Comments on: What’s your biggest work mistake?

By: Chrees

Chrees — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:01:48 +0000

I don’t want to go into details even though I’m semi-anonymous. But it was around $1.4 million and had to do with letters of credit. It ended up semi-OK for my company, but talk about feeling sick for a long time… Let’s just say “trust but verify” is a good business outlook to have as well.

By: thc

thc — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:44:36 +0000

My biggest mistake was a little similar to the Japanese broker. I was entering a large option trade for a client and clicked on “sell” when I meant to click on “buy”. The trade was for 50 puts (5000 shares) on a stock that was moving very quickly. I had the trade “busted” and re-entered correctly. Fortunately the stock had moved in my favor and my error made about $5,000 for the firm in a time span of about two minutes. Had it moved against me, the error would have come out of my pocket.

By: jim

jim — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 19:05:56 +0000

I’ve never made a mistake in which a significant amount of money was involved but there was this once time I ran some script someone else had written on our network that started deleting everything from the drive. The script was intended to clean out a whole bunch of directories of object files so that you could compile code from scratch (a make clean type situation) but it was old and the person who wrote it made very dangerous assumptions. The end result was that a bunch of system files were deleted, the ones that weren’t being used at the time, before I realized it because in addition to it deleting everything, it was supressing all output, so my only indication was that it was taking longer than it should have.

Was it really my fault? Yes in that I didn’t look at the script first but it was presented to me as being reliable and correct. It only ended up being a minor inconvenience for me and some other developers, but everyone understood the original writer was the one at fault.

By: Miller

Miller — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:33:54 +0000

Jim, I think we are all intersted in YOUR biggest mistake? Luckily (I guess…), I am not in an important enough position for my mistakes to really mean much besides loosing a few days worth of work. Yay cushy desk job!!!

By: HECHO RELEVANTE

HECHO RELEVANTE — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:33:03 +0000

J-Com: un error dram�tico en la mesa de Mizuho

�Que me trague la tierra! No es lo mismo vender 1 acci�n por 610.000 yenes que 610.000 acciones por 1 yen. �No es lo mismo! Est� claro. No quisiera estar en el pellejo del operador del broker nip�n Mizuho Securities que dio la orden, del jefe de mesa…

By: Neo

Neo — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 13:44:53 +0000

It wasn’t me exactly but my manager. We were reviewing two different vendors and we signed contracts to do some beta testing. We ended up going with one of the vendors but didn’t read the contract very closing for the second vendor. In their contract, it stated that is the contract wasn’t terminated within a certain period in writing, it would automatically role into a full blown contract. Since we had already signed up with the first vendor and now also committed to this second vendor, both for two to three years, we were wasting easily $500,000 to $750,000.

Now all contracts get reviewed by the lawyers before being signed!

Neo