[mikegreco]

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

[dimitar]

According to his next post:

What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)

[basicallydan]

Well, that clears it up - and it's quite a clever way to tick the arbitrary "someone took the fall" box.

[apples2apples]

Itoh should have been fired.

[nathanb]

Why? How did Itoh demonstrate that the company would be better without him than with him?

[apples2apples]

He was the one who was more responsible for the incident than the intern.

[HCIdivision17]

As acdha above notes, he was. But the author incredulously blurted out that he himself had hit the button when he was told his supervisor had been fired over the event (maybe ten minutes later).

The reality was that his boss took the fall for him, which is awesome and terrible. Much of the discussion in this thread has been a tempest in a teapot due to missing context.

His supervisor took the fall to protect him, he was fired on paper, but it was his last day anyway, and he did actually get to work at the embassy again, as it really was a simple innocent mistake.

Though certainly one with serious, long-lasting consequences.

Edit: http://globis.jp/774-2

[nathanb]

OK, probably I'm just dumb and have poor reading comprehension (and will get downvoted again for asking a simple question), but can you explain why Itoh was responsible?

It seems that the translators could have saved their work more regularly -- perhaps they hold some of the blame. Obviously the poster could have thought a bit before hitting the button -- he holds all the blame for the resetting of all the terminals. How is Itoh "more responsible"?

[Scuttles]

Makes sense (and is convenient). The people at the embassy had to have someone to blame, and report back to their superiors that they had dealt with the situation appropriately.

[marbletiles]

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss?

Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then caused an international crisis you're going to get fired too.

Then years later HN will call for Dennis Ritchie to get fired instead.

[megablast]

Also, the situation where somebody has to be fired.

I imagine that someone wanted someone's head, so whose head should it have been? They guy who wrote the system couldn't be fired, he was in a different company. And maybe a macro has been assigned to that key, so it wasn't his fault anyway.

[colanderman]

The person in charge of minimizing risk to their internal systems.

Unfortunately, most small companies have no-one who fills that role, or if they do, it's the same person who both has the power to fire others, and is unwilling to entertain the notion that they themselves are at fault.

[nmjohn]

Except he didn't know there was a breaking news situation. He said pushing the wrong button wouldn't normally be a big deal.

[marbletiles]

He said he came in to find the system running, and the only time that happened was when Washington was waiting for info.

And even if you don't buy that, if pushing the button's not a big deal it doesn't need all the safeguards everyone's yelling for. (Had such safeguards been in place he might equally well have seen them, thought "oh, nobody's in, this will do what I want anyway" and approved it).

[vacri]

That button needs a safeguard even if it's not an international incident. Even if only one person would lose a few hours' work from an all-nighter, work for something that's not so important, it's still someone's work.

And given that it's right next to a 'single terminal reset' key, it should be immediately obvious to anyone who's ever used a keyboard - mistakes can and do happen, even when you're fluent.

[coldpie]

And yet, to this day, Firefox has both Ctrl-Q (close all Firefox windows without prompting) and its neighbor Ctrl-W (close current tab) and refuses to change that or provide remappable keyboard shortcuts. One of the biggest UI failures I'm aware of in 2014.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821

[hrjet]

This in combination with "Restore all tabs on startup" not being the default is a disaster.

The first thing I do on a new Firefox installation is enable "Restore all tabs on startup".

[schnable]

This is in all apps in OS X, that's the standard keymapping.

[noisy_boy]

Ctrl-Q exits on Thunderbird too. Since in MS Outlook that combination marks a mail as read, for keyboard-heavy users switching between the two, it is no fun.

[iancarroll]

One might wonder if that workstation showed the online and offline status of all the computers.

[kstenerud]

The worst unix disaster I ever saw happened to one of my co-workers. He was working on a client machine, logged in as root because he needed to compile and install some complicated software. As he was working, he did an ls -l /bin and copy-pasted it to a text editor so he could make sure everything was installed correctly. Unfortunately, after returning to his console, he accidentally hit paste. Most of /bin was actually symlinked somewhere else. As you know, ls shows symlinks like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Apr 27 17:02 cc -> /etc/alternatives/cc

Guess what happens when you paste a whole list of those into a console as root?

[lcedp]

That's fascinating.

To prevent this from happening with me, I've added the following line to my `.Xdefaults`

    URxvt.perl-ext: confirm-paste

(I'm using `rxvt-unicode`)

http://i.imgur.com/joHRXaH.png

[talmand]

The worst unix disaster ever? Could you elaborate for non-unix people such as myself?

[smwht]

The important character here is the '>'. This redirects output to a file and overwrites the file. The lrwxrwxrwx will only print an error, but the redirect to the target executable will erase the target.

For example:

  $ echo "asdf" > foo
  $ cat foo
  asdf
  $ lrwxwrwxrwx 1 root root -> foo
  lrwxrwxrwx: command not found
  $ cat foo
  $

So basically, this zero'd out every executable on the system.

[talmand]

Yep, that's bad.

Out of curiosity, what was the solution to fix all that?

[mianosm]

Possibly a cp or an scp from a remote system with a working set of binaries.

[kstenerud]

scp was in /usr/bin, so we could at least copy enough basics from another system and recover the rest from a backup. Needless to say we lost the client contract.

[Tyr42]

Oh no, that redirect!

[baddox]

But typing "rm -rf /" is significantly harder to do accidentally than typing F7 instead of F6.

[graylights]

Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it.

The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"

[jonreem]

On any modern system it's actually "sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" and then entering your password while staring at the command.

"rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root

[jfb]

Much, much, much the worse is "rm -rf ~ /blue". I don't give a crap about 99% of the stuff outside of $HOME, but of course, the stuff in $HOME is the stuff that's trivial to destroy.

[lloeki]

You're missing the point:

    $ cd dir where there are source files and temp files
    $ rm *.tmp # or so you think
    '.tmp not found'
    # too bad

[daurnimator]

Except when: (these are terrible lessons to learn)

1. You type it into the wrong system (D'oh)

2. You have run `mount --bind / /somewhere/else` then `rm -rf /somewhere` a week later

:(

[colanderman]

It boggles my mind that --one-file-system is not the default :/

[daurnimator]

> Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it.

Every few days I remind myself of this.... then I have to delete another directory with a git repository in it, and end up add the -f in again

[couchand]

I run into this all the time, too. Now my -rf usage is almost always wrapped by this:

    rmgit()
    {
        git status
        read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
        echo
        if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
        then
            rm .git -rf
        fi
    }

[anon4]

I think this would be a bit better for interactive cases. Note: written just now, I haven't actually felt the need for this safeguard... yet.

    rmrf()
    {
        (echo "The following files are going to be deleted!!!"
         for FILE in "$@"; do
             echo "<<<" "$FILE" ">>>"
         done) | less
        read -p "Are you sure? " -n 1 -r
        echo
        if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
        then
            rm -rf "$@"
        fi
    }

[mandalar12]

What would be the "good" alternative ? I often tries "rmdir" or "rm -r" if the directory is not empty and very often there are some "protected files" so I add -f. Thus it happens that I directly lauch "rm -rf".

[couchand]

Watch it fail first, verify that the failure makes sense, check to see if there's a way to delete one file with -f before deleting the rest with -r. Use -rf only as a last resort, and only by appending the f to an already-failed command whose syntax you've validated.

[artursapek]

More easily, "rm -rf ~" with a premature "Enter"

[corobo]

do the -rf after the directory to avoid this in future

Premature enter just results in:

[web@server /]$ rm ~

rm: cannot remove `/home/web': Is a directory

[krylon]

Hehe, I did something like that once, except that I typed "rm -rf ~ /blue/". There was no /blue/, but I managed to wipe out my home directory, and I did not have a backup. :-| It was on my personal machine, so at least I did not delete anybody else's files, but I still got burned hard enough to learn a valuable lesson.

[svachalek]

The / key was right next to Enter on a lot of old keyboards. It was quite easy to type 'rm -rf /tmp/garbage*' and have a simple fumble turn it into 'rm -rf /'. I mean, there's this guy I know, he did that once.

[australis]

There's also the chance of it happening when writing a script

Such as this classic:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...

[jzwinck]

Ten years prior to that, Apple had a similar bug in one of its installer scripts on OS X. I have a hard time finding much about it online now, because it happened at a time when OS X and the Internet were a lot less popular than today, but what I recall is that an unexpectedly customized installation directory (say with spaces or one level closer to "/" than the default) would cause the installer to delete a whole lot of things.

[iopq]

I once installed GGClient in C:/Program Files/ instead of any particular folder

so of course, I said "I'll just uninstall it from there and install it in the correct folder" and it proceeded to delete C:/Program Files/

[bentcorner]

There's also this one from Pool of Radiance's 2001 release:

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2001/1416.html

Uninstall wipes out your Windows directory.

[thinkpad20]

The one that I did only a few months ago was something like

    $ cp -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
    $ (run some commands to verify copy did what I wanted)
    $ rm -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory

Of course, all I had meant to do was delete `path/to/some/directory`, but I just pressed 'up' in my history and switched `cp` to `rm`. Of course I hit Ctrl-C in an instant, but my FS was already hosed...

[thefreeman]

Not really, on my keyboard at least / is directly next to . and you could feasibly be clearing out a directory or something with rm -rf .

[jessaustin]

It's my habit to never use the -f flag until I get those annoying confirmation messages. I <CTL>-c to cancel that command, then scroll up and add the flag to run again. I think this is a good habit? Anyway, the worst thing I've done along these lines was resetting a dev DB that had seen considerable un-backed-up configuration work. I couldn't blame rm for that.

[colanderman]

Eh, "rm -rf $TEMPDIR/$TEMPFILE" in a shell script is just a couple typos away from deleting everything on the network. Yet I've seen people put crap like that in build scripts even after they've previously inadvertently deleted half the network drives.

Fortunately, despite rm's poor choice of options and bash's poor default handling of variable name typos and the obvious PEBKAC, backups saved the day here.

People are human. Policy ought to reflect this.

[sentenza]

Be honest, who doesn't have

rm -rf *

in their shell history? Now it's just one accidental twitch away.

[TimWolla]

I suspect everyone tried to remove all dotfiles and dotfolders with rm -r .* as well...

[pjc50]

Many years ago I wrote a kernel module for my own use in response to a similar incident. It checked to see if the calling process was deleting a file called ".landmine" and killed the calling process if it was.

Far from perfect - it depended on the order of deletion - but a more general solution than preserve root. Of course it still requires the user to mark things they consider "important".

[canjobear]

Are you trying to say it's OK because Unix behaves analogously?

It is definitely a problem with Unix also.

[marbletiles]

It is. Which is why everyone in Unix who types "rm -rf " then types their next character _very carefully_ and reads the line before committing.

I'm trying to say that when you've got something dangerous without safeguards, you take care around it. Not taking care of known-dangerous things and causing severe damages as a result is an arguably good case for dismissal.

[graylights]

The proper answer is to type "rm <dir> -rf" otherwise you're risking a stray strike on enter.

[gatehouse]

The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system.

[goblin89]

> The other proper answer is to have a good backup and recovery system.

And, of course, that should've been the solution to OP's incident with the Korean Airlines flight 007. Backups, surprisingly, are scarcely mentioned at all in this whole thread.

[mreiland]

rm -rf / is not quite the same as the f7 key restarting all machines sitting right next to the f6 key to restart a single machine.

you cannot fat finger rm -rf /

[claudius]

  # rm -rf /tmp/bla

  # rm -rf / tmp/bla

[mreiland]

no

[astrodust]

You can fat-finger enter before you're done typing.

[mreiland]

that's a pretty fat fucking finger...

[thrownaway2424]

You forgot the part where the only reason he was fucking with the F6 key in the first place was to play a game. That's irresponsible and grounds for firing.

[ghayes]

Actually, from the article he was a system administrator and another employee had been playing a game which froze her own terminal. The author did nothing wrong except press the wrong button (and to your point: not report his coworker for playing games on her terminal in her free-time).

[bdunbar]

> not report his coworker for playing games on her terminal in her free-time).

I was enlisted in the Marines, MOS as a programmer (4063), 1989 - 1993. I never really programmed, but spend my time as a small computer support guy.

Computer games were officially forbidden, but unofficially tolerated, provided one was discrete. I suspect the same 'don't ask don't tell' policy applied to EUCE at the embassy in question.

Sea story. My team was once directed by our boss, the Major, to 'sweep' the command for 'games' and remove them from computers. This took the better part of two weeks, and was massively unpopular with our peers. 'A Marine On Duty Has No Friends', we repeated to ourselves. We even got into the spirit of things and deleted games from _our_ computers.

Near the end of this evolution I hand-carried some paper into my Major's office. He was, yes, playing a computer game.

He did at least have the grace to look embarrassed.

[nerfhammer]

He publicly embarrassed USG, POTUS and a major US ally. SK is going to call up the state dept and demand an explanation. Someone has to be fired. This isn't some startup in California where everyone just plays it cool. The termination of his boss and his boss's boss and his boss's boss's boss all the way up were probably considered as well.

[jheriko]

I think you will find they embarssed themselves.

Responsibility flows upwards, not downwards. Its just unfortunate that the people at the bottom are often carrying the people above far more than they should...

[pfisch]

He was probably fired because they realized they couldn't put a summer intern in control of such a critical system. I would make the same call.

[mikegreco]

If you go with this line of reasoning, whoever put him in that position should also be fired, and their boss should be fired for putting someone in charge who made such a poor decision in the first place.

[jasonwocky]

The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss.

e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's their job to make sure the safeguards are in place to prevent losses like that.

In government it's difficult but not impossible to put a dollar value on losses like this. In this case, whoever was in charge of that network, and could request budget to build safeguards (whether software or training) against such mishaps, was ultimately responsible. Firing the intern is just shit rolling downhill.

[lotsofmangos]

Firing the intern means that the story you just spun to your boss about how this all occurred won't be contradicted by the intern and you might not get fired.

[davidw]

Interesting and very sensible comment - it's one of the few here that adds some real value to the discussion.

[hueving]

Only part of that makes sense. The person putting an intern in such a position of control should be reprimanded, but it wouldn't make much sense for the next level higher because there isn't a blatant mistake. Hiring someone that turns out to make a mistake isn't as blatant as giving an intern the power to shut down a mission critical system.

[toyg]

They might have been, we just don't know.

[pessimizer]

That may have happened.

[dm2]

I do agree with you.

An equally sufficient solution would have been to install a safety switch on any button with that much importance. Something like this but probably smaller, or just a plastic cover that fit over the F7 key: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/15a5/

A fireable offense would be lying about the action or trying to cover it up.

Should the lady who asked for the reset be fired for playing a game and asking him to reset the computer?

Should the technician that didn't install some sort of safety be fired for not foreseeing this issue?

He would be much less likely to make the same mistake in the future than the person who would replace him.

If there are terminals that could erase a presidential report and there is no backup available, you send a non-critical staff member to guard every one of those terminals, or at least put a sticky-note in the middle of the monitor.

I'd say several other people deserved to be fired for this, but the intern was not one of them.

[mseebach]

Appropriate or not, it's probably what was to be expected in what I imagine even in 1981 was not the most enlightened HR management regime (the US foreign service). Also, 32 years is a lot of time to wash away the bitterness of having been unfairly fired from a summer job, especially if you, as the author, ended up doing pretty well for yourself.

Also, whether or not it was appropriate is completely irrelevant to the story being told.

[emn13]

I expect the HR management back then was more enlightened than it is now - the quick-to-pounce media and politically instigated witch hunts (terrorism, save-the-kids, etc.) have ensured that cover-your-ass is more and more a necessity.

[billmalarky]

That sounds like rose colored glasses. The cold war had its fair share of witch hunts. Granted this was the 80's not the 50's but lets not forget McCarthyism was based around democracy vs communism.

"That Korean announcement and the slow response by the US President—both caused by delayed real information—caused decades of conspiracy theories."

[Spooky23]

HR was called "Personnel" in those days. It was different.

The reality here is that an intern doesn't have civil service protection, so it is quick and easy to dispose of them. Going after the supervisor may take longer, so if rapid action is needed, they'll fire the first person who serves "at the pleasure of" the executive.

[emn13]

Oh, I don't think people are any worse - I just think there's more adherence to the letter of whatever regulations there are now. The principles of zero-tolerance (three strikes...) have been widely applied, regardless of the nuance of some situation.

Note also that it turns out the OP was "fired" but immediately rehired too...

[ufmace]

On the other hand, they're hiring people to do these things, not computer programs. Shouldn't we expect them to notice that when doing routine-thing-x, it's awfully easy to accidentally do catastrophically-dangerous-thing-y, and thus it would be a very good idea to be extremely slow and deliberate when doing routine-thing-x?

I have to routinely create and drop databases on my local system. Our production databases, which I also have to connect to, contain hundreds, maybe thousands, of person-months of work. I realized that it would be a good idea, before issuing DROP DATABASE commands, to deliberately stop and double-check what server I'm connected to. Luckily, I haven't screwed that one up yet.

[logfromblammo]

I sure am glad that I never accidentally pushed an unlabeled and unprotected "get fired immediately" button. If it is important to not have all the workstations on site shut down at once, go to the control terminal and disconnect the keyboard before the system startup employee comes in without any clue as to what is going on and starts his ordinary daily routine. Maybe write a note and wedge it into his keys?

Based solely on the shortened account, it was not appropriate at all to fire him. Convincing him that it was is just doubly inappropriate. There may be more to the story, but as it is, it looks like angry scapegoating against a hapless, lowest-level employee.

[rrss1122]

When so many people higher up are given incomplete information or even downright embarrassed on the world stage because of one simple mistake, I feel it is appropriate. It is still, however, doubly insane that one person's stray keystroke can do all of that.

[sergiotapia]

Insane, but somebody had to pay for that screw up and you can bet your ass it wasn't going to be the guy managing the newbie 23 year old. It'll be the newbie 23 year old himself.

[ProAm]

attention to detail is a more valuable skill than people realize

[chengiz]

IMO cleary he is not telling us the entire story.

[njharman]

In the world of bureaucratic need for scapegoats.

[endtime]

> In what world

Japan, I guess? I've never been there but the story was consistent with my impression of their work culture.

[jpatokal]

This was the American Embassy, which follows American work culture.

Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.

[patio11]

c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...

Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable, which blows my mind.)

[eru]

Not true. See correction to article.

[nandemo]

The correction is unclear... Since there are always exceptions, of course it's not the case that "dismissing a permanent employee (正社員) is always illegal". But there's in fact a (somewhat vague but broad) provision in labour law and also　precedents that make it very difficult to legally fire a permanent employee in normal circunstances.

Basically you can legally fire a permanent employee in the same sense that a civil servant in most countries can be fired: if the employee does something egregious, like stealing from the company, not showing up for a long period of time with no reason, etc. Certainly not for incompetence, or even　if the company has been in the red for several years in a row.

E.g. Japan Airlines went basically bankrupt (technically a restructuring) and even so they had trouble laying off part of the staff.

[wildpeaks]

The Japanese way is good in the sense that, as long as you have Internet, you could make your startup without worrying about putting a roof over your head or finding an office space to work from, and you get a still-full salary to bootstrap it without having to put the time.

You even get access to a pool of other soon-to-available engineers to work with if you're stuck with other poor sods in the room.

Definitely another scenario than the being suddendly kicked out of the door by security right before the week-end with a box of your belongings and, if you're lucky, a tiny check to not starve until next week.

[billmalarky]

I highly doubt you are allowed to retain ownership of anything you create on the job though.

[HillRat]

It was the AMEMB in Tokyo, though the basic principles apply to ay bureaucracy answering to political masters. Interns don't get AFSA (or, at the time, AFGE) union representation, and somebody's head was going to roll for that mistake, even though the company that programmed a non-confirmed global reset into a single keypress was truly at fault. Fair? Nope. Inevitable? Yep.

[mathattack]

Lots of fields are like that. You generally get paid better because of the risk. (I hope he was!)