War Stories

Nice post. Thanks for posting interesting events.

In my company, the culture has been just do it without having to wrap header, footer, body all sorts of work delay catalysts. Having said that the code changes have to be reviewed by an engineer from the team who owns the package.

Sarcastically, even if you add a ';' to a package you are the owner of the package from then on

I've been in similar situations, and it is often very difficult to push back to the customers (end-users) that while you can RCA the problem, you are not authorized to fix it.

A lot of my time now is spent proving negatives where an issue is raised to us and we need to check if it is our problem. If it is not, we often have to provide documentary evidence that it is not us and point the customer to who they need to contact to escalate the issue.

I think the single most important help for me is the fact that my line manager will back us engineers up completely if we have taken an issue as far as we can, and he fields the heat from the customer in that case.

It is difficult not doing something you know will work to fix an issue, but I've learned to be careful to not do anything without cast-iron authorization from the correct person(s), simply as a self-preservation measure.

@matrixmadhan

Thank you for taking the time to read my post! Just thought that many of us have experienced similar situation at the dawn of their careers.

@spynappels

Yes, to end users we are all same. When we try to tell that it's not our issue exactly and some other team has to work on that, they think we are just giving "excuse" to get away. That hurts!

My intention in this case was not show off how capable I was. I just wanted to make up for the other teams ignorance as I know how it goes to the end users when something important does not work. I am an end user too for my companies IT team (yes they have separate IT team which takes care of internal infrastructure) and it would be really difficult for me to work if a proxy server or a terminal server, which gives us access to the client's infrastructure, goes down!

However, I have learned it hard way and have sworn that I will never repeat such crazy deed.

Wise words.
Just make that call to get authority and you are covered. If you cannot get authority, make a diary entry and move on to the next problem.

Yup, papertrail is essential in situations like these.

my ex-colleague at HP was angry at my manager and he screwed up the crontab not once but twice, it affected the Australian customers so bad that people couldn't get their pension payout..hehe he didn't tell anyone he did it, neither did he admit it but one look at his face told me everything I had to know. I had a good laugh after he left

Was he fired? If I was his manager and had any suspicion that he was responsible and was able to prove it, not only would he be fired, he'd also be prosecuted for criminal damage!