[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.

[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.

[bonaldi]

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.

[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?

[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.

[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".

[baddox]

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

[canjobear]

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

It is definitely a problem with Unix also.

[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 /

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!)