[viraptor]

> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained

No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.

[thefreeman]

Personally I agree. Mistakes happen, everyone has accidentally hit the wrong key at one point or another in their life. I was pretty surprised how seemingly fine he was with being fired. At the same time, I guess the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response, and it has been about 30 years since it happened.

[GoodIntentions]

IMHO, firing someone who owns up to a keystroke mistake like that is wrong. Good managers fix the problem, weak managers fix blame.

Root cause analysis + countermeasure might have boiled down to "operator error due to shitty interface" + "we will tape a guard over F7 key, since it will never ever get fixed in software"

[viraptor]

> the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response

That's a dangerous way of thinking. 9/11 was big enough that it required a response. Not sure if we'll ever reverse the airport security stupidity that was such a response.

[smsm42]

This is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment may be entirely appropriate - one of your responsibilities is not to make such mistakes, you failed at it, you're fired.

[vehementi]

I never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.

[smsm42]

>>> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again

This is a far-reaching conclusion. That assumes that a) no mistakes can be prevented before they happen for the first time and b) every mistake can be prevented after making it. The truth of either far from obvious. Moreover, it is routine in our culture that sever mistakes are punished - e.g. if you make a mistake of driving drunk and cause harm, you'd probably be punished, not lauded as model citizen since you'd never make the mistake again.

Moreover, if no punishment follows the mistake, why the mistake would not be repeated? What would be the motivation to avoid the repetition of the mistake - do you assume the sympathy for the co-workers would be enough? It is not always a sufficient motivator.

>>> It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping the current employee.

That assumes employees are a fungible commodity, and if you pay the same money you always get the same one. This is not true - you can find employee which would be more attentive, or one with more experience.

[vehementi]

If you believe that you can find an employee that is more attentive or with more experience, and you are not laying off your employees right now to find those better employees, what the hell is going on? Are you just hanging out, basically sitting there knowing you have suboptimal employees, and eagerly waiting for them to fuck up so you have an excuse to axe them? You know your employees are (dun dun dun) capable of mistakes but it's expensive to lay them off so you're watching like a hawk for when you get to upgrade them?

The key difference here to me is mistakes vs negligence. Employee makes a typo -> It's a mistake. Not severe, negligent incompetence. It's a learning experience. The company is worse off by firing that person who has experience

If someone is slacking off? Yeah, fire them, that's not a mistake, that's negligence. You email a colleague in another time zone asking for help and they ignore you because you didn't CC their manager? Yeah, fucking fire that person.

I mean, in fact we have an industry based around the fact that people make mistakes: it's called software testing. Should we be firing developers when they make a mistake (i.e. their code has more than zero bugs)? That would be ridiculous. You're not even punishing them in that case - they're going to use their current salary at your shop to leverage a higher salary at the new place they (effortlessly) land at, whereas you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire that mythical developer that you should have fired this guy for a year ago?

[meepmorp]

> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again.

Personal experience tells me this is not always true.

[vehementi]

You're right, I shouldn't've used "never". But that mistake is an experience and people learn from mistakes. Now that person is less likely to make the mistake again.

I mean, the goal of the business is to create value / profit and find people who add value to your organization. Not to judge and suss out people who you discover are capable of making a mistake and saying "AHA! I FOUND YOU! You were an imposter all along not worthy of paying! Time to start from scratch again!"

[sliverstorm]

IMO the fact that we have multiple examples of these kinds of accident-prone key pairs does partially exonerate whoever did this particular F6/F7 bit.

[dceddia]

I can't count how many times I accidentally hit the Save Game button instead of the Load Game button in Half-Life. The keys were literally, like, right next to each other.

[jessaustin]

...the whole window with ctrl+q.

OMG I've never done that but now that I know about it I'm very afraid. If I do it tomorrow I'm blaming you.

[sushid]

Thankfully, Chrome has a built-in feature to prevent this from happening (on OSX at least). Just go to Chrome > Warn before Quitting and make sure there's a checkmark next to the option.

Now, if you accidentally press Cmd + Q, it should prompt a "Hold Cmd + Q to Quit" instead of actually quitting.

[tremendo]

Or, Settings > On Startup... "Continue where you left off". This will restore your tabs after launching Chrome.

[Houshalter]

I disabled that warning because it's annoying every time I want to close the browser, even without the dangerous keyboard shortcut. If it happens, you can go to the menu and find "recent tabs" or just ctrl+shift+t.

[sp332]

If you do this in Firefox, you can go to History -> Restore previous session. This will bring up all the tabs you had open last time it quit.

[viraptor]

This helps: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/customizable-...

Also, I made a mistake, it doesn't close the window. It closes all windows at once. Be afraid!

[pooper]

ctrl + q very appropriately quits the application. If this came as a ticket to me, I'd close it as working as expected.

[djur]

Traditionally applications have asked the user if they're sure they want to quit. That's a no-no these days, but it's still a reasonable choice in situations where the cost of quitting might be high (there's unsaved content, or the app takes a long time to start, or it's impossible to persist the current state of the application).

For some time, the Chrome team refused to implement a 'Sure you want to quit?' popup due to a general anti-popups consensus. They also refused to implement a checkbox to enable that behavior due to a general anti-configuration consensus. They've since relented on the latter.

[pooper]

Mozilla Firefox used to have a setting under options/preferences to disable loading images and loading javascript. People complained and said this should be removed as not enough people use it and that people who use it can create/use an add-on to do the same.

It is not easy to find a right balance between providing adequate functionality while avoiding information overload. The web is still evolving. We are learning and we will do better (overall) as time goes by. :)

[SilasX]

... and then you'd spin it off as a feature (or design review) request for better handling of accidental quit actions, right?

[pooper]

I like this idea. I will try to remember this because it is the perfect answer in situations like these...

[nitrogen]

Ctrl-Q typically preserves the session though, so all non-ajax sites will come back as they are, including partially filled forms.

[Sami_Lehtinen]

Yeah, if you don't care about privacy and save such data to disk as active session, active browser tabs, history, cookies, etc. Those should be RAM only for privacy reasons and never stored to any medium which can store those for extended periods.

[LukeShu]

I've done it enough times that I was finally motivated to figure out to set browser.showQuitWarning=true in about:config.

[oakwhiz]

The other reason I enable browser.showQuitWarning in Firefox is because you can Save and Quit instead of just quitting.