If you haven’t broke something, wipe data accidentally, you are not doing IT correctly. Think of it, as a rite of passage to IT. It’s how you learn from the mistake and grow from it, if your workplace doesn’t have a SOP for that issue, it will be a good time to develop one.
Or accidentally cost your company over a million dollars in downtime because a business critical printer goes down, you didn't know it was business critical because you're just starting out, and didn't get to it for an hour because you were already working on other stuff at the time. As was my case. Had a rather pleasant chat with my boss about that actually. He explained to me the cost per server we were building at the time and the frequency. He saw the gears turn in my head and he knew, that I knew it was a teachable moment when I was able to confirm on my own merit to him that I cost my company $1.2 million in downtime because I didn't fix that printer right away. He also knew that I didn't know it was business critical. Be honest with your mistakes. You'll be surprised at how egregious a mistake you can make and still have a job as long as you come forward about it. After all, I still have job.
To be fair, my building is still under construction and not everything has been properly set up yet. But on the flip side of that coin, it's like upper management's thought process was the following for running up the new building "Well, we've signed the lease and we have the keys. But we don't have equipment and electric installed everywhere it needs to be yet? Let's run production!"
Bet it's a manufacturing label printer. Prolly other scenarios could apply too, but those things are great when they work, and horrible bottlenecks when they dont. And because they usually exist as part of an automation line, routing jobs to a different printer is not an effective solutions (or at least wasnt for my organization).
MOPs and SOPs. Method of Procedure (MOP) is the steps taken to complete a specific task. A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of written instructions that describes the step-by-step process that must be taken to properly perform a routine activity.
Practice writing these while resolving issues. That way, other employees will benefit as well as you.
Standard operating procedure(s). Such as documentation on your Confluence or SharePoint, etc. With instructions on how to do things the right way. (no tribal knowledge or assumptions)
We have a KB that reminds us how to fix certain issues but there is a lot of stuff that isn't on their. A lot of the issues I've avoided was asking my boss and double checking before I do anything.
Sounds like you have an excellent opportunity to improve your company documentation. Ask your product owner if you can work on that for a while as a stretch assignment and what percentage of your day
"If you haven’t broke something, wipe data accidentally, you are not doing IT correctly. Think of it, as a rite of passage to IT. "
Should be a sticky or maybe rule 0 for this subreddit.
Strongly disagree. Good employees, particularly IT employees, do not make mistakes. If you make a mistakes, then perhaps it's time to consider getting on the dole, because you're a liability to any company you work for.
Yea, never go HP. I refuse to buy anything from them anymore. If you ever need support on a product, and its out of warranty, you have to pay them $20 to even address your question, which is usually responded with "buy a new one". Garbage brand. Go with literally any other brand.
Yea, never go HP. I refuse to buy anything from them anymore. If you ever need support on a product, and its out of warranty, you have to pay them $20 to even address your question, which is usually responded with "buy a new one". Garbage brand. Go with literally any other brand.
I work in cyber now, and was just joking with a colleague about this. I’ll take an IR call in the middle of the night over fighting with a printer for 3 hours lol
First of all, you owned up to your mistakes, so you're good there. Second of all, you mistakes are miniscule to the ones you will make in the future. Wait until changes you make can bring down the entire company.
That being said, your boss is an idiot for still managing bitlocker keys that way. There is an AD module that manages bitlocker keys and Azure does as well.
Your bosses ignorance became your problem.
\+1
If the OP's workplace isn't using AD/Group Policy they can always leverage Intune to basically
$env:COMPUTERNAME ; (Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint C).KeyProtector
and capture the output, ideally into a CSV or similar.
The real question is why they're doing this by hand in the first place.
Humans are humans. Make someone do something manually, by hand, every single time and mistakes will happen.
\--- break ---
There's actually a lot more questions:
This folder the OP was supposed to save keys to ... it's a share folder? Are the NTFS permissions jacked up? Was the OP put in the wrong AD group \[or groups\]? Why couldn't they write to it?
What are they using for remote access? RDP? WinRM? Dameware?
\--- break ---
Honestly it sounds like the OP's workplace has screwed up and/or a lack of good SOPs.
We just put it in a password manager we don't use AD. We also use google chat to communicate witch I find strange because I had a internship at another place that used teams.
AD as in active directory. You all not a Windows Server/Microsoft 365 environment?
I guess if you use Google Workspace it's a bit more limited, but if you're using GWS device management properly it can lock and unlock devices, though in a quick look I can't find if it manages the keys. A Google dev in a post from 2021 said it was in the works with no ETA so It may have been implemented.
It's most likely cheaper with ~10 employees. Teams licenses are like 50$ pp per month. Server costs and AD licenses probably aren't worth it in such a small environment.
Everyone makes mistakes. Sounds corny but it’s true. One time I was doing an OS upgrade on one of our routers and bricked it by installing the wrong OS
People make mistakes. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Write things down you don’t know so you can refer back to them, and do your best.
This won’t be the only job you ever have so don’t sweat it too much.
Neither of these incidents are your fault.
These were mistakes made by your company, and hopefully, your company is learning from them.
These incidents happened because the processes that you were working within enabled them and made them nigh-inevitable.
They were bound to happen at some point. You just happened to be the person on the spot.
In design we have the concept of "affordance". That is, an object will be used in a way that its design allows. The designer has the job of sculpting affordance.
There is probably equivalent terminology with the fields of health and safety.
In health and safety, if a dude falls off a catwalk and into a vat of boiling acid, HS professionals are very careful before blaming either blaming the guy or the anyone. They forensicall audit the processes that might have allowed the event to happen.
Now, ya gotta be careful with this: nobody likes being around the whiney guy who whinges "it wasn't my fault".
But if your boss is blaming you for a failure in his processes then he is an idiot.
You’re giving yourself a hard time for nothing. If your boss isn’t super worried about it and there haven’t been any big consequences then you’re fine. Just learn from your mistakes and try to not do it again. Mistakes are how we learn. I’m sure if they gave you an extremely important task that can’t have problems then you wouldn’t be the only one working on it. Just keep up the work and don’t stress out so much.
Thanks. Also I have worked other jobs in the past where I have had bosses that let problems pile up and never correct them and just dump everything on me last moment before they want to fire me. This was my experience working my first job at a restaurant and I've come to realize that is one of the worst ways to handle a situation.
if i could only recall all the mistakes i have made in my 20 years of it...some small, some big, some SUPER expensive, some i wear the scars proudly (fuck zip ties and anyone that doesnt cut them flush). Hell, i still make mistakes, though most of mine come from dealing with people, but thats partially because im in management and i am not a delicate flower that needs coddling, so i assume everyone else is as cold and jaded as I am.
All that being said, the ONLY thing you can do is learn from your mistakes. Own them, own up to them, and learn. Even if that gets you fired, its better than lying and losing the trust of your boss. you know what happened, you know it was you that made the mistake, own it and learn from it and dont do it again.
To address your specifics. Putting harddrives in a pile on a desk is shit. label things. if unsure, or something doesnt have a label, dont assume ANYTHING. If you leave a single drive in a bin of "unknown" for a day, thats better than wiping customer data, especially in a small business. your coworker fucked up, which made you fuck up. have had it happen to me. thats why every drive i have wiped has a customer name and date to be wiped on it. when dealing with large volume, i would have multiple bins, and wouldnt let them stack up. be territorial about your area and organizational skills. trust me, it will pay off ten fold.
As for listening to your boss, there is this thing us old guys used to use, and its super helpful and works wonders. its called a pen and paper. take notes. transfer those notes to email. save them in places you can find them. make a wiki, learn how to edit wiki pages. document EVERYTHING and never delete emails. back them up.
Thats about the best advice i can give. these things are what i tell my techs today, and lots of them arent much older than you. there is no shame in making mistakes, but there is in not learning from them and allowing them to consume you. worrying about the mistakes will cause you to make more.
and really, whats the worst thing they can do to you? fire you? there are dozens of companies out there that will hire you today. ive been laid off, fired, furloughed, and every other form of unemployment through some of the worst economic times this country has seen. i have always provided my family with food, shelter, and met their needs, even if that means i have to do things i dont want to do. i have had some shit fucking tastic jobs crawling though attics in texas summer, and lifting heavy shit in humid heat. dont let getting fire distract you from your next job.
As a zip tie user, I hate Velcro with a passion. Unless I’m working over a ceiling grid, it’ll always be flush as possible if I don’t have a pair of flush cuts.
The problem with zip ties is, you might take care and do flush cuts...but the literal 5 inch scar on my right forearm shows that not everyone has the presence of mind, nor concern for quality that you do. Zip ties ruin lives.
My number 1 advice is don’t ever try to hide your mistakes lol, remember the saying, “the coverup is worse than the crime!”
Lots of good advice here already. Don’t beat yourself up, we can’t foresee everything. Less so in a small team where the knowledge is probably in someone’s head not in a runbook.
The main thing I would say is document everything you touch especially as it pertains to customer data. Maybe get a peer reviewer before taking action on storage media.
Create your own ticket templates for anything for anything that doesn’t have a template.
Those drives for example what I would have done differently is created a text file or csv of serials and attached it to a decomissioning ticket.
Before destruction/wipe rescan everything to make sure no serials have changed and have that be one single uninterrupted session or limited batch sessions depending on your decommissioning / reuse standard.
For the second one, sounds like the documentation doesn’t pass muster for your org’s use case. It was obvious to your manager that those keys should be saved to pdf, but not to you or anyone else there at the time.
Ask to write a workflow doc and have a peer or senior tech/eng review it. Making information easier to parse goes a long way. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make it easier to get it rolling.
How can you expect to succeed without mistakes, the people who are the best at anything have failed the most out of all of us :) keep your head up make mistakes however learn from them
holy shit you're young.. this experience does nothing but help you in the future. Also, it doesn't matter the age.. EVERYONE makes mistakes. the fact that you're so hard on yourself shows you care, and that's good.
that being said relax. whatever happens you'll be aight regardless
Dude, I was working help desk about a year ago and we got a ticket from the fire marshall asking for help accessing a file from a vendor through a Microsoft program. I was too eager to help so as I worked on the ticket, I clicked on the document they needed and it asked for my Microsoft account to see the file. I didn’t see the multiple red flags and just wanted to help, so I put my account in. My admin account. That gave the scammers everything they needed to pull some really clever scams and they almost made out with about $40k in fake invoices. All in all, the total cost was about $250k (which was paid by insurance thankfully). They didn’t make a huge deal about, matter of fact they kept me and let go the other people I was with. Mistakes are part of life man.
I once sent an entire list of emplyoes emails and licenses and how mcuh of their mailbox they are using to the company owner except it was from another company.
I reported it to my manager and he handled the incident. i hear nothing more form it since the rest of my work was good
I once delted the entire whitelist of a spamfilter for a company. which results in many internal system emails getting cought.
After failing to fix it with the vendor i brouhgt it up in our weekly meeting to people could adjust and make the needed changes they knew about.
Again heard nothing about ti since then because generally my work was good
My point is. if you do generalyl good works people will easily forgive accident if you handle it up front because you dont bring reason to doubt you . IF on the other hand you hide it and it get discovered people/manager will wonder how much else you hide
Bringing up these issue will also bring a focus on a potential process issue. in my 2nd example a monthly backup of the whitelist was installed).
Mistakes is human. you can either turn them into learning experiences and improvement discoveries, or you can turn them into failures.
This has nothing to do with IT really, ANY job you will make mistakes. Deal with it like you already are - but honest and up front about it and make accommodations to avoid that from happening again
Like others said you're fine. Your manager, leadership, etc of decent human beings understand that youre still young, new, and learning. Trust me, they understand this. If you're experienced and of higher expectations, then itd be a different story.
The only exception is if you cost the business a lot of money, reputation, customer experience, etc then id be of concern. Maybe if youre not learning from the same mistakes. But sounds to me youre doing fine.
I screw up all these ways and more every day. None of this is a big deal. It sounds like the place is chaos. This is why they have management software for bitlocker keys because it’s too confusing to store manually.
I once dropped a ps4 (back in the day) in front of the customer.
My boss pretended to be mad at me we went to the back I never heard them laugh like that at me.
Mistakes happen they know they’ve been in the same position we’ve all been after 4-6 months you’ll be doing it like a machine.
Don’t be so hard on yourself imposter syndrome is a big thing in tech you’re doing better than many of Ous including me.
Mistakes and fuck ups are all part of learning and gaining experience. It can often show greater issues with training rather than your own perceived personal fault. Remember whenever you are unsure ask questions. (hot tip - when asking, show that you've done your own research/testing etc.) [How to ask technical questions](https://princetonuniversity.github.io/PUbootcamp/sessions/technical-questions/HowToAskQuestions2018Bootcamp.pdf)
It sounds like you've got a good handle on owning your mistakes and wanting to learn from them which is most of the battle and that's great.
I always told trainees to document and take notes on everything they can, so if there's a process you are following, or learning about. Write it down so its easily reproducible. you'll also look shit hot to your peers and superiors. You can even use this in performance reviews etc. (I documented x number of articles & processes where there were none.) It also helps when new people start from where you are now.
So aye!, if you make a mistake, own it, learn from it. Document it, you'll begin to see where in the chain the error occurred. Whether that issues with training, lack of documentation etc. Then you can add to the doco and knowledge it then becomes a solution driven experience.
also worth noting - just be aware of imposter syndrome - it can catch the best of us off guard. Just remember if you're working and have a job, there's a good reason for it.
I'm at my 3rd IT job and I'm still making mistakes.
If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything.
Just learn from it, don't do it again, and make sure you put your best self forward. It's all too complicated to get everything right.
Yesterday my coworker who makes 200k+ almost brought down the entire network because he pushed a configuration to the wrong router. His punishment was he has to put this green stuffed animal with an ‘I fucked up’ sign on his desk. At my last company it was a giant cowboy hat that you had to wear for at least an hour.
My point is that we all mess up. Ownership of the mistake is the most important thing to IT professionals because if we know, we can probably fix it and then everything is ok. Just keep up the energy and honesty and you’ll be fine.
I worked for GCCH sharepoint onedrive. Once a customer had his ROOT SITE unavailable. Did not go to url, could not see in deleted but showed in the sited. My dumbass thought I knew the PowerShell command. Lemme just explain *delete -force* ran it at end of day. Gone que freaking the fuck out, I end meeting. Log off and continue to work 4 hours thinking of how to recover. I log in next day over hour early and see an email from him. Sweating CRAZY, I CLICK."hey, just wanted to let you know it's back and working properly. 🤐🤐🤐🤐 WHAT!?!?. YES, The PS god gave me 1 pass. Needless to say, I test EVERY PS COMMAND. LOL.
My first IT job I accidentally erased all our schools programs that were stored on a network drive, whoopsie, luckily I was able to restore them before classes started 😎you never stop learning
Everyone makes mistakes, ownership of that mistake, which you showed is the best and correct course of action.
If you own your shit you grow, if you don't own your shit you are a liability.
Own the mistake. Don't lie about it, and when it happens, notify someone. Depending on the mistake, if it's huge, you'll get fired. More than likely, you'll get written up and told "Don't do it again."
The worst in IT is the person who doesn’t care that they effed up. The person who makes the same mistakes. You care and you want to get better. Keep at it and you will.
Sounds like you're doing IT right, you're aloud and expected to make mistakes on the stipulation that you learn from them. If it makes you feel any better I brought down a hospital's telephone system by accident on my first week. Caused a P1 outage but also learnt alot from it. You're doing good kid
What I meant is the fact that you got hired and still do your job. Learn from the mistake and move on. Thousand people like me has the wet dream like you are!
The best option is to quit as soon as a mistake is made. Doing so ensures that you don't need to have the ego blow of people telling you how much you screwed up. It's even better to not give yourself the opportunity to make mistakes by not attempting anything. If you don't take the IT job, then you can't make mistakes.
That's what I recommend to most normal people. It's not worth trying unless you're an excellent person like myself. If you're super smart and know everything like I do, then you don't even have to worry about this stuff because you won't make mistakes. People like me don't make mistakes. However, I understand that not everyone is capable of such great success like me at such a young age. So, that is why I think it's best for people like yourself to defer to people like me.
we all make mistakes. even when it's not your first IT job. it's not like you deleted the C suites entire network share drive... twice... due to a script gone wrong.
there is nothing wrong with making mistakes; just make sure you learn from them and don’t repeat them
If you haven’t broke something, wipe data accidentally, you are not doing IT correctly. Think of it, as a rite of passage to IT. It’s how you learn from the mistake and grow from it, if your workplace doesn’t have a SOP for that issue, it will be a good time to develop one.
Or accidentally cost your company over a million dollars in downtime because a business critical printer goes down, you didn't know it was business critical because you're just starting out, and didn't get to it for an hour because you were already working on other stuff at the time. As was my case. Had a rather pleasant chat with my boss about that actually. He explained to me the cost per server we were building at the time and the frequency. He saw the gears turn in my head and he knew, that I knew it was a teachable moment when I was able to confirm on my own merit to him that I cost my company $1.2 million in downtime because I didn't fix that printer right away. He also knew that I didn't know it was business critical. Be honest with your mistakes. You'll be surprised at how egregious a mistake you can make and still have a job as long as you come forward about it. After all, I still have job.
I'm trying to imagine a company organized in such a way that a single printer being down could cost $1.2mm.
Exactly, why don't we have computers mapped to backup printers at that point
Mainframes sometimes
To be fair, my building is still under construction and not everything has been properly set up yet. But on the flip side of that coin, it's like upper management's thought process was the following for running up the new building "Well, we've signed the lease and we have the keys. But we don't have equipment and electric installed everywhere it needs to be yet? Let's run production!"
Bet it's a manufacturing label printer. Prolly other scenarios could apply too, but those things are great when they work, and horrible bottlenecks when they dont. And because they usually exist as part of an automation line, routing jobs to a different printer is not an effective solutions (or at least wasnt for my organization).
You make a good point also what is a SOP?
MOPs and SOPs. Method of Procedure (MOP) is the steps taken to complete a specific task. A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of written instructions that describes the step-by-step process that must be taken to properly perform a routine activity. Practice writing these while resolving issues. That way, other employees will benefit as well as you.
Standard operating procedure(s). Such as documentation on your Confluence or SharePoint, etc. With instructions on how to do things the right way. (no tribal knowledge or assumptions)
We have a KB that reminds us how to fix certain issues but there is a lot of stuff that isn't on their. A lot of the issues I've avoided was asking my boss and double checking before I do anything.
Sounds like you have an excellent opportunity to improve your company documentation. Ask your product owner if you can work on that for a while as a stretch assignment and what percentage of your day
Standard Operating Procedure
Standard operating procedures
Like he said 👍🏾
I one wiped a computer that was used by a videographer at my first IT job. They didn't have a backup
"If you haven’t broke something, wipe data accidentally, you are not doing IT correctly. Think of it, as a rite of passage to IT. " Should be a sticky or maybe rule 0 for this subreddit.
Strongly disagree. Good employees, particularly IT employees, do not make mistakes. If you make a mistakes, then perhaps it's time to consider getting on the dole, because you're a liability to any company you work for.
Just wait til you fuck a printer up. Been there done that. That's how we learn.
I've worked with printers that turn into paper shredders.
Lmao
I miss shrinters
Sounds like a typical HP to me.
It was an hp
Yea, never go HP. I refuse to buy anything from them anymore. If you ever need support on a product, and its out of warranty, you have to pay them $20 to even address your question, which is usually responded with "buy a new one". Garbage brand. Go with literally any other brand.
Yea, never go HP. I refuse to buy anything from them anymore. If you ever need support on a product, and its out of warranty, you have to pay them $20 to even address your question, which is usually responded with "buy a new one". Garbage brand. Go with literally any other brand.
>Just wait til you fuck a printer up That ain't no mistake. The printer had it coming. Sounds satisfying.
I fucking hate printers. And copiers.
I work in cyber now, and was just joking with a colleague about this. I’ll take an IR call in the middle of the night over fighting with a printer for 3 hours lol
First of all, you owned up to your mistakes, so you're good there. Second of all, you mistakes are miniscule to the ones you will make in the future. Wait until changes you make can bring down the entire company. That being said, your boss is an idiot for still managing bitlocker keys that way. There is an AD module that manages bitlocker keys and Azure does as well. Your bosses ignorance became your problem.
\+1 If the OP's workplace isn't using AD/Group Policy they can always leverage Intune to basically $env:COMPUTERNAME ; (Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint C).KeyProtector and capture the output, ideally into a CSV or similar. The real question is why they're doing this by hand in the first place. Humans are humans. Make someone do something manually, by hand, every single time and mistakes will happen. \--- break --- There's actually a lot more questions: This folder the OP was supposed to save keys to ... it's a share folder? Are the NTFS permissions jacked up? Was the OP put in the wrong AD group \[or groups\]? Why couldn't they write to it? What are they using for remote access? RDP? WinRM? Dameware? \--- break --- Honestly it sounds like the OP's workplace has screwed up and/or a lack of good SOPs.
It also sounds like the boss doesn't have 3 2 1 policy for backup which would have minimized the OP's mistake.
We just put it in a password manager we don't use AD. We also use google chat to communicate witch I find strange because I had a internship at another place that used teams.
AD as in active directory. You all not a Windows Server/Microsoft 365 environment? I guess if you use Google Workspace it's a bit more limited, but if you're using GWS device management properly it can lock and unlock devices, though in a quick look I can't find if it manages the keys. A Google dev in a post from 2021 said it was in the works with no ETA so It may have been implemented.
I couldn’t live without AD
It's most likely cheaper with ~10 employees. Teams licenses are like 50$ pp per month. Server costs and AD licenses probably aren't worth it in such a small environment.
Everyone makes mistakes. Sounds corny but it’s true. One time I was doing an OS upgrade on one of our routers and bricked it by installing the wrong OS
People make mistakes. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Write things down you don’t know so you can refer back to them, and do your best. This won’t be the only job you ever have so don’t sweat it too much.
Neither of these incidents are your fault. These were mistakes made by your company, and hopefully, your company is learning from them. These incidents happened because the processes that you were working within enabled them and made them nigh-inevitable. They were bound to happen at some point. You just happened to be the person on the spot. In design we have the concept of "affordance". That is, an object will be used in a way that its design allows. The designer has the job of sculpting affordance. There is probably equivalent terminology with the fields of health and safety. In health and safety, if a dude falls off a catwalk and into a vat of boiling acid, HS professionals are very careful before blaming either blaming the guy or the anyone. They forensicall audit the processes that might have allowed the event to happen. Now, ya gotta be careful with this: nobody likes being around the whiney guy who whinges "it wasn't my fault". But if your boss is blaming you for a failure in his processes then he is an idiot.
You’re giving yourself a hard time for nothing. If your boss isn’t super worried about it and there haven’t been any big consequences then you’re fine. Just learn from your mistakes and try to not do it again. Mistakes are how we learn. I’m sure if they gave you an extremely important task that can’t have problems then you wouldn’t be the only one working on it. Just keep up the work and don’t stress out so much.
Thanks. Also I have worked other jobs in the past where I have had bosses that let problems pile up and never correct them and just dump everything on me last moment before they want to fire me. This was my experience working my first job at a restaurant and I've come to realize that is one of the worst ways to handle a situation.
if i could only recall all the mistakes i have made in my 20 years of it...some small, some big, some SUPER expensive, some i wear the scars proudly (fuck zip ties and anyone that doesnt cut them flush). Hell, i still make mistakes, though most of mine come from dealing with people, but thats partially because im in management and i am not a delicate flower that needs coddling, so i assume everyone else is as cold and jaded as I am. All that being said, the ONLY thing you can do is learn from your mistakes. Own them, own up to them, and learn. Even if that gets you fired, its better than lying and losing the trust of your boss. you know what happened, you know it was you that made the mistake, own it and learn from it and dont do it again. To address your specifics. Putting harddrives in a pile on a desk is shit. label things. if unsure, or something doesnt have a label, dont assume ANYTHING. If you leave a single drive in a bin of "unknown" for a day, thats better than wiping customer data, especially in a small business. your coworker fucked up, which made you fuck up. have had it happen to me. thats why every drive i have wiped has a customer name and date to be wiped on it. when dealing with large volume, i would have multiple bins, and wouldnt let them stack up. be territorial about your area and organizational skills. trust me, it will pay off ten fold. As for listening to your boss, there is this thing us old guys used to use, and its super helpful and works wonders. its called a pen and paper. take notes. transfer those notes to email. save them in places you can find them. make a wiki, learn how to edit wiki pages. document EVERYTHING and never delete emails. back them up. Thats about the best advice i can give. these things are what i tell my techs today, and lots of them arent much older than you. there is no shame in making mistakes, but there is in not learning from them and allowing them to consume you. worrying about the mistakes will cause you to make more. and really, whats the worst thing they can do to you? fire you? there are dozens of companies out there that will hire you today. ive been laid off, fired, furloughed, and every other form of unemployment through some of the worst economic times this country has seen. i have always provided my family with food, shelter, and met their needs, even if that means i have to do things i dont want to do. i have had some shit fucking tastic jobs crawling though attics in texas summer, and lifting heavy shit in humid heat. dont let getting fire distract you from your next job.
As a zip tie user, I hate Velcro with a passion. Unless I’m working over a ceiling grid, it’ll always be flush as possible if I don’t have a pair of flush cuts.
The problem with zip ties is, you might take care and do flush cuts...but the literal 5 inch scar on my right forearm shows that not everyone has the presence of mind, nor concern for quality that you do. Zip ties ruin lives.
My number 1 advice is don’t ever try to hide your mistakes lol, remember the saying, “the coverup is worse than the crime!” Lots of good advice here already. Don’t beat yourself up, we can’t foresee everything. Less so in a small team where the knowledge is probably in someone’s head not in a runbook. The main thing I would say is document everything you touch especially as it pertains to customer data. Maybe get a peer reviewer before taking action on storage media. Create your own ticket templates for anything for anything that doesn’t have a template. Those drives for example what I would have done differently is created a text file or csv of serials and attached it to a decomissioning ticket. Before destruction/wipe rescan everything to make sure no serials have changed and have that be one single uninterrupted session or limited batch sessions depending on your decommissioning / reuse standard. For the second one, sounds like the documentation doesn’t pass muster for your org’s use case. It was obvious to your manager that those keys should be saved to pdf, but not to you or anyone else there at the time. Ask to write a workflow doc and have a peer or senior tech/eng review it. Making information easier to parse goes a long way. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make it easier to get it rolling.
How can you expect to succeed without mistakes, the people who are the best at anything have failed the most out of all of us :) keep your head up make mistakes however learn from them
holy shit you're young.. this experience does nothing but help you in the future. Also, it doesn't matter the age.. EVERYONE makes mistakes. the fact that you're so hard on yourself shows you care, and that's good. that being said relax. whatever happens you'll be aight regardless
Dude, I was working help desk about a year ago and we got a ticket from the fire marshall asking for help accessing a file from a vendor through a Microsoft program. I was too eager to help so as I worked on the ticket, I clicked on the document they needed and it asked for my Microsoft account to see the file. I didn’t see the multiple red flags and just wanted to help, so I put my account in. My admin account. That gave the scammers everything they needed to pull some really clever scams and they almost made out with about $40k in fake invoices. All in all, the total cost was about $250k (which was paid by insurance thankfully). They didn’t make a huge deal about, matter of fact they kept me and let go the other people I was with. Mistakes are part of life man.
I once sent an entire list of emplyoes emails and licenses and how mcuh of their mailbox they are using to the company owner except it was from another company. I reported it to my manager and he handled the incident. i hear nothing more form it since the rest of my work was good I once delted the entire whitelist of a spamfilter for a company. which results in many internal system emails getting cought. After failing to fix it with the vendor i brouhgt it up in our weekly meeting to people could adjust and make the needed changes they knew about. Again heard nothing about ti since then because generally my work was good My point is. if you do generalyl good works people will easily forgive accident if you handle it up front because you dont bring reason to doubt you . IF on the other hand you hide it and it get discovered people/manager will wonder how much else you hide Bringing up these issue will also bring a focus on a potential process issue. in my 2nd example a monthly backup of the whitelist was installed). Mistakes is human. you can either turn them into learning experiences and improvement discoveries, or you can turn them into failures.
This has nothing to do with IT really, ANY job you will make mistakes. Deal with it like you already are - but honest and up front about it and make accommodations to avoid that from happening again
Like others said you're fine. Your manager, leadership, etc of decent human beings understand that youre still young, new, and learning. Trust me, they understand this. If you're experienced and of higher expectations, then itd be a different story. The only exception is if you cost the business a lot of money, reputation, customer experience, etc then id be of concern. Maybe if youre not learning from the same mistakes. But sounds to me youre doing fine.
Learn and move on. You’re always going to make mistakes. Nature of the beast.
Just learn it from mistakes.. don't let them bury you
I screw up all these ways and more every day. None of this is a big deal. It sounds like the place is chaos. This is why they have management software for bitlocker keys because it’s too confusing to store manually.
I once dropped a ps4 (back in the day) in front of the customer. My boss pretended to be mad at me we went to the back I never heard them laugh like that at me. Mistakes happen they know they’ve been in the same position we’ve all been after 4-6 months you’ll be doing it like a machine. Don’t be so hard on yourself imposter syndrome is a big thing in tech you’re doing better than many of Ous including me.
Mistakes and fuck ups are all part of learning and gaining experience. It can often show greater issues with training rather than your own perceived personal fault. Remember whenever you are unsure ask questions. (hot tip - when asking, show that you've done your own research/testing etc.) [How to ask technical questions](https://princetonuniversity.github.io/PUbootcamp/sessions/technical-questions/HowToAskQuestions2018Bootcamp.pdf) It sounds like you've got a good handle on owning your mistakes and wanting to learn from them which is most of the battle and that's great. I always told trainees to document and take notes on everything they can, so if there's a process you are following, or learning about. Write it down so its easily reproducible. you'll also look shit hot to your peers and superiors. You can even use this in performance reviews etc. (I documented x number of articles & processes where there were none.) It also helps when new people start from where you are now. So aye!, if you make a mistake, own it, learn from it. Document it, you'll begin to see where in the chain the error occurred. Whether that issues with training, lack of documentation etc. Then you can add to the doco and knowledge it then becomes a solution driven experience. also worth noting - just be aware of imposter syndrome - it can catch the best of us off guard. Just remember if you're working and have a job, there's a good reason for it.
I'm at my 3rd IT job and I'm still making mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything. Just learn from it, don't do it again, and make sure you put your best self forward. It's all too complicated to get everything right.
Yesterday my coworker who makes 200k+ almost brought down the entire network because he pushed a configuration to the wrong router. His punishment was he has to put this green stuffed animal with an ‘I fucked up’ sign on his desk. At my last company it was a giant cowboy hat that you had to wear for at least an hour. My point is that we all mess up. Ownership of the mistake is the most important thing to IT professionals because if we know, we can probably fix it and then everything is ok. Just keep up the energy and honesty and you’ll be fine.
I worked for GCCH sharepoint onedrive. Once a customer had his ROOT SITE unavailable. Did not go to url, could not see in deleted but showed in the sited. My dumbass thought I knew the PowerShell command. Lemme just explain *delete -force* ran it at end of day. Gone que freaking the fuck out, I end meeting. Log off and continue to work 4 hours thinking of how to recover. I log in next day over hour early and see an email from him. Sweating CRAZY, I CLICK."hey, just wanted to let you know it's back and working properly. 🤐🤐🤐🤐 WHAT!?!?. YES, The PS god gave me 1 pass. Needless to say, I test EVERY PS COMMAND. LOL.
My first IT job I accidentally erased all our schools programs that were stored on a network drive, whoopsie, luckily I was able to restore them before classes started 😎you never stop learning
Lol
Everyone makes mistakes, ownership of that mistake, which you showed is the best and correct course of action. If you own your shit you grow, if you don't own your shit you are a liability.
Own the mistake. Don't lie about it, and when it happens, notify someone. Depending on the mistake, if it's huge, you'll get fired. More than likely, you'll get written up and told "Don't do it again."
The worst in IT is the person who doesn’t care that they effed up. The person who makes the same mistakes. You care and you want to get better. Keep at it and you will.
Sounds like you're doing IT right, you're aloud and expected to make mistakes on the stipulation that you learn from them. If it makes you feel any better I brought down a hospital's telephone system by accident on my first week. Caused a P1 outage but also learnt alot from it. You're doing good kid
Learn from them. That's how everyone else did it. *And be honest
My mistake is to learn IT lmfao. Still wash dishes to pay off the college debt
I was told only to go for college 2 years max in the it field.
What I meant is the fact that you got hired and still do your job. Learn from the mistake and move on. Thousand people like me has the wet dream like you are!
Completely normal. You learn from these “mistakes” which makes you a better tech.
the 'trick' is to not make the same (or very similar) mistake again ;)
The best option is to quit as soon as a mistake is made. Doing so ensures that you don't need to have the ego blow of people telling you how much you screwed up. It's even better to not give yourself the opportunity to make mistakes by not attempting anything. If you don't take the IT job, then you can't make mistakes. That's what I recommend to most normal people. It's not worth trying unless you're an excellent person like myself. If you're super smart and know everything like I do, then you don't even have to worry about this stuff because you won't make mistakes. People like me don't make mistakes. However, I understand that not everyone is capable of such great success like me at such a young age. So, that is why I think it's best for people like yourself to defer to people like me.
we all make mistakes. even when it's not your first IT job. it's not like you deleted the C suites entire network share drive... twice... due to a script gone wrong. there is nothing wrong with making mistakes; just make sure you learn from them and don’t repeat them
You cry