Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?
- Reference: 1693812788
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/04/who_me/
- Source link:
This week meet "Fred", who some years ago landed his first real IT job fresh from a bootcamp at which he earned the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification. The job was with a big construction company that operated over multiple sites – quite an opportunity for a young up-and-comer with more enthusiasm than experience.
This job came with a 90-day probation period, so Fred was being particularly diligent. Within a week he impressed the boss with "a miraculous IDE hard drive recovery involving swapping out the bad controller card with a working duplicate one."
[1]
We're not sure that sounds particularly "miraculous" but maybe you had to be there. The boss's praise filled Fred with confidence.
[2]
[3]
A short while later, a problem with the AS/400 midrange box emerged: tape backups were not going through as they should. As the AS/400 is an IBM box this was not a job for the new kid with a still-wet Microsoft credential. But Fred's bosses saw it as a learning experience, so he was asked to watch while a qualified tech did the job.
That old hand said the drive would have to be removed and replaced with a working unit, so the AS/400 would have to be powered down while he extracted the relevant hardware. The boss went to the phone, called the front desk, and told the receptionist to make an announcement over the PA: all users had to close their work and log off. Fred watched closely.
[4]
All went well.
[5]Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice
[6]Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?
[7]The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic
[8]Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache
A few days later the technician returned with the replacement tape drive, and informed Fred that the server would again need to be powered down while the new unit was installed.
This time, however, the boss was at one of the other sites hundreds of kilometers away, so could not make the call to reception. Fred, young go-getter that he was, took it upon himself to make the crucial call and ask everyone to close their work and log off.
After a few minutes, it was deemed safe to proceed, and the technician powered down the mainframe.
The the phone rang. It was the boss, over at the other site, wondering what had happened to the AS/400. He was … let's say … surprised to learn that it had been shut down on Fred's say-so.
[9]
It had not occurred to Fred that workers at other sites might be logged into the same mainframe. Nor that they might need to be informed that they were in imminent danger of losing work. Nor, apparently, that a fresh recruit still on probation probably doesn't have the authority to say it's OK to shut down the enterprise server.
Needless to say, people lost hours worth of work. Given one of those people was the boss, you can imagine how it ended for young Fred. At least it was a learning experience.
Has a bit of enthusiastic over-reach ever cost you a job? Don't worry, it's happened to a lot of us. Tell us all about your experience in [10]an email to Who, Me? and we'll commiserate together.
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/28/who_me/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/21/who_me/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/14/who_me/
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Re: A bit unusual
Maybe next week we'll get a confession from "Ricardo", of last week's "Test for Ricardo" Motorola fame. I'd love to know whether he just-got-away-with-it and held onto his job or not.
Re: A bit unusual
The offender did get away with it, this just isn't written from the point of view of the offender.
The technician surely wouldn't reappear out of thin air unannounced to replace the drive, why did Fred's boss arrange for him, a freshly hired rookie, to seemingly be the most senior IT person on site during maintenance on a business critical system?
If for some reason the boss really did need to leave him alone, it's not unforeseeable that servers need maintenance occasionally, so why was there seemingly no established procedure for safely shutting it down?
Reads to me like Fred's firing was done to protect the boss from his lack of planning.
Ah, MCSE
a.k.a. Must Consult Someone Experienced, such was the high regard the qualification held. It was a pretty common qualification for someone fresh out of uni/college without any real world experience. Much as in Fred's case...
Re: Ah, MCSE
Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert
Learning experience
While the boss is understandably pissed off, there's two takeaways here:
1. There was an issue with his training, including chain of command and authorized operations
2. He's *never* going to make this mistake again!
Re: Learning experience
> 1. There was an issue with his training, including chain of command and authorized operations
Yeah, it was wrong of the boss to Mainframe the newbie...
Re: Learning experience
" 1. There was an issue with his training, including chain of command and authorized operations "
That makes it sound like the manager's fault. Last time I checked you don't get taught to accept responsibility for your own mistakes at Manager College.
Umm. Mainframe?
AS/400s were definitely not in the mainframe category. They were normally described as Departmental computers, and fell into the mini-computer category.
Yes, they were IBM systems, but IBM sold everything from PC's (this was the time of AS/400, so IBM was still selling PCs) to large 370 family mainframes.
In a similar era, I actually got away with hot-plugging an internally mounted Exabyte 8mm tape drive in a RS/6000 model 930 without blowing the fuse in the SCSI terminator!
Re: Umm. Mainframe?
If the business is small enough to get by on an AS/400 VAX or whatever they'll consider that a mainframe.
Re: Umm. Mainframe?
Midrange according to IBM (minis according to everyone else) so no, not mainframes.
Mistakes must be made in order to learn from them.
True, but it's best if you can arrange to have other people make them.
A real advantage of these stories; if only there were some that took place past 2000 and referred to technology that still exists...
On one hand I want to hear about people tying their docker containers in knots, on the other I have a solid "who me" story that I'm wondering about sending in because it feels a bit recent.
Only problem is, for some of those more recent stories the statute of limitations may not have elapsed yet...
Relevant IBM story
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7393654-a-promising-junior-executive-of-ibm-was-involved-in-a
A long time ago, our company had an opening for a sysadmin. Myself and another developer were being considered for the role. He was older and more experienced than me, and would probably have gotten it. At the time, we had a bunch of small unix servers that were slow and overloaded. So he decided to wipe and reinstall one of them, without first backing it up or even discussing it with anybody. As it turned out, that machine contained a database, a development environment and a whole bunch of important source code.
So a couple of weeks later, he was out the door and I got the sysadmin job.
A bit unusual
These are normally stories where the "offender" gets away with it - just!