repository from one machine to another, Lord knows why, when a junior admin I was supposed to supervise had arrived a half hour early and started the operation without me. He got the source and destination arguments reversed in the file transfer; we were using DD for this one part of it.

Management reacted pretty well. They assured both of us that while we made the mistake, it was not our fault that data was lost: the problem was that backups were not being checked, which caused us to lose the resulting three days (120 developer days) of work. The manager in charge of the folks doing the backup got taken to task - but nobody else did.

[I_am_uncreative]

I did something like this once my senior year of high school. I was using XCOPY to copy a copy of Counter Strike: Source that someone had placed on the U:/ drive, but reversed the order of arguments so that instead of copying it to my desktop, I copied everything on my desktop to the directory.

For whatever reason, we had write access to that directory, but not deletion. I had to get the teacher to delete it for me.

[KronisLV]

> Don't be afraid to tell us when you make a mistake. We all remember our first screw up and will be happy to help.

This is very much dependent on the circumstances - sometimes people won't be supportive or encouraging, but cold at best and toxic (rude, making fun of mistakes, letting their egos run wild) at worst. This is more likely to happen in some work cultures/companies than others, and there can also be individuals that are allowed to persist with their problematic conduct in otherwise okay environments.

If you are ever in such environments, acknowledge the fact, possibly push back against stuff like that and definitely be on the lookout for alternatives, where you'd be able to prosper.

Thankfully, my personal experiences have mostly been okay, but I've definitely seen both attitudes and choices that can make everyone's lives worse, to the point where I wrote the satirical article "The Unethical Developer's Guide to Personal Success": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/the-unethical-developers-gu...